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WEF Global Competitiveness Report fails

Urs E. Gattiker — Thu, 10 Sep 2009 04:30:22 +0000

Due to weakening financial markets and decreasing macroeconomic stability, the US has been ousted from the top slot in the World Economic Forum’s latest Global Competitiveness Report by Switzerland.

Effective benchmarking requires key performance indicators (KPIs) that help explain whether educational expenditures are a key driver or operating metric we should look at to help achieve higher rates of youth employment. We address this in more detail.

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Note: There is a file embedded within this post, please visit this post to download the file.Some of the data points provided by this important report are:

Rankings – 4.11

Rankings – 5.01

Rankings – 5.02

Rankings – 5.03

Rankings – 5.04

Rankings – 5.06

Hard data: Are they accurate?
Switzerland is doing quite badly when it comes to primary education, as well as secondary education rates (e.g., Rankings 4.11). One explanation is that instead of using absolute numbers, the report uses the percentage of Gross National Income (GNI) spent on primary schooling. This could explain why countries that spend more on primary education as a percentage of GNI do better, like Lesotho or Namibia.

However, whether as a percentage of GNI or in absolute dollars per pupil, mere spending cannot assess the effectiveness of a school system. In fact, countries that spend less in absolute dollars or as part of GNI often do better than others by nevertheless achieving higher literacy rates.

Opinion data: Reliable and valid?
The opinion data is based on a survey of 13,000 executives in the ranked nations, but given Rankings 5.06, how much does an executive really know about the reality of a teacher trying to teach a classroom of fifth graders about math or finding information on the Internet using computers?

Put differently, what does access mean: PCs connected to the Internet for each classroom or access for each child to a computer with nothing more than an operating system and a word processor?

And if we trust that executives can provide an evaluation regarding math and science education, why don’t we ask them about reading and writing as well? Graduates who are unable to write a job application without typos or grammatical errors have a tough time getting a job, don’t they?

Secondary and tertiary education: What about youth employment?
During this financial crisis, education should actually help improve one’s skill-set, thereby making teenagers (15 – 19-year-olds) and young adults (20 – 24-year-olds) more employable.

Unfortunately, the youth unemployment rate in the US was 18.5 percent in July 2009. According to the government this is the highest July rate since recording began in 1948 (download pdf report and tables).

Canada’s employment figures for June 2009 show a loss of 33,000 jobs among those 15 – 24 years old, rocketing the unemployment rate among young people to 15.9 percent, the highest in 11 years (download pdf and report summary).

A recent report for Australia indicates a similar trend whereby the labor force underutilisation rate (LFUR = sum of unemployment and underemployment) for 15 – 24-year-olds rose from 24.2 percent in February 2009 to 26.2 percent in May 2009 (see chart at right, see five-page report).

For Switzerland, the number of unemployed youth (15 – 24-year-olds, including school leavers and students) increased from 4.6 percent in July to 5.3 percent in August 2009. Their numbers reached 29,298 which represents a three-quarter increase over August 2008 (download pdf and more details).

Bottom line
The above indicates that educational expenditures may not be comparable across countries and, as importantly, asking executives to judge an educational system may result in data that could hardly be called reliable and valid.

While Australia, Canada and the US rank highly for their participation rates in tertiary education, Switzerland gets marked down for having a strong dual system (meaning apprentices spend as little as 30 percent of their time in formal education, while the rest is spent acquiring practical skills in the workplace).

Besides, completing an apprenticeship leaves the door open for post-secondary education. Worse, not having enough qualified tradespeople on construction sites does not help improve the country’s competitiveness with regard to its infrastructure. Youth employment means all this human capital is wasted, which definitely does not improve a country’s competitiveness.

Surely, youth unemployment is an important KPI for benchmarking education policy, whereas expenditure levels tell us little about how effectively a country uses its newly trained human capital. The World Competitiveness Report 2009-2010 uses educational benchmarks whose usefulness are questionable, if not outright invalid.

More resources on KPI and benchmarking education:

A portrait of the youth labor market in 13 countries, 1980–2007

The Bologna Club: What U.S. Higher Education Can Learn from a Decade of European Reconstruction

Tuning educational structures in Europe

OECD data: Economic returns for an individual obtaining upper secondary or post-secondary non-tertiary education, obtaining tertiary education, part of initial education

Excel spreadsheet

World Economic Forum Davos

Looking for telework as a techie? Join our virtual team NOW!

Now, it’s your turn. What are some of your KPI and benchmarking stories regarding education and competitiveness in your neighbourhood?

FT ComMetrics Blog Index: Who made the list?

Urs E. Gattiker — Thu, 12 Mar 2009 01:52:37 +0000

By now you probably know that diligent work is being done to get the numbers ready to publish the FT ComMetrics Blog Index, which ranks FT Global 500 and Fortune 500 companies’ corporate blogs.

