My first job after leaving university was as a journalist for the New Zealand Farmer magazine. This publication was based in downtown Auckland, one block back off Queen Street and just around the corner from the Auckland Star -- in those days the city’s evening newspaper. The same company that owned and operated the Farmer also owned the Star. It also owned the other occupant on our floor, the NZ Woman’s Weekly which was in its Jean Wishart era. Halcyon days.

Moving to New Zealand’s biggest city came as a very exciting culture shock to an Innocent Country Boy™ whose urban experiences had previously extended only to Eltham and Palmerston North.

I managed to secure a place in a flat about two blocks away from Eden Park and became a bus commuter. This was a flashback to my high school years where a long ride on a bus each day was a key component of getting to and from Stratford High School. Summer afternoons after work at Eden Park were also something special, usually involving me and a few dozen others either watching Auckland or New Zealand teams ply their craft.

The Farmer was, in those years, New Zealand’s most successful agricultural publication. An A4 bound magazine, it had over 30,000 paid subscribers and was published on the second and fourth Thursdays of each month. It was well backed by advertisers. It was a goldmine for NZ News Group.

Its staff were extremely skilled and experienced and all had served The Farmer for many years. I was greener than the Taranaki grass I had been raised on, in that respect. Like David Carradine’s Grasshopper, I had much to learn.

These were the days where smoking at work was acceptable. Indeed in the case of journalism I think it was something that seemed to be a mandatory part of the training regime. We had Adler Gabriele typewriters -- not a plug nor an electron in sight. We hammered out our stories onto copy-paper sandwiches, with a carbon paper filling cutting a copy of everything we wrote. Changes and layout instructions were marked onto these by hand before being sent off to the Star building for typesetting.

A couple of our production team were Buddhists. I’d never met one of those before. At lunchtime they used to get visited by their mates who had shaved heads, sandalled feet and who wore flowing saffron robes. They were all top blokes who enjoyed a chat. I learned a lot about meditation. One revealed that the worst thing about meditating outdoors in Nepal wasn’t the cold, rather it was the weight of the snow on his shoulders.

One of the production team was also a part-time homoeopath. So too was his “wife”, who was also a very “out” lesbian. I’d never met one of those before, well at least not one of the “very out” variety. Her partner was a former New Zealand womens shotputter, with ginger hair stylishly coiffed into a Number 2 cut. Quite memorable, she was. The first time I met her she was wearing a T-shirt emblazoned with the words “women need men like fish need bicycles”. Like Annie Lennox, who was I to disagree?

The chief subeditor had been in the business since Johannes Gutenberg set up shop. He was unwavering on points of style and reinforced his views by whacking the backs of my knuckles with a steel ruler. For that reason I too have some immutable style points which I have emblazoned deep in my consciousness, and probably my unconsciousness. I may also even have some scars on my knuckles, slow learner that I am. The first thing I notice on a menu or cafe’s specials board are the typos. Apostrophes will be the death of me. Same deal for Americanised English, particularly the word ass instead of arse. The split infinitive is NOT a grammatical error. And so it goes.

Within a month of starting with the Farmer I had writer’s block mastered. I was always amazed by and envious of my colleagues who could sit at their typewriters all day and hammer stuff out. Page after page after page. I required a few cups of instant coffee (real coffee hadn’t been invented back then) and collegial conversations to get my days underway.

However after a few months I had been appointed to the role of “North Island feature writer”. This was one of the coolest jobs I’ve ever had. One week out of every four was spent on the road visiting people in remote places who were doing really interesting stuff. Usually at least two such folk were visited each day, sometimes three a day on easier country. The other three weeks of the month were spent writing up these stories and setting up the next road trip. I had a work car -- a Honda Civic -- and became a connoisseur of country hotel breakfasts. The Riverina Hotel in Hamilton could not be beaten on that score. I also got really good at drinking cups of tea and eating scones at farmers’ dining tables.

I discovered people farming breeds of sheep I’d never heard of before, got to the end of the North Island’s longest no exit road, played with big machinery, learned about blueberries and other new exotic fruit, watched napalm being applied by helicopters at dawn, saw first-hand a Gotcha Gun being used to snare deer from a helicopter, and met some great new entrants working their arses off to make a go of their farms. I also managed to get to the South Island on occasion and got some great stories from the last ever Department of Lands & Survey ballot farm draw in the Te Anau basin. The early 1980s were a pretty special time for agriculture in New Zealand and it was great to be able to observe and write about these.

The North Island’s longest no exit road runs up the Waitotara River valley, from the Waitotara township to Ngamatapouri. This is about a 45 km journey, but it takes forever. Well, probably a few minutes change out of two hours one way. Anybody who is interested in scenic countryside, “hard” hill country (vertical to overhanging in places), swing bridges or geology should do this trip. Seriously.

Auckland in the early 1980s was pretty cool too. Exotic takeaways, ethnic food, cocktail bars and it was well placed for the occasional spot of scuba diving. It had its own traffic cops and interesting weather. The first thing I bought in Auckland was a clothes drier. There were also 26 wet weekends in a row at one stage -- and yes, I did keep count. That’s the main reason I took up squash, as an indoor sport had a climate reliability factor. My club also had a mixed sauna, but that’s probably another story for an Innocent Country Boy™.

