Osterman Research Blog

An interesting article was published yesterday regarding innovative job-seeker Attilla Nemeth, a 26-year-old Hungarian who was eager to get a job in Marriott International’s IT department.  While “innovative” and “eager” are normally good qualities in an IT staffer, Mr. Nemeth’s decision to commit extortion in pursuit of this job was – at best – ill advised.

Here’s the story: on November 11^th of last year, Mr. Nemeth sent an email to Marriott telling them he had been accessing their network for several months and had obtained confidential information as a result of his snooping around.  In the email he threatened to reveal this information publicly if he was not given a job as an IT staffer.  After Marriott did not respond to this threat, Mr. Nemeth then sent them some of the documents he had accessed, purportedly as a result of an infected email attachment he had sent to several targeted Marriott employees.

Marriott contacted the US Secret Service and created a bogus HR employee to serve as the contact for Mr. Nemeth in an effort to catch him.  He believed the ruse and continued the dialog with the agent/employee.  After several weeks, Marriott purchased an airline ticket for Mr. Nemeth who arrived in Washington, DC and was interviewed for the position he sought.  During the interview, he told the agent/employee that he had stolen Marriott data, sent the extorting emails, demonstrated his technique for infiltrating the Marriott network, and identified where in Hungary he was storing the stolen information.

Mr. Nemeth has pled guilty to two counts that could land him in federal prison for up to 15 years – he will be sentenced in February 2012.

Even though Mr. Nemeth may not have been the brightest bulb among those seeking a job at Marriott International, he had a major impact on the company’s IT department.  Marriott was forced to have more than 100 employees search across its network to figure out exactly what Mr. Nemeth had stolen and how he accessed this information.  Marriott estimates that it spent anywhere from $400,000 to $1 million in consultants, employee salaries and various other costs associated with this exercise.

In yesterday’s mail I received two unusual pieces of correspondence:  the first, a handwritten note from a collaboration expert – and a very nice man – that does some industry analysis for us as part of our annual information service; and the second, a letter inviting me to attend some 15-minute Webinars.  Both were unusual in that they were written on paper and sent through the mail, not electronically.

That got me to thinking about how our communications has changed from mailed correspondence to fax to email to SMS and other very short modes of communication.  While the speed of delivery is certainly improving over time, I believe the primary driver for migrating to faster and shorter modes of communication is television.  For example, studies have shown that an increase in television viewing among children shortens their attention span, which I believe  translates into other realms, as well.  For example, the average sound bite in the 1968 presidential election was 43 seconds, but dropped to 9.8 seconds in the 1988 election and 7.3 seconds by 2000.  Moreover, television changes our mindset into believing that every problem on a funny TV show can be solved in 30 minutes, while problems on serious shows require a full 60 minutes (minus 16 minutes of commercials) to resolve.

If our attention spans continue to get shorter, what impact will this have on our ability to communicate meaningfully in the future?  Can you say enough about your product in 10 seconds to get people interested in what you’re selling?  Can your 140-character Tweet or 160-character text message really convey your actual meaning?  More importantly, can you as a business decision maker or voter or parent or consumer gather enough information in just a few seconds to make a well-informed and meaningful decision?

I’m not sure what the solution might be and welcome your thoughts on the topic, particularly in the context of business communications and how we will convey information in the future.  I think it’s an important topic to discuss.

To some decision makers, “social” media has the somewhat dubious connotation of people telling the world what they had for breakfast or spending a couple of hours each day keeping up with family and friends when they should be working.  To others, it carries with it the connotation of excessive corporate risk because employees will use Twitter or Facebook to say something in violation of corporate policy.  As an example of just how scared some corporate decision makers can be of social media is the NFL policy that forbids players to tweet 90 minutes before a game commences and through final postgame media obligations.  Chad Ochocinco, for example, was fined $25,000 for two tweets and possession of an electronic device during the 2010 pre-season when he played for the Bengals.

My recommendation to those who are fearful of or resistant to the benefits of social media is to spend a day or two at the Enterprise 2.0 Conference.  I was there on Tuesday and – while I am already sold on the many benefits of social media – came away with a renewed appreciation of how important this technology will be in improving business processes, reducing costs, speeding decision making and improving overall corporate performance.  More on what was most impressive in another post.

However, for social media to work there are three important questions that decision makers in any organization need to consider:

• First, do you have a corporate culture that will enable social media to add value?  A culture that rewards information-hoarding or that encourages employees to build their own little fiefdoms within your corporate walls will simply waste money deploying even the most promising social technologies.  Because social media is about, well, being social, organizations in which employees trade information only to get brownie points or to establish their own reputation will simply be wasting their time and money.
• Second, will the social media technology that you deploy simply be another thing for employees to do, or will it integrate with existing business processes so that social media becomes a natural extension of these processes?  If the former, fuhgeddaboudit – it will simply be a waste of your IT department’s and employees’ time.
• Third, do you have a plan for social media?  If not, don’t bother – as one keynote speaker put it, “Social without a goal is a whole lot of noise.”

In short, make sure that your corporate culture, integration plan and goals for social media are set before you deploy the technology.  If you don’t, you’re probably better off not deploying social media in the first place.

This post is aimed at people who don’t think that social media offers much real business value and that it’s more time-waster than productivity tool.  One of my favorite quotes from Jimmy Fallon:

“Did you guys notice this?  Twitter was down for two hours on Saturday.  It was horrible.  I was forced to call random people out of the phonebook and just tell them what I had for lunch.”

And that pretty much sums up how many people view social media – as an avenue for possibly meaningful content, but primarily as a means of sharing information that doesn’t have much business value.  However, while social media actually does provide substantial business value, I believe two of its more important benefits in a business context will be a) its ability to allow people to communicate useful information in a way that would simply seem silly when delivered in another format, and b) to delve into a knowledge base of information that today is more or less kept hidden in people’s brains.  Here’s what I mean:

• Imagine that you wanted to tell people you were at a particular Starbucks, enroute to another city, attending a conference next week, etc. – information that might be relevant to maybe three people at any given time (who might be at that conference or a block away) in your circle of friends, associates or acquaintances.  Now, imagine sending an email with that information to a few thousand people three or four times a day.  Worse, how about sending them a fax?  It simply wouldn’t happen, and you wouldn’t be able to obtain the benefits of sharing this useful information.

Of course, this is an obvious example of how social media is used today, but it underscores the point that social media represents a new medium, not a replacement for email and other, more traditional forms of communication.  Our own research shows that the a much larger proportion of people view email as more important compared to a year ago than view it as less important, indicating that social media really is a supplement to traditional communications, not its substitute.

• More importantly, social media – particularly purpose-built, corporate social media – represents something of a knowledge directory that is generally not available via other systems.  While the idea is not new (Linkadoo and others were focused on this years ago), social media enables the sharing of information in ways that are simply impractical via other methods.  Let’s say you want to find someone with knowledge of Hadoop-based software who also had worked in healthcare earlier in their career.  Or someone who was familiar with the particular marketing manager with whom you’re on the phone right now.  Or you need to find just the right restaurant for a customer event in a city with which you’re unfamiliar.  The right social media capability can act as that repository and distribution mechanism for the tidbits of knowledge that are perhaps too obscure to put into a database or to codify on a resumé or that would never be assembled across the diverse array of contacts you might have on Twitter or Facebook.  In short, social media represents a tool for bringing that kind of information together and to provide real business value as a result.

And, in case you’re wondering, I had an enchilada and an apple for lunch today.