The 2009 index will appear in the Financial Times newspaper’s regular supplement on Digital Business as well as on its webpage (www.ft.com/digitalbusiness) on Wednesday, May 13.

We have described different facets of this project in previous posts:
Five steps to turn buzz into sales
How we found and selected the blogs included on the FT ComMetrics Blog Index
Financial Times: Is blogging good value?

I thought you might benefit from some of my background research on this topic. And I’d appreciate your help in curating this list by providing more details and submitting additional cases.

>> Last update: 12 March 2009
>> Total # of corporate blogs from FT Global 500 companies: 73 (part of a larger and expanding database).

The following examples of companies using social media marketing with the help of blogs are listed in alphabetical order:

Actual FT ComMetrics Blog Index from FT Global 500

:::: If your blog is not on this list (even if your company already has another blog on this list), enter its URL as a comment below. For every company listed, we select the best-performing blog and include it on the index. Some companies (e.g., Microsoft, Deutsche Telekom, Nestlé, Siemens, Volvo) have more than two blogs in our database but only the best one is included in this list, so you may be aware of a blog that we don’t know about. By entering the URL below you can help the company move up in these rankings by providing us with a blog that might perform better than the one we have used here. So please share and contribute below.

Notice anything missing? Whether a Fortune 500 or FT Global 500 blog, leave a link and description in the comments below. The main list will continue to expand to ensure inclusion of all qualifying corporate blogs.

The FT ComMetrics Blog Index ranks FT Global 500 and Fortune 500 companies’ corporate blogs.
Please subscribe now so you can claim your personal and/or corporate blog AND trace those that you want to compare yourself to.
For Twitter, please use #hashtag ➡ #FTCBI

FT ComMetrics Global 500 blogs: Case study HSBC

Urs E. Gattiker — Tue, 23 Dec 2008 09:29:06 +0000

The ups and downs, ins and outs of corporate blogging at a Fortune 500 corporation prove that just following the example of others and embarking on a social media experiment will not save the day. This case demonstrates that when the going gets tough, the tough take action or failure is just around the corner.

The previously published case studies listed below help to illustrate social media practices, both good and bad.

Volvo, China Mobile, Nike, Starbucks, Apple, ABB, Swisscom and more: case studies about corporate blogs

Before you start a corporate blog, tie your shoe laces properly

Happy birthday Daimler: a blog that rocks

Case study: Beck’s beer – does humor translate?

In the past we discussed different approaches by FT Global 500 corporations in managing social media campaigns and blogs in particular. For instance, American Express chose to pay journalists to write specifically for its branded platform Open Forum while the Royal Bank of Canada pays students to blog for students.

Beck’s beer chose a British comedian to bring its message to 18- to 25-year-old males in the US. Today we focus on the HSBC Business Specialist’s Blog within The HSBC Business Network.

HSBC’s Business Network aims to help expand start-ups’ networks, as well as offer them the expertise and support of the bank’s business specialists across the UK. Supposedly the community’s purpose was, and still is, to guide new businesses through writing a business plan, researching the market, developing sales strategies and marketing plans (including on the web), mastering tax and employment law as well as franchising.

So how is HSBC’s social community doing on the Web in general and on its HSBC Business Specialist’s Blog in particular? I went ahead and began assessing this venture by using the four criteria that characterize an organizational blog. Based on these, HSBC clearly qualifies.

Unfortunately, data assessed according to the vibrancy indicator demonstrate a distinct lack (e.g., last post more than 15 weeks ago). I also went ahead and used the conversation or broadcast index and found only a few comments by readers.

Finally, to get full access to the blog or the community you must register yourself. This is unfortunate since it seems completely unnecessary. In fact, if the content and services provided by the platform are convincing, HSBC’s small business owners – the platform’s primary target group – will subscribe to receive content and other material via e-mail and so forth.

Evaluation
The content of HSBC Business Specialist’s Blog comes from UK branches’ small business experts offering their opinions on various topical issues. Since September, however, nothing new has been posted and the last three posts are dated June 20, August 21 and September 4.

This is a common characteristic throughout the site. HSBC hired LiveWorld to develop and implement this community in partnership with communications agency Mindshare. While these experts have managed to get a few people (HSBC customers that is) to start their own blogs on this platform, regular posting of valuable material seems to be the exception and not the norm.

To get people to continue engaging and regularly contribute to the virtual community, however, subscribers need to believe that the end result is worth the effort. Accordingly, unless valuable content is posted regularly, people are unlikely to be convinced that it is worth their time to contribute and participate in this virtual community.