Eventually new doors opened and I moved away from the Farmer and subsequently away from Auckland. I have a curiosity that makes me walk through new doors.

For my tenth birthday my parents bought me a tomahawk. It was an American Estwing. Its handle was part of the same casting as its head. The metal parts were polished to a shine. It had a wound leather grip and a leather holster so I could attach it to my belt. Tomahawks should be part of the daily wardrobe for all ten-year-olds. After all, what’s the worst that could happen?

Tomahawk was nicely balanced. With a bit of practice it could be thrown at things and it would embed itself. Finding things to embed it in was part of my formative learnings in the dark arts of public relations. There are two kingdoms of natural things: plants and animals. While tomahawks embed nicely in both, the scale of repercussions is quite different for each kingdom, I observed.

Once sharpened, tomahawk would hold a keen edge for a while. It was too small for the purposes of tree felling, but tree ringbarking was a different matter entirely. I learned that ringbarking trees had a measurable negative effect both on the health of the selected tree and on the health of my mother. Tomahawk managed to get confiscated for a period of time on one occasion.

Once reunited, tomahawk and I decided to do our bonding further away from the house section. A row of pine and macrocarpa trees was located to the west of our house, primarily for the purpose of deflecting the prevailing sometimes salt-laden south-west winds that whip through that part of Taranaki.

The pines had a bevy of low limbs that could be whopped off, not to mention pine cones that could be bagged up and used to curry favours with mothers who enjoyed using these to start household fires. Smaller pine trees may even have been ringbarked. Limbs were used to build dams in the creek that ran beneath. The North American beaver could have learned much from my dam-building master classes.

Macrocarpa trees were great for climbing, as they had gnarled and multi-limbed barrels. Having got oneself and one’s tomahawk well up a macrocarpa, there were smaller limbs that could be whopped off and used to construct fortifications amongst the entwined limbs. Notches could be carved into the bark to create footholds for ease of access and egress. There were also grand views to be had of the Land to the West.

Forts up a macrocarpa tree were essential camouflage and protection against the Enemies of the State that lived in the Land to the West. These were the Evil Forces afoot from the citadels of Mangatoki and Lowgarth, for instance. It was the job of me and my legions to keep careful watch, to plan defensive strategies and harness the resources necessary to repel these potential invaders.

My army was legend. Well trained and superbly equipped, it could move with pace and strike at the Heart of Evil when necessary. My soldiers’ loyalty was unquestioning. I ruled with compassion and fondness and was universally loved and lauded by my troops. Our authority over our dominion was unquestioned, as long as I was home in time for dinner.

Sometimes tomahawk and I would have scouting expeditions further west, to familiarise ourselves with the tree-clad territories in which we may have to engage with Evil Forces. Whilst there, limbs could be whopped off and smaller specimens ring-barked, for their own protection and for strategic purposes.

Can a ten-year-old with a tomahawk create a legacy that changes the world? In my mind they can.

This morning’s Dominion Post newspaper had as its front page lead a story titled “Degrees ranked by earning potential”.

Apparently officials at the Ministry of Education think that this is a good idea and a valuable use of their time. I disagree with them. Indeed I think that they’re nuts.

“Health” is the big winner in terms of median salaries earned five years after graduating, according to the Dominion Post. This is where the nonsense starts. This category will include doctors and surgeons, together with nurses, paramedics and, presumably nonsense health professions, like naturopathy. That is a very diverse range of occupations and earning potential within a category.

It will be the high income earners – the doctors and surgeons – who are inflating this category compared to others on the list. These will also be the folk to whom the focus of school leavers will be directed by their career “advisers”.

Bear with me while I do a reductio ad absurdum. The nation’s career advisers are spectacularly successful and all of the nation’s secondary school leavers decide to become health professionals and rock off to medical school.

First problem: they won’t all fit into our medical schools. New Zealand is already arguably over-graduating doctors, many of whom leave the country to avoid repaying their significant taxpayer-funded student debt.

Second problem: the academic competency bar for medicine is set pretty high – considerably higher than media studies, for example. Perhaps if Year 13 students work really hard, they could get their average performance over 50%.

Third problem: if every university student graduates as a health professional, how are the country's other professions going to be filled?

I think it’s tragic that a focus is on the earning potential of graduates. Whatever happened to students being encouraged to consider academic training in things they really enjoyed, perhaps were passionate about, and in which they stood a good chance of excelling?

A lot of people, myself included, gain a degree in a particular area of interest and then end up pursuing a completely different career. To explain, my degree is in agricultural science, my chosen profession is in communication. In all of the years I was in a position to hire communication staff, I never hired one with a communication degree. Call me strange but I always went for the applicant I thought was best suited to the role on offer.

I also think that it’s tragic that this nation’s tradespeople, service workers and general backbone of the economy don’t seem to be ranked as a priority by the Ministry of Education. Maybe that’s why our dairy industry has to import qualified and capable farm workers from the Philippines. I suppose that that is also a reality of so many school leavers having above average abilities. It could also be due to the fact that people on the unemployment benefit like to live in big cities, rather than in places like Stratford or Otautau.

