Bess Yount is about to tell one of her favorite stories. The setting: the Berkshire Mountains of western Massachusetts on a ferociously cold Sunday morning. An overnight ice storm has taken its toll. As people start their morning routines, it’s obvious something is wrong. Showers don’t work. Toilets don’t refill after being flushed. Pipes have frozen and kitchen sinks have seized up. Lift the faucet handle and nothing comes out except a miserable gasp of air.
It’s time to call a plumber, Yount says. But who do we call?
Now Yount is hitting her stride. It doesn’t matter that she is speaking on a mild spring day. It’s inconsequential that we are sitting inside Facebook’s luxurious headquarters in Menlo Park, California. She has set the scene so perfectly that I’m practically shivering from the cold. My mind is conjuring up the sound of sinks gone bad. I’m imagining frost on the windowpanes, the narrow hallways of an old Colonial house, and wooden floors that feel cold to the touch. I’ve bought into her story so completely that imagination is replacing reality. I’ve become one of those Massachusetts homeowners, bewildered and frightened by this frozen-pipe problem. Time has stopped. I can’t think about anything else until Yount guides me toward a solution.
Fortunately, help is on the way. In Yount’s story, the ice storm’s damage leads us to reach for our smartphones or our laptops. We get onto Facebook to tell our friends about our problem. We want sympathy; we want companionship—and we’d like some advice about what to do. As we type our status updates, we notice a perky ad that speaks to our situation. A plumber in town is open for business, right now. Never mind that it’s Sunday morning. He specializes in fixing frozen pipes; he’s ready to make a house call. His phone number is right there on the ad. All we need to do is call. Then, blessedly soon, we can enjoy a warm shower, clean dishes, and all the other pleasures of running water again.
Predicament… unexpected solution… relief. You could imagine Yount telling her story at a holiday party, a church supper, or even a small political fund-raiser. By sharing her slice of Americana, she creates a genial, reassuring way of winning people’s trust. If you’ve ever watched an effective salesperson in action, you know the power of this classic formula. Even so, it takes a master’s touch to make such tales overcome a listener’s doubts.
Bess Yount is one of Facebook’s best storytellers. She joined the fast-growing social network in 2010, just a few weeks after earning a master’s degree in sociology. Now she is part of a three-thousand-person sales and marketing team that has helped turn Facebook from a money-losing experiment to one of the world’s most profitable media companies. Nobody ever asks her to write code, yet she is every bit as valuable as Facebook’s widely lionized software engineers. The reason: She connects with skeptics and draws them into Facebook’s fast-growing advertising ecosystem. She makes progress seem pleasant.
When I first met Yount, she worked her magic by visiting small-business conferences in cities such as Anchorage, Sacramento, Miami, Chicago, and Sugar Hill, Texas. At each stop, she struck up conversations with people running restaurants, nail salons, two-partner law firms, dentist’s offices—any kind of business, really. Many of the people she met were in their late forties or older. They came of age when newspaper ads and Yellow Pages listings provided reliable ways of promoting a small business. Now those time-tested methods were proving impotent. Newspaper readership kept plummeting; the Yellow Pages were becoming as outdated as ditto machines. (Google them!)
At some level, business owners know they must change with the times. Yet the older ones are often bewildered and defensive. They spent a lot of years mastering the ins and outs of traditional advertising. It’s depressing to see the value of those old skills dwindle. Before these merchants can move from print to pixels, they need reassurance that digital technology can pay off in their worlds. They also need a safe way of mastering new skills without feeling like the slowest learner in a gossipy classroom.
Yount makes the pain go away. She’s spending less time on the road now in favor of a new focus on making upbeat videos that can be shown nationwide, but her approach hasn’t changed. She’s constantly sharing straight-from-the-heart stories that help listeners transition to a more up-to-date way of seeing the world. The real-life story of the Pittsfield, Massachusetts, plumber and the ice storm is now paired with new narratives that showcase Latino immigrants, Oklahoma repair shops, and more. Yount isn’t the sort to show off her sociology training; you won’t hear her talking about “nonformal education programs” or “the facilitation model of learning.” All the same, she builds her presentations with an exquisite sensitivity to the way that new beliefs take hold. The proof is in Facebook’s own growth. When Yount joined the company in 2010, Facebook sold less than $100 million in advertising a year. Six years later, that number exceeded $26 billion. By selling pixels—nothing but pixels—Facebook collects four times as much ad revenue as one of traditional media’s biggest conglomerates, CBS. It has taken CBS more than eighty years to amass its collection of radio stations, television stations, Internet sites, and cable-TV networks such as Showtime and the Movie Network. By contrast, Facebook was founded barely a dozen years ago. CBS enjoys an illustrious past; Facebook owns the future.