For a final quantitative check I used our tools on My.ComMetrics.com. Google PageRank gives the site a three; while this is not bad, the site has been stagnant at this level since it was launched earlier this year – maybe another indicator that things are not going that well.

Bottom line
Launching a community for your target customers is one thing, but coming up short in terms of impact is another. If you do something, do it right and consult with the experts, in this case social media gurus. The HSBC case provides us with the following lessons from the digital frontier for ensuring reader involvement.

1. Assure regular (i.e. at least every two weeks) posting to the blog of relevant and new content for your target audience (in this case, small businesses); and,

2. Make sure that people actively engage with the blog (i.e. invite them to participate and provide feedback by leaving comments on each blog post).

Beyond the above, creating an online community that benefits from participants’ more active engagement may also necessitate support in the form of:

1. possibly organizing offline events that bring online members together (i.e. facilitating and enhancing networking); and,

2. special offers that help members with their business (i.e. giving members-only access to various things like implementation checklists [for example, five ropes to skip when preparing your loan application or ten things you must check to implement your marketing plan smartly] and so forth).

Hence, HSBC’s virtual platform for small business has not proven to have an enduring appeal for the bank’s target audience (small business clients in the UK); however, not all is lost. By taking the above steps, the bank can demonstrate that it has still got a winning touch in social media.

HSBC must clearly demonstrate to its target audience that engaging with its platform helps small business owners improve their bottom line. Without the changes suggested above, however, involvement by its target customers will continue to be lackluster.

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Here’s what I’m suggesting for today. Add your comment to this post. What is your experience; are you using this or similar communities; do they help your business’ bottom line? Please provide your thoughts and insights! Thanks.
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Why not follow me on Twitter.
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MyComMetrics Twitterfeed for http://My.ComMetrics.com = benchmarking your blog or Twitterfeed – count what matters – change what counts #tools2watch

FT ComMetrics Global 500 blogs case study: Royal Bank of Canada

Urs E. Gattiker — Wed, 10 Dec 2008 12:29:02 +0000

Fortune 500

Volvo, China Mobile, Nike, Starbucks, Apple, ABB, Swisscom and more – case studies about corporate blogs

Before You Start a Corporate Blog, Tie Your Shoe Laces Properly

happy birthday Daimler – blog that rocks

In the past we have discussed different approaches used by FT Global 500 corporations in managing social media and blogging in particular. For instance, Daimler has its employees blog away with gusto, while American Express chose to pay journalists to write specifically for its branded platform called Open Forum

Here we discuss the case of the Royal Bank of Canada – that has chosen 6 students and one employee to write about their lives and things of interest.

PS. While the Royal Bank of Canada struggles with today’s financial markets and has to raise another 2 billion dollars to bolster its capital structure, things look far rosier at the social media front as the case study below illustrates.

selecting the team

Of interest is that the Royal Bank of Canada had a competition to select the bloggers for this venture. The competition was open to students all across Canada. The bank selected six students to write content for the blog for one year. I do not know if these students will continue to contribute after this period or new ones will be selected.

The blog was launched during January 2008.

what this blog does very well

There are quite a few lessons we can take from this blog. To begin with, it is clearly targeting itself to people who are between 17 to 25 years old. It focuses on a target audience that consists of students that require student loans and banking services. However, financial matters are not at the core of this blog’s content with some exceptions. For instance, when a post describes why the arrival of the bank on the UCB campus in Vancouver was so a good thing, I am not sure how many will be interested besides those attending UBC, of course .

Besides having a clearly identified target audience, the blog carries posts that are of interest to its target group. Topics may range from,

- environmental issues,
- consumer affairs,
- good study habits,
- mobile communications, and
- planning your holidays (e.g., Christmas or Reading week)

possible changes

This blog tries to cater to teenagers and early 20s folks who are, most certainly, social media savvy. And whilst we are offered a page that allows one to ‘access each blog,’ in reality it is one blog that offers one to read each author’s posts (see here bloggers go life). So every author is also accessible as a category.

Unfortunately, the media savvy audience is not given the opportunity to get each author’s contributions as an RSS feed or receive content by choosing one or two categories to be put into a feed. We have discussed this issue in more detail here: why RSS fails with my readers.

Another interesting result is that the blog does not offer readers an option to get posts via email. A bit surprising considering that maybe no more than 20% of Canada’s students use RSS.

I went to My.ComMetrics.com and entered the URL to get some preliminary statistics as shown to the right. PageRank with 4 is satisfactory for the Royal Bank blog. However, the number of backlinks seem a bit low. Maybe the difficulties outlined above regarding RSS feeds and lack of e-mail subscription option could be one explanation that the blog is not reaching as many as it otherwise could.

