What was the last movie that made you cry? For me it was Straight A’s, a quiet little movie that was well done. I watched it last night. When was the last time a video game made you cry? I, like many of you, grew up in the era when video games emerged and grew to become an industry as large and larger than the movie industry. Since 1982, the year before I entered college, video games have consistently made more money than Hollywood and Pop music. But has there ever been a video game that has made you cry? I’m still waiting. During that time there have been countless movies that have made me cry. I don’t think of myself as a sentimentalist, and not too many people would label me as someone who is overly sensitive, but I’m struck by the gap in these two entertainment media.
In 2003 I started my work at Monster.com. At the time, the organization was growing by leaps and bounds and I was brought in to run the largest contract in the company’s history the $52M re-engineering of USAJOBS, the official job site for the U.S. federal government. I started out in Monster’s product management group. As we approached the strategic planning for 2004, the product team got together for a summary from a consultant hired to explain why Monster was losing its mojo. Aijon explained, “Monster, your marketing is excellent. You are selling the idea that there is a better job out there. And that you, Monster, are here to help people get that job. Your marketing connects emotionally and viscerally with people. Everyone wants to believe there is a better job out there. And, so, they follow you.”
He went on to explain that, “Your problem is that your experience is transactional. People come to Monster.com and you treat them like an ATM treats people.”
(For those who have heard me present my grievance with Citizen’s Bank, this should be a familiar theme. Citizen’s Bank brands themselves as a friendly, intimate, personal bank. They use “hello” in sans-serif, all lower-case, green to show how friendly they are. Yet every time I put my ATM card into the machine the first question they ask is, “English or Spanish?” After answering the question once – the first time I put my ATM card in, to ask again is a design failure. It’s like the child I constantly have to nag to load the dishwasher.
Aijon explained that Monster had 3 options. We could
- Improve the experience to match the marketing messaging
- Change the marketing message to better reflect the experience
- Do nothing
Of course, he advocated that we should do the first. “People will follow you for a long time, because they really want to believe your brand promise. But not forever,” Aijon prophesized. He pulled out a series of mocks he had done, recommending changes to the home page and Monster user experience. The pictures showed full screen images of workers in emotional experiences at work. For example, one showed the back of a worker walking down a row of cubicles with a box overflowing with paper, paper on the floor behind him, and you just knew he’d been laid off. You felt it.
After Aijon left, sadly, the product team at Monster – after returning to their anxiety about feeling we had lost their innovation – went into the next meeting for strategic planning for 2004 where they proceeded to lay out the largest, most airtight, project GANTT chart I’d ever seen. It had activities filling an entire projected wall in 8 point font. After listening to people force their pet projects to be retained in the plan for about 20 minutes, I shared my only observation of the meeting, “You just came from a meeting where you all shared your worries about losing innovation. And, this strategic plan is fully packed for the next five years. We all know this is more than we can do. Where, then is innovation supposed to occur.” The team stopped, looked at me as if they’d just met a creature from another planet, pause, pause. Then they turned and went back into the strategic planning battledome they’d created to ensure that they were valuable and doing work that interested them for at least the next year.
Later the next year, Jess Bergeron and I started a secret group inside Monster.com. Jess and I had been working on USAJOBS and I shared the story with her. She had the same concerns about the Monster experience. And so, we started a group that sought out visceral, emotional online experiences. Our goal was to capture and learn from these experiences so that we could, whether Monster supported it or not, build experiences that people felt. That they connected with emotionally and personally. That mattered.
Yesterday, I revisited my LinkedIn inMaps.
In my network I’m connected to nearly 2,000 people directly and infinitely more indirectly. Whenever making a new connection, I try to have a personal relationship with them, so that we know each other, and can rely on each other in the future. Otherwise, what’s the point? In LinkedIn inMaps, it allows you to label your professional networks, and populates the clusters for you. For me, it has human capital, Federal government, workforce development, entrepreneurship, management consulting, market research, higher education, and leadership. This is a pretty decent summary of the work I’ve done over the past 20 years and the channels in which I’ve swam.
But, my one wish is that it showed something different. I wish that the categories were not so functional, as they were emotional. I would want to see in the people I’m connect to with a different set of attributes: Kind, Compassionate, Caring, Inspiring, Warm, Hopeful, Childlike, Generous.
These are the attributes around which I want my world to be built. These are the people I want to be connected to. For LinkedIn, as it was for Monster, success will come from building an experience that connects people, not in business, but as humans. May we quickly enter the age of authentic human engagement that enables us to be ourselves and not a role, that empowers us to nurture the elements of ourselves that will truly make us better, and that helps us better recognize and realize the essential need to do meaningful work.
What’s the last website you found that evoked an emotional response? Share it, join the secret team that Jess and I started and share your experiences. I’d love to hear what you have to say.
Dan DeMaioNewton's Blog 