One of modern society’s biggest secrets is the degree to which our date of birth defines our appetite for new technology. As science-fiction author Douglas Adams famously observed, we seldom think twice about all the wizardry invented before we were born or when we were tiny. Nuclear weapons, jet travel, diet soft drinks? Such creations are obvious and ordinary. If our grandparents marvel at such developments, we do our best to suppress a yawn. In Adams’s words, such steps forward are just a natural part of the way the world works.
When we fall in love with an innovation, it’s almost always something that arrives with a bang when we’re between ages fifteen and thirty-five. Everyone’s chronology is different, but within this continuum of inventions in the past thirty years, pick out your own delight: cell phones, Wi-Fi, digital music, the Xbox 360, the iPhone, Twitter, texting, 3-D printing, video streaming, Airbnb, virtual reality. Not only do we hail such additions as exciting and revolutionary, we might seize upon our favorite as a ticket to fame and wealth. As Adams dryly observed: “With any luck, you can make a career out of it.”
Left for last in Adams’s social segmentation is the way people react to everything invented after they turn thirty-five. In such situations, it’s all too late. We already feel locked into the habits that have defined our lives. With a few exceptions, we aren’t in the mood to change. Grumpiness sets in. We can’t feel the magic of something new anymore. Whether we own up to it or not, we want progress to stop. Adams’s trenchant putdown: anything invented after your thirtieth birthday—no matter how benign—will strike you as being “against the natural order of things.”
No matter how anyone feels about it, technological progress keeps coming. The previous chapter showed how industrial-sector breakthroughs intensify demand for critical thinkers with analytic and decision-making skills. This chapter will highlight the ways that fast-moving advances in consumer technology stir up the need for critical thinkers who specialize in adjacent skills: reading the room and communicating in inspiring ways.
For change-resistant consumers, it’s as if a UPS truck keeps unloading new packages (labeled TECHNOLOGY SURPRISE!) on their doorsteps faster than anyone can open them. Seventy percent of us now have broadband Internet, up from essentially zero in 2000. Americans average fifty minutes a day on Facebook, compared with just sixteen minutes a day reading newspapers, if we read them at all. We’ve replaced movie theaters with Netflix; department stores with Amazon; file cabinets with Dropbox. And we’re just getting started.
Whether you take Douglas Adams’s demarcations literally or figuratively, there’s no arguing with his basic message. The big societal challenge for the modern world doesn’t involve how rapidly engineers create new technology. The great point of strain involves how rapidly the skeptics and the hesitant can absorb each new wave. That’s especially pressing because as the baby-boomer generation gets older, so does our overall society. We aren’t making babies fast enough to keep America as youthful as it used to be. (The median age of an American is now 37.8 years, a remarkable jump from a low of 28.1 in 1970.) We’ve ended up with more than half of America on the cranky side of Adams’s final dividing line, inclined to regard each new advance as a debasement of the natural order.
Technology by itself can’t master the art of persuasion. Artificial intelligence systems can do a brilliant job of playing the intricate Japanese board game go—but they can’t make you want to sit down for a session yourself. Tools such as Alexa, Siri, and Cortana, which are meant to make tech seem friendlier and more approachable, delight those who start out warmly disposed to digital helpers. They horrify those who fear the robots are taking over. There’s a reason why the U.S. economy employs fourteen million people in sales and just four million in computer-related jobs: it’s impossible to automate the highly nuanced feat of changing people’s minds.