Digging a bit deeper with the My.ComMetrics.com tool one can calculate a few more statistics, such as:

return on engagement – ROE for November 2008
- conversation index – 24 posts – 11 comments = 0.458
- consistency index – 24 posts over a 30 day period = 0.8
- comment nugget index – 0 comments with URLs, 11 comments = 0
- ComMetrics ROE index – about 35 points out of a 100

As we have pointed out previously it is the trends that matter. Therefore, we are interested how the above statistics look over a quarter or six months. I can inform you that looking over several months the findings look similar. For instance, July has 24 posts as well, about the same number of comments and 0 comments with URLs embedded in them. While the blog had 11 comments for the month of November, 5 were from one post and did add little if any value – hi nice post – were the kind of comments we collected. Nevertheless, our statistics show that the trends for this blog look upwards… good show!

The above preliminary findings indicate that when it comes to engagement, the blog still has some room for improvement.

bottom line

This blog has a clearly identified target audience made up of Canada’s unversity and college students. As importantly, bloggers are themselves members of the audience the blog is supposed to serve. Others prefer to use professional writers or journalists as does the OPEN Forum blog.

The blog is being used to build the bank’s brand and it does this quite successfully by letting the contributors focus on issues that matter to their peers. In turn, the bank’s products are featured rarely if ever. Hence, any student in Canada (a potential client – of course) might want to read the blog because it is interesting. This in itself is quite an achievement.

We should also take into consideration that this blog is just about 11.3 months old. So while there is room for improvement as outlined with the return on engagement indices above, this is to be expected with such a new venture. Hence, I congratulate the RBC team for their blogging efforts – keep up the good work and continue posting interesting stuff.

If you have a chance, check out their blog. Please let me know your take – do you agree with my conclusions?

Did I forget anything? Are you aware of another corporate blog where the bloggers are students? Do you have the URL? Please let me know your thoughts by leaving a comment below – I am curious and want to know your take on this. Thanks for your help.

Twitter: Being more effective with Tweet Deck

Urs E. Gattiker — Thu, 27 Nov 2008 20:00:06 +0000

SEE UPDATE FURTHER BELOW for Davos
We have brought you a few interesting tools, tips, tricks and so forth that help you use Twitter more effectively find a few here:

Twitter FAQs tools and tricks

Tweet Deck is a free, cross-platform, application running on the Adobe Air platform that allows you to manage your twitter account.

TweetDeck allows me to group those followers that I consider important for me for:

- professional
- social
- other

reasons. In turn, I may have 50 people in my professional group only. Nevertheless, I can I can track every single one of their tweets this way.

This is a good way for using TweetDeck because you not only are enabled to follow everyone that follows you (put them in your other group), as importantly, you can track those people that are most important to you at the same time by putting them in a separate group.

You can download Tweet desk here:

Click here and TweetDeck will also install Adobe Air platform on your PC

PS. Yes a Linux version is available as well, of course.

Tweet deck stands out from other applications because it allows you to open up different lists in the one window. What you can do is take all of you followers and add them to their own category.

Below you can see a screenshot I made tonight.

I decided to put some feeds under a group called Own Feeds and filter a few people into this group so I will not miss their tweets.

I have a tech group and filter some more feeds from geeks into that one. There are endless possibilities with this.

If you want to stay organized with your tweets and continue to follow those that follow you, you might want to try Tweet Deck.

Incidentally, the tool is very user-friendly and you can intuitively start using it, takes no more than 3 minutes to get up to speed.

Incidentally, Twitter Search is available with TweetDeck. In turn, I created a custom window that only return tweets that match such a term as Thanksgiving. What is also great you can filter by kewyword amongst your pals and do advanced searches (e.g., exclude some keywords). Just wonderful, you may miss a few tweets but rarely if ever miss the important ones.

TweetDeck also integrates Twitter Search with TwitScoop. This will allow you to search for hashtags or the top trending topics. I searched for Thanksgiving and got them . TwitScoop’s website shows you all the people talking about that subject at a given time. So I knew about the Mumbai disaster before Tehelka – my favorite Indian weekly - covered it – see Mumbaifeed on Twitter

Safety and Security – Twitter – back up – backup

You should get this tool to protect your feeds, follower list and so forth, check it out and yes it is free.

making Twitter safer for you – backup your list of followers now

Please comment. Let me know what your favorite Twitter client is.

=========> UPDATE 2008-01-29
Here’s what I’m suggesting for today. If you are a participant in the World Economic Forum (WEF) in Davos, Switzerland or you are watching from afar -

- install TweetDeck,
- do enter two search strings (#wef AND #Davos)

and you should be all set to get updates on all tweets with those two hashtags delivered right to your desktop. Also read:

Corporate microblogging or Twitter-squatting?

WEF Davos without gas

WEF Davos: What’s the big idea?

And if you want the real story, follow WEFdavos to get the scoop. Thanks for your support.