It’s not because we’re Gen Y, it’s because you suck.

“Generation always job hop and therefore must have no loyalty or patience.” Is an incredibly persistent meme. It seems that whenever someone in their 20’s leaves a job these days at least one person in management will trot this out.

It does simplify things immensely for them. Blaming the year that someone is born in for a high staff turn over is so much easier than taking a closer look at the company, the corporate culture and how incentives and roles are structured.

They are right on one thing, at least in my experience, generation Y has no patience. No-one wants to stay in a role with little to no opportunity to learn or take on more responsibility or make more money. Thanks to the dot com boom, we have been taught that just sitting around and waiting for your turn on the corporate ladder, or for the next semi-insulting 6% pay rise is no way to build a life you actually want to live.

As for job security, it’s absence is assumed, except in extraordinary circumstances, and we plan for it by always searching. After all, why should we trust our careers and income to someone else? That is just insane.

Rather, we want to continue to learn and grow, we want cool projects to put on our CV, we want to be confident that we can always find that next job, and get a raise on the deal each time. We want a work environment that suits our chosen lifestyle and our goals.

So, it’s not because of our age, it’s because the company we just left sucked.

Though you might still want to just pretend it’s a Gen Y thing. I guess it is easier that way.

Social SERPs & why SEO is getting harder

You want to know why SEO is so lucrative? I can go on about the ability to discern intention behind the search term, or how you can track what works and what does not in terms of traffic and sales, and all the usual pitch material that any sales person in this space trots out to part your average small business owner from their money. This is not really the answer though.

At it’s core, the reason selling SEO services is so lucrative is simply because it is so scalable. There is only one possible list of results for a term per search engine. Because this is both predictable and visible, it is easy to create a system to produce the results you want. And the great thing about systems is that you only need one smart group or individual to come up with it. Once the system works, you can hand it to almost any idiot and they will get it right most of the time.

So obviously you don’t even need to employ smart or creative people. You just plug your plodders into the system and out comes results, well often enough to produce money.

Where this starts to fall apart is when you lose visibility. This has also been a point of contention on Pagerank sculpting. After all, how can you sculpt something you can’t even see. How can you even tell if it is working? The best systems set up to justify this rely on producing a model that is “close enough” and then trying to build something that works with it. This is potentially where we are heading with SERPs.

Google has already started to head towards personalised SERPs, and they are also starting to roll out Social Search as well. Both of these innovations kind of kill the one SERP per term thing dead.

SEO is going to have to stop being seen as something to be bolted on later, and going to have to be integrated with other activities. Such as social media to build personal referrals, offline and mass media to create a name space around a brand term, and not fighting over generic terms and so on. SEO might have to start to involve a little more strategic thought than most of the generic SEO shops seem to think.

Sorry about that plodders.

What makes Friday Drinks work?

Here is a question: What makes Friday drinks work?

There was one company that stands out in my experience. Friday drinks were not regular, nor were they a perminant fixture. When they did happen, it was usually on the spur of the moment. Either after a busy week, something going live, or after a week where we all felt like we achieved something.

It would start with One of the senior programmers or designers or even sometimes the owner. One of them would suggest friday drinks. The beer would be bought, or whatever was left from the last time would be takent out of the fridge, and who ever was interested would get into it.

If it was a quiet week, we would start with a drink while we did our last tasks and emails and just trickle into the main room with the couches once we finished for the week. Everyone would hang out, play some games and socialise. Sometimes we would head out for a bit as a group, either for dinner or just more drinks, or we would just go home.

There are a number of reasons why it seemed to work so well, from both a business and an individual perspecective.

• It never felt like an awkward, imposed social activity.
• There was a genuine interest in socialising within the business.
• The office had a venue that facilitated organic social events.
• There were games activities available that formed the focus for interaction.

The organisation was also small enough that no-one seemed to feel marginalised. There were no real groups within the organisation that excluded all others outside of what was require opperationaly.

In the end, the reason Friday Drinks worked so well here was that it was an extension of the company’s culture, and not an attempted to compensate for it.

Data mining and the lube upsell

People are weird. They are irrational, often contradict themselves. individually not all of their behaviour matches the categories and groups they assign themselves to.

Thanks to the internet, and the ability to collect vast volumes of behavioural data, it is easier than ever to demonstrate this.

What else communion wafer consumers buy.

What else do you expect from a fleshy robot driven by a hodgepodge of metal hardware and software developed over a mind bogglingly long period of time where the only criteria for success was how often each iteration got it’s end away.

Of course the most important take away from this is, if you asked the average Communion wafer buying member of the public if they would also be interested in some water based lube, chances are they would say no. That particular product does not fit in with the kind of person they think they are, and that they want to be seen as.

Digital revolution, what digital revolution.

Made you look.

Click/Link bait aside, I do not think that we have seen the full effect of the current decade’s social and technological changes just yet. In fact, I would say that we won’t for the next twenty years. Not until those whose lives have been effected the most by all this new technology, and the behavioural changes it has wroght are in charge.

Today, with a democratic government seeking to control the internet, and the current conflict between the business model of BBC and News Ltd, we are seeing the start of a generational piss fight. This conflict between legacy media and the legal ecosystem it spawned and digital media and content generation, won’t go away soon.

It is not even realistic to expect it to be resolved soon either. Unlike most other revolutions or booms, the digital one is mostly opt-in. An individuals exposure to the Digital Revolution is only ever as great as they want it to be. It can range from full immersion, through to just logging on once a week to bank and download some emails. It’s relevance is not as obvious as efficient industry, or fast mass transit. So you can not expect the same adoption rate, or even a clear recognition of the immediate implications.

So, right now, as a society there is no clear understanding of what has changed and what not. As has been demonstrated by the behaviour of the Australian Government with ISP level filtering, there isn’t even an understanding of what it really is. Or how different it is to any other media from before. Currently as a society we are poised to throttle the baby for the benefit of a dying geriatric.

Joseph Schumpeters’ concept of Creative Destruction is especially relevant here. Sometimes the current way of doing things just has to die so that something better can happen. But I can not see it happening thanks to Generational Lag and it’s hold on society.