The smartest marketers and salespeople know the limits of synthetic persuasion. Automated systems such as MailChimp and HubSpot can spray us with customized e-mails, drawing inferences from our shopping habits of a month ago. Tracking cookies can chase us from website to website, showing us the same T-shirt ads no matter where we go. (Their hope: if we abandon a shopping cart on one clothing store’s site, our previous interest in buying a T-shirt can be rekindled.) Yet there’s a limit to the effectiveness of such brute-force techniques. Often they annoy us. Young or old, we don’t like being treated as a node on someone else’s vast grid of business-to-consumer selling. As Stephanie Meyer, chief marketing officer at software maker Connecture, observes: “It can’t be B-to-C; it has to be B-to-human, or B-to-me.”
The result: A newfound respect—even reverence—for people who tell persuasive stories. If you’ve come through college with that gift, take a moment to realize you possess skills that are both scarce and precious. You can reach other people in ways the algorithms can’t. Your wit and warmth will help you be persuasive in one-on-one settings, your ability to read the room will serve you well in small groups, and your capacity to inspire people will enable you to succeed on an even larger scale.
If you aren’t yet convinced of how valuable your strengths are, let Silicon Valley executive Santosh Jayaram put the full picture together. He is an engineer by training who worked for several years at Google before setting up a series of his own companies. A few years ago, he was prowling the Stanford campus, looking for talent to hire. But he didn’t stop by the engineering school. Instead, he slipped over to the humanities quad to recruit.
Once there, Jayaram explained to Michael Malone, an adjunct writing instructor, how everything had been turned upside down. Nowadays, it didn’t take a year of intense engineering to build features. Getting the code right was the easy part. Many software-based products could be assembled in a few weeks as teams of programmers outside the United States stitched together existing chunks of code. The hard part came when it was time to connect with potential users, who would either embrace this exciting idea or ignore it. To create bonds, Jayaram explained, he needed storytellers who could make the rest of the world imagine how much better life would be if they were already using this marvelous new creation. To pull off that magic trick, he said, “English majors are exactly the people I’m looking for.”
Never forget how much these organizations need you. Companies historically have undervalued the importance of getting their stories right. They believed that frontline marketers or back-office technical writers were worker ants who did nothing more than fuss with the details. That belief was dubious then, and it’s preposterous today. Find a fast-moving field, and your well-honed communications skills become a huge asset. You’re entering the picture when the overall strategy is still in flux. Your technical colleagues and their bosses haven’t found their story. They’re inarticulate or mute, which terrifies them. They don’t know how to connect with America’s older technophobes; they probably aren’t certain how to reach people young enough to be excited about new approaches. Without you, ambitious organizations are stuck. If you can be their Bess Yount, expect pay and recognition that will make you proud.
Let’s examine three important ways your storytelling arts can pay off.
Striking Up a Conversation
It’s crowded out there! Experts at the University of Southern California calculate that on average, each of us is exposed to seventy-four gigabytes of data a day. We’re talking about fifteen and a half hours of texts, e-mails, Snapchats, Instagram pictures, YouTube videos, corporate videos, and so on, every day. Most of it is instantly forgettable.
How does this overload affect your chances of being noticed if you set out to be a blogger, journalist, podcaster, author, or any kind of message maker? Cynics may deride you for embarking on a hopeless quest. It’s easy to believe we’re in a world with too much information and too little attention. Even corporate “content providers” with business degrees are struggling to protect their page-view numbers and their click-through rates, and they are spending millions of dollars to optimize their offerings. The big media companies are squeezing as much value as they can from today’s standard audience-engagement formulas. What hope do you have? How can you prevail with your liberal arts degree and your appreciation of creativity for its own sake?
Don’t waste energy arguing with the doubters. Just draw strength from the story of Andy Anderegg, an English major who turned the naysayers’ arguments inside out, demonstrating a path to success that remains wide open today.
In the spring of 2010, Anderegg was just another English major in the American heartland, finishing a master’s in fine arts from the University of Kansas. As for what lay ahead, she didn’t know. Nobody in New York wanted to publish her novel. In fact, she hadn’t exactly written a novel yet. She was exploring the crazy-quilt world of genre writing, in which different writing styles serve everything from celebrity memoirs to PhD dissertations.
