Jon DiPietro is Domesticating IT

I occasionally post subjects with the subtitle, “I Do Not Think It Means What You Think It Means.”  The subtitle pays homage to one of my favorite sources of movie quotes, The Princess Bride (you can view this particular quote on YouTube).

Today I’m commenting on the current plague of companies looking to enslave college students and recent graduates in order to help them establish a presence in social media.

I subscribe to multiple Craigslist RSS feeds and every single day there is at least one advertisement from a company looking to bring in unpaid interns for various jobs.  Many of them are mundane, computer-oriented tasks but many of them look just like this one:

Do you tweet, blog and use social media like Facebook all day, every day? Are you a creative individual who can take things to completion? Does the event industry interest you? You may be the perfect fit for our next internship!

[company name removed] is looking for a detail oriented, knowledgeable and passionate person to help develop its’ social media campaign.

The perfect candidate will have experience in all areas of social media; Facebook, Twitter, Blogging Platforms. Have exceptional writing skills. Proficient in MAC and Basic HTML. A passion for weddings is a plus!

This is an unpaid internship, but has great potential to become a full-time position. Internship credit is available.

Please email resume. No phone calls please.

Aside from the spelling errors and poor grammar, what’s so bad about this?

Crime Doesn’t Pay

That’s right, if your internship doesn’t meet six federal legal criteria you are violating federal labor laws.  Many employers mistakenly think that they can hire unpaid interns because they are providing enough value through the experience the interns gain.  However, this is the wrong perspective. They need to consider whether or not the person materially provides value to the company.  If so, they must be paid.  If not, why are you wasting everyone’s time?

Hobbyist Vs. Professional

Let’s try rewriting the advertisement listed above using a different profession and see how it may turn out…

Norm Abram is the seemingly superhuman master craftsman who has hosted the PBS television show, "The New Yankee Workshop" for some 20 years.

Do you caulk, paint and watch television programs like the New Yankee Workshop and This Old House all day, every day? Are you a creative individual who can take things to completion? Does the construction industry interest you? You may be the perfect fit for our next internship!

[company name removed] is looking for a detail oriented, knowledgeable and passionate person to help develop its residential construction business.

The perfect candidate will have experience in all areas of construction; hammers, nails, saws. Have exceptional painting skills. Proficient driving Fords and Chevys. A passion for subdivisions is a plus!

This is an unpaid internship, but has great potential to become a full-time position. Internship credit is available.

Please email resume. No phone calls please.

Sounds absurd, no?  Just because a person knows how to use a hammer or circular saw doesn’t mean they know how to build a load-bearing wall, right?  And watching Norm Abram every weekend for two years doesn’t mean you’ll be able to build a ten foot Clancy sailboat from scratch.  Knowing how to use tools does not mean that a person understands how to design, finance, construct, and sell a home.

Well, just because a student posts pictures of friends’ compromising antics on Facebook and has a few thousand followers on Twitter doesn’t mean they understand how to effectively architect, implement, and measure a social media marketing campaign.  That’s even assuming that the business already understands how the social media marketing strategy will fit into its overall marketing strategy, but they frequently do not.

What’s the Harm?

Here is a short list of some of the missteps that can lead to more harm than good:

• It is possible to attract the wrong audience. The first rule of search optimization is, “do no harm.”
• Blogging carries legal responsibilities including copyright infringement and Federal Trade Commission regulations.
• Facebook’s Terms of Use are complicated and even contradictory. Violating them can get you banned.
• Anything worth doing is worth measuring. Fan and follower counts do not tell the story.
• Creating compelling, engaging content is challenging and dynamic.
• Hope is not a strategy.

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Last month, I wrote a post titled, “Statistics: I Do Not Think It Means What You Think It Means.”  The title paid homage to one of my favorite sources of movie quotes, The Princess Bride (you can view this particular quote on YouTube).  Since that article, I have read no fewer than a dozen more posts from various bloggers who try to draw conclusions from data on social media by calculating averages and medians.  When it comes to using these calculations in social media all I can say is, “You keep on using that word. I do not think it means what you think it means.”

Primer (I promise this won’t hurt)

Most of the statistical jargon we use (like averages, medians, and standard deviations) apply to data populations that follow a normal distribution, also popularly known as a “bell curve.”  This describes data that is more or less centered around an average (or “mean”) value.  The median is a line of demarcation, having half of the values above and below this number.  The general shape of this bell curve is defined by the standard deviation.  A high standard deviation results in a short, wide bell while a low standard deviation results in a tall, narrow bell.

Graph depicting a normal distribution and its mean.

The key to normal distributions is randomness.  Without a process that is truly random, you will not have a normal distribution and terms such as average and median can be thrown out the window.  This is a common pitfall in statistical process control, where processes controlled by machines are sometimes not as random as people think.  The caution here is that if you’re going to measure statistics like average, median, and standard deviation you must be sure that the data population forms a normal distribution.   Otherwise, the numbers will not mean what you think they mean.

Enter the power law distribution, also known as a Pareto distribution or the 80/20 rule.  Unlike a normal distribution, these values are not symmetrical, but highly weighted against one end of the graph.  This type of relationship typically represents social and economic data patterns, and is especially true in social media.

Graph of a power law (or Pareto) distribution and its mean

A power law distribution can represent participation rates in social media; for example, the number of contributions (Y axis) per participant (X axis).  It can also be used to describe a demand curve; for example, the price of a given product (Y axis) versus the demand for it (X axis).

What I Think It Means

This is very much a case of caveat emptor.  I’m not saying that the word “average” is meaningless in power law distributions, just that it has a very, very different meaning than most people understand it to have.  If you read, for example, an article that talks about the “average number of retweets/posts/likes” etc… then you must first determine whether or not the data population from which it was calculated is a normal distribution.  This can be done pretty easily through a mathematical calculation but many of the people touting these statistics don’t know how or even why they should.

So before you make any decisions based on what the “average” person does, make sure it means what you think it means.

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