Sad CEO. Flickr CC photo credit: Sunfrog1
As I write this, there are 1,500 job openings listed on ThomsonReuters.com. There's exactly one comment on the latest post on Reuters CEO Tom Glocer's personal blog-and it's spam. It's likely that when Tom Glocer does get comments, he reads every one (he also replies on occasion). This is the CEO of a company with 55,000 employees and nearly $13 billion in annual revenue. He doesn't tweet often, but he does reply to some of the mentions he gets (about 20 in the past 30 days). There are hardly any comments on any of the ten latest posts on The Knowledge Effect, an official Thomson Reuters blog. In the last seven days, only three jobseekers have tweeted at @JobsWithUs, the official Thomson Reuters recruiting account. Something isn't adding up. Where are the jobseekers?
Saatchi & Saatchi is synonymous with innovation in the agency space. They're absurdly successful, and list "6 of the top 10 and over half of the top 50 global advertisers" as clients. They're on your Top 10 list if you're a recent graduate or agency jobseeker; they're the agency you want to partner with if you're in business development; they're the agency you want to sell to if you sell or market to agencies. And just like Thomson Reuters, their CEO, Kevin Roberts, has his own blog.
As I write this, the latest ten posts have-together-received exactly five comments. One of the comments is spam, from a user called, "hosting company." What if it had been an intelligent, on-topic comment from someone calling their self "S&S Hopeful"? We can't know it would have changed anything for the aspiring employee, but we do know that Kevin Roberts would have at least read it: "All comments must be approved by the blog author." And how many Saatchi & Saatchi jobseekers get to interact with Kevin Roberts at any stage in the hiring process? How many salespeople or marketers get to speak directly to the CEO of one of the top agencies in the world?
What would you do for the chance to ask Warren Buffet anything? According to The Wall Street Journal, "there are few prizes more coveted than the opportunity to ask Warren Buffett a question at Berkshire Hathaway's annual shareholders meeting." The notoriously inaccessible titan answers 20-30 audience questions every year, and the rules have been changed several times in favor of more equitable question selection. Most recently, raffles were set up in multiple locations throughout the venue, and Fidelity Investments saw this for what it was-an open side door. Although the company "holds about $4 billion of Berkshire shares, or a roughly 2% stake in the company," this equity alone still isn't enough for an audience with Buffet. They sent 40 analysts, who entered several raffles each, netting this 2% stakeholder a whopping 20% of all the audience questions asked. Other attendees found their own side doors. Both managing partners of investing house T2 Partners were able to ask Buffet questions this year, after they spotted an overflow room in which the raffle wasn't attracting many entries. Although neither of these side doors were social in nature, their discovery-and usage-reflect exactly the kind of thinking required to uncover access opportunities in the social space. If only Buffet tweeted!