When her own writing stalled (which happens to all writers), Anderegg would fantasize she was living in Kansas City, ninety-five miles from KU’s campus. Among her indulgences: repeated visits to Groupon.com so she could savor the site’s discount coupons for the big city. Such joy! If she lived in Kansas City, with Groupon’s help, she could buy a pink spangled cowboy hat at Rusty Spur Couture. In fact, for twenty dollars, she could double up, thanks to a two-for-one special.
The Kansas City fantasy didn’t last long, but Anderegg’s enchantment with Groupon kept growing. The site’s job section posted an opening for in-house writers at the company’s Chicago headquarters. Starting pay: thirty-three thousand dollars a year. It wasn’t great, but Anderegg hadn’t expected to get rich as a writer. She could make it work for a year or two. Even though the site’s edgy style would be a huge departure from scholarly writing, she was willing to give it a try. Her genre-writing training would help her deconstruct the way Groupon’s writers worked their mischief. All she needed to do was pass Groupon’s writing test.
The quick-witted grad student with the big glasses prevailed.
Anderegg broke into Groupon’s writing lineup with a deliriously exaggerated portrayal of how much fun it could be to go bowling in Detroit. She began with an ode to the thumb: “the highest throne in the human hand castle.” Bowling “celebrates the thumb,” she declared. She brought that awestruck tone to the bowling alley’s most mundane details. The seating: “classic orange.” The ball returns: blessed with “supernatural abilities.” The score-keeping screens: “designed primarily for box jellyfish who, for the sake of fairness, direct only two of their twenty-four eyes at the pins.”
Who knew bowling could be such a delightful, goofy experience? The secret, of course, was that Groupon wasn’t really selling bowling; it was selling whimsy and unpredictability. Its target audience consisted of millions of people across the United States (at all points on the spectrum between sociable and lonely) who couldn’t decide what to do with their time or money. Groupon became the giddy friend with a never-ending series of invitations to embark on adventures. A well-written Groupon ad could make anything sound exciting. Even more important, Groupon’s sassy tone made it easy for subscribers to corral their friends without seeming needy or domineering.
What Anderegg mastered in June, she was teaching by August. With Groupon’s coupon traffic growing 300 percent a year, the company constantly scrambled to hire more writers. Few people at Groupon knew how to explain the site’s quirky writing style. Most job candidates couldn’t master it on their own. Anderegg stepped forward with a training module that helped dozens of other English majors crack the code. She took charge of writer recruiting and training, pushing up her pay to forty-seven thousand dollars a year.
Merchants who wouldn’t dream of lampooning their own offerings discovered that Groupon’s wit—and a discount coupon—brought torrents of new customers to their doors. Something as ordinary as family-style salads at a Wyoming steak house could become silly and intriguing in the hands of Anderegg-trained writers. Do you want a nuclear-family salad? Or maybe an extended-family salad? Heck, summon all your courage and try a dysfunctional-family salad. The fun never stops.
Groupon caught the American mood perfectly, for a short time. Millions of people signed up for daily e-mails that provided giggles, discount coupons, and the promise of new adventures. Investors rushed to buy stock in Groupon, which went public in 2011. At its zenith, the company claimed an enterprise value of more than $15 billion. Eventually, Groupon’s growth curve turned downward. What was hilarious in 2011 was starting to become familiar in 2014. Cost-cutting took hold, and Anderegg’s writers were told to crank out e-mails much faster, even if it meant recycling last month’s phrases. By the beginning of 2015, Anderegg herself had moved on.
Groupon’s stumbles didn’t need to be Anderegg’s setbacks, which is the most important lesson from her journey. When Groupon was riding high, she earned several more promotions at the company. Within five years of graduating from Kansas, she had become the Chicago site’s managing editor, at a salary of more than a hundred thousand dollars a year. When she quit, she moved to Southern California and set herself up as a well-paid consultant to other digital-media companies. Working half-time, Anderegg was able to sustain a six-figure income and still work on a collection of short stories. Not only had she become a digital-era shaman, blessed with mysterious knowledge of what made viral posts work, she also was perfectly positioned to build a consulting practice around her expertise.
Those sorts of skills will always be valuable. What’s more, no employer can ever pry them away from you.
I Hear What You’re Saying
Does empathy pay?
For most of the past century, the answer has been an awkward “no.” We expect—and even appreciate—high levels of caring from social workers, nursing aides, kindergarten teachers, store clerks, and restaurant waitstaff. But in the United States, at least, such fields tend to pay poorly. Big earners in our society are defined by ambition and relentless priority-setting. Some are nice, some can be gruff, but they generally expect the rest of the world to adapt to their attitudes and priorities. Paul Piff, a University of California, Irvine, psychologist who has studied the interaction between wealth and social behavior, finds that the most affluent Americans tend to be more narcissistic, less reliant on other people, and more consumed with a feeling of entitlement.
This is a dismaying truth for anyone steeped in a liberal arts way of thinking. On college campuses, the ability to understand other people’s points of view is an unquestioned virtue. Pull up a seat at any graduation ceremony, and you’ll hear well-crafted tributes to the power of empathy. The best psychologists, anthropologists, political scientists, and sociologists are constantly trying to understand what makes other people tick. “Viewing the world through many lenses… is the very core of a college of arts and sciences,” declared Northwestern dean Adrian Randolph in a 2016 speech. It’s a sad turn of events if our society gives no consideration to the art of being considerate.
In his book Give and Take, Wharton management professor Adam Grant offers a cheerier alternative. He divides the world into people who are givers, takers, or a bit of both, which he calls matchers. Many people who achieve the least, he finds, are givers whose generous natures end up being exploited by others. Yet people who accomplish the most often turn out to be givers too. They just approach the wider world with a more careful strategy. On first encounters, they err on the side of compassion. If that warmth is reciprocated, they carry on. If they are snubbed, they pull back. Grant’s conclusion: generosity and empathy are winning virtues; you just need to be careful about choosing your friends.
In our tech-influenced society, empathy’s rewards may be intensifying. Cutting-edge companies that hope to redefine America’s habits—not just Facebook but also a host of other disrupters—can’t bully their way to success. The confrontational bosses at Uber, for example, keep advertising for community managers and growth managers to join the ride-sharing business. These specialists excel at the rapport building needed to recruit drivers and keep passengers loyal, even when a particular trip turns sour. That’s a challenging job. Annual pay can top eighty thousand dollars. Scan through a LinkedIn list of Uber’s current community managers, and you’ll see that such a job attracts people whose college backgrounds radiate empathy, including psychology majors from Swarthmore and art history majors from McGill.
Another factor that helps turn empathy into a highly marketable skill is that it’s easier than ever to keep score. People’s business reputations are constantly on display via Yelp, TripAdvisor, eBay, and countless other rating sites. Being known as a nice person to interact with becomes a valuable asset. Equally important, as we spend more time online absorbing information and trading gossip, banter, and jokes, we become starved for deeper emotional engagement. Emoji masquerade as sustenance for a while, but at a certain point, such digital gestures fail to satisfy. We crave real smiles and the full, five-senses delight of doing business with someone willing to view the world—for a moment—through our lens.
A few months before starting work on this book, I spent a week in California’s almond country working on a Forbes magazine profile of Build.com. The online company sells about five hundred million dollars’ worth of faucets, door handles, and other home-improvement gear annually. It’s an improbably strong competitor to much larger rivals such as Amazon and Home Depot, even though it’s outgunned in terms of money, prestige, and brand recognition. I wanted to find out why. The best place to hunt for answers: Build.com’s sales desk, where nearly two hundred employees field calls from contractors and homeowners who need advice. The right person to study: Mary Helen Smith, a University of Nevada, Reno, English major turned salesperson.
By the time I put on headphones to listen to Smith’s customer calls, her sales that day had already topped twenty-five thousand dollars, the most of anyone on the floor. Yet she didn’t seem rushed or pushy. Instead, Smith drew out the details of each caller’s situation with good-natured wonder, as if she were reconnecting with a longtime friend. One woman in Hawaii wanted to buy a Kohler sink but was trying to bargain down the price. Smith never said no; she just asked the woman to tell her a bit about the home-remodeling project. Each detail elicited a friendly response. “That’s a great choice!” Or “You’ve picked a lovely color.” Two minutes later, Smith booked the sale, at full list price.
Try too hard, and such cheery patter seems fake. It doesn’t work; it can even backfire. In Smith’s case, empathy is a central part of who she is. During a lull, I asked her to tell me about her path to Build.com. Did she absorb the liberal arts mind-set on campus or had she been headed that way from early childhood? In Smith’s case, it was a bit of both. She grew up in an intensely rural stretch of eastern California, near the Nevada border. Her father ran a feed store; her mother taught high-school English. Smith was raised with a profusion of animals at home, not just her dog Stanley, but cats, ducks, and horses too. As a little girl, Smith thought she wanted to be a veterinarian.
Four years as an English major at University of Nevada, Reno, added sophistication to Smith’s warmhearted nature. Her most vivid memories of college include the different ways various students reacted to the assigned texts. Studying Toni Morrison’s The Bluest Eye, she was struck by how the women and men in the class took such different stances on issues. “I stood firm on what I believed,” Smith recalled. “But I still was open to a good argument from someone else.” A term abroad in Romania, a seminar picking apart Shakespeare’s Henry V… at each juncture, the collision of different cultures and the efforts to reconcile them left indelible impressions.
Every few minutes at Build, a bell rings to celebrate some salesperson’s big order. I hadn’t expected to find an unheralded intellectual crushing the sales quotas at this plumbing-supply company. The more I talked with Smith, however, the more logical her success—and her background—became. As she explained to me, part of the fun of her sales job involves decoding each caller’s fears and aspirations. Each of Build’s customers “is like a character in a novel. I like to gain their trust. It feels good.”
All Your Friends Are Here
Every street musician knows this trick; you probably do too. If you want to earn some money playing your violin in public, it’s not enough to leave an empty instrument case open in front of you in the hope that passersby will toss in a few coins. It works better if you create the appearance of a new social norm by sprinkling in an assortment of quarters, singles, and a few five-dollar bills before you start playing. That way, spectators feel an implicit obligation to contribute. They hear you, they see the illusion of prior payments—and they assume that it’s right and customary for them to leave a donation too.
Arizona State psychology professor Robert Cialdini loves to cite this example as a rudimentary demonstration of the power of social proof. When we’re trying to decide how to handle an unexpected situation, we gladly take cues from what everyone else is doing. If we hear laughter on the sound track of a TV show, we start laughing too. The desire to fit in is so strong that we leave donations even if we weren’t amazed by the caliber of a street musician’s performance; we join in the guffawing even if the comedy show’s jokes weren’t all that funny.
Take a more serious look at the concept of social proof, and you will find it coursing through every aspect of a liberal arts curriculum. Read Anna Karenina, and you can’t help but be struck by how much Levin’s personality unravels when he moves to Moscow. In the countryside, he is a decisive man with big ideas. In the capital city, he is a spendthrift, caught up in the artifices of trying to keep pace with a new group of high-rolling friends. Has he fundamentally changed? Or is he being swayed by the company he keeps?
Study psychology, and it won’t be long before you’re revisiting Solomon Asch’s pioneering research related to conformity. Put a person in a roomful of opinionated strangers and then ask him if two lines are the same length or not. The truth is right in front of him, ascertainable by his own eyes. Yet his answer will be skewed by what everyone else says. If enough people assert with great confidence that two unequal lines are actually the same length, most individuals at some point will capitulate and join the crowd. Let a person write the answer in secret, so no one can mock or disagree with it, and he or she is more likely to cling to the truth.
Study current-day politics or try to make a living as a political consultant, and there’s no escaping the growing power of social proof. As the Pew Research Center found in a landmark 2014 study, if a person identifies as a liberal, he or she is likely to get most news from CNN, National Public Radio, MSNBC, or the New York Times. If a person identifies as a conservative, Fox News is his or her most trusted source. “When it comes to getting news about politics and government, liberals and conservatives inhabit different worlds,” a team of Pew analysts declared. At both ends of the political spectrum, people who discuss politics seek out like-minded individuals and unfriend or block those contacts on social media who disagree with them. Favorite opinions keep being reinforced; other points of view hardly register.
Whatever your pathway, your liberal arts classes have deepened your understanding of the ways people can be swayed by others’ beliefs. By the time you graduate, you have analyzed enough situations to make your own judgments about what’s authentic and what’s fake; what’s persuasive and what’s futile; what’s beneficial and what’s harmful. You know social proof is much more than a five-second ploy that helps buskers win bigger tips. You appreciate the delicate ways trust is built (or destroyed) over long periods in high-stakes settings. Even so, you know how powerful it can be to declare: “All your friends are here.”
If you’re intrigued by social proof but want to apply it in socially minded, noncontroversial ways, consider the example of Jeff Kirschner. He is a University of Michigan creative writing major who set up Litterati, a socially minded enterprise that encourages volunteers to pick up trash. Convincing people to contribute more than a single afternoon’s labor is usually a hopeless task, yet Kirschner has managed to organize sustained cleanups in San Francisco, in Stockton, California, and in a host of other cities. Many of these are ongoing projects in which volunteers regularly fan across neighborhoods to grab hold of empty cans, cigarette butts, hamburger wrappers, and the like.
Kirschner’s unique edge: he arranges for each volunteer to snap a smartphone picture of every piece of litter, along with a geotagged location. The result: Litterati creates detailed maps of trash outbreaks that can help city officials redefine their street cleaners’ routes. In San Francisco, Litterati’s photos help identify cigarette butts by manufacturer—a powerful tool in ensuring that offending brands pay their fair share of cleanup costs. As technology creates immediate feedback and a shared sense of doing good, volunteers delight in being part of a posse whose group successes are tallied by the minute.
All of which brings us back to Facebook, the frozen-pipe story, and the hidden beginnings of the job that Bess Yount enjoys today. In the autumn of 2008, Facebook was just four years old. Software engineers represented the largest group of employees, and they included more than a few college friends of the company’s twenty-four-year-old founder, Mark Zuckerberg. Facebook’s culture back then was a raw, exuberant blend of tech zealotry and college-dorm fun; coders raced their RipStiks across carpeted halls whenever office tensions got to be too much.
At a staff meeting that autumn, someone asked Zuckerberg to explain Facebook’s approach to advertising. I was in the room at the time, and I remember how enthusiastically he talked about the way that Facebook’s vast assortment of drop-down menus would let advertisers manage campaigns without anyone needing to talk to a human being. Looking to reach women ages eighteen to thirty-four? Click on a few buttons, and you’ve got them targeted. Prefer to focus on people who like gardening, watch horror movies, and have traveled to France? Click. Click. Click. You now hold them in the crosshairs of your advertising rifle.
At that moment, Zuckerberg thought his engineers were building such an automated marvel that traditional advertising teams would become as unnecessary as lamplighters. Good-bye, Mad Men–era politics! Good-bye, handshakes, expense-account meals, and the personal back-and-forth of making ad deals happen. Zuckerberg felt sure he had glimpsed the future. In advertising, at least, the road ahead was going to be a triumph of technology over humanity.
By 2010, Zuckerberg had changed his mind. Human sales teams weren’t so pointless after all. The splendors of Facebook’s drop-down menus turned out to be too much, too fast. First-time buyers didn’t buy ads. They found the automated system too chilly and impersonal. It didn’t speak to them. Facebook’s regular users didn’t mind all the automation in the background controlling what stories popped up in their news feeds. For them, technology was an invisible helper that made it easy to stay in touch with friends. For advertisers, though, the technology was too prominent. It felt sterile and rushed. There weren’t any social preliminaries that put merchants at ease in the way that old media’s ad-sales teams made it safe and pleasant to buy a magazine ad or a TV commercial.
It was time to regroup. If business managers wanted personal reassurance before buying Facebook ads, Zuckerberg and his business-savvy chief operating officer, Sheryl Sandberg, would make that happen. If businesses wanted to hear stories about similar enterprises that had bought Facebook advertising, they could make that happen too.
Today, Facebook employs thousands of people in its advertising, marketing, sales, and business-development teams. They coexist alongside the company’s famous hoodie-clad engineers because they possess valuable skills that don’t involve software coding. They tell stories well. They empathize with their customers. They show how potent a degree in history, English, psychology, or any other liberal arts discipline can be in a business setting. After all, these new hires know how to reassure people on the brink of trying something new. Everything is safe; your friends are already on board.