I guess we’re lucky that fashion models didn’t come out in the top spot on the Ministry’s list. If they had, then this sage observation from Derek Zoolander would come into play, when he summarised his career: “Well I guess it all started the first time I went through the second grade. I caught my reflection in a spoon while I was eating my cereal, and I remember thinking ‘wow, you’re ridiculously good looking, maybe you could do that for a career.’”

Since I wrote my Field of Dreams blog on 8 January, I discovered this brilliant case study about the Maersk Line’s foray into social media. Maersk is lucky to have found somebody with the Ray Kinsella attributes I described, and that is working famously for them. Amazingly so. Who would have thought that a shipping company, albeit the world’s largest container shipping company, would attract the level of social media interest that it has.

I’m also a bit of a fanboy for infographics. I have a view that if a story can be told on one side of a sheet of paper it shouldn’t be told.

Some years ago I read Maverick by Brazilian businessman Ricardo Semler. This was an inspiring read. I was impressed by the section at the rear where he had reduced the HR policies for his organisation to a series of posters. I thought that this was a major breakthrough, as many organisations’ staff policies and procedures are to the practice of Plain English as the Battle of the Somme was to World War I.

I have a passion for summarising stuff. This was encouraged at an early age by a grandfather who, over dinner, used to regularly ask two questions: “What are you reading at school?”, followed by “Summarise that in one sentence.” This endeavour became competitive at times in our household. My sister holds the prize for her summary of Jean M Auel’s Clan of the Cave Bear saga as being about “Sex and Aryanism.” In three words Big Sis captured the essence of what Ms Auel took seven novels to describe.

Infographics are a great tool for getting things onto one page. Here’s an infographic that outlines the history of Microsoft and its significant contribution to the world of electronic connectedness. I remember well the day in 1986 when a PC was wheeled out to replace the golf ball typewriter that had previously taken pride of place on my work desktop. I’ve had a love:hate relationship with Microsoft ever since, and have recently made a determination to avoid using their products, with their associated licensing fees, wherever possible. Bill Gates cares not a jot about my cause. I guess that’s a luxury of being rich. So rich that he could probably write out a cheque for New Zealand. Well, maybe not quite...

New Zealand’s Treasury says that our assets are worth about NZ$240.3 billion. Microsoft is worth about US$240 billion. At the current exchange rate, that’s NZ$286 billion. Let’s see how these two perform over the next few years.

Brand values and brand loyalty are part and parcel of the world in which we live, a phenomenon that has been gaining momentum since the early 20th century. Some people dedicate themselves to a range of products that are largely based on what they see or hear in that product’s advertising and the linkages they associate to the way they think they want to live or to their own personal values. I have seen people wearing Apple and Nike brands tattooed to their bodies. This allegiance often has nothing at all to do with the physical attributes of that product, particularly when compared to the physical attributes of competing products.

Bulk commercial beers are a good example of how marketing allows what are largely identical products to position themselves in their market. Heineken, Stella, Becks, Carlsberg, and other European lagers for that matter have no discernable difference over one’s palate. Take away the label, the shape of the bottle and remove the celebrity du jour who’s doing the drinking of these in the TV ads, and they’re just the same lager. Blind testing will confirm this. The fact that these businesses do so well is all testimony to the power of great advertising and promotion.

Tobacco companies used to be able to do the same thing. Indeed tobacco companies largely wrote the book about the power of branded identity and how to make this work. Their products were largely identical, but the market segments they reached through their brand advertising were anything but. Major sporting and cultural events were synonymous with tobacco brands. Once regulators decided that this had to stop, tobacco sales suffered.

I’m a great believer in supporting businesses that are prepared to take a stand and do something different to what their competitors do. I’m attracted to businesses with a strong and active interest in what their customers and prospects want or enjoy, who set high production values, and deliver reliably for a reasonable cost. These can be local businesses, they can also be global businesses. These days market reach is largely determined by the nature of the product or service being sold.

Last New Year I decided to become a beer snob. I had tired of tap beers at most licensed hostelries all tasting the same and was also a bit annoyed at the prices being charged for these. Unlike big bulk brewers, craft brewers actually care about producing something that consumers will not only enjoy but will talk about. Craft brewers rely heavily on word of mouth endorsement for people to try their beer. That’s a marketing channel that the bulk brewers lost generations of drinkers ago.

I’ve become a convert to craft beers, although I discovered along the way that I have much to learn to become a “snob”. I’ve met some people over the past year who are extremely well versed in intricate comparisons between different types of hops and the countries in which these are grown. I just enjoy a really good beer, and I think that shall be the end of my pretentiousness.

Build it and they will come. This premise served Kevin Costner’s character Ray Kinsella well in the movie Field of Dreams. It is a premise that can also work well for businesses who want to operate in the world of social media, with some conditions...

The power of social media for businesses comes through building meaningful relationships with clients and prospective clients and putting them to work for you. Use it to develop and reinforce your brand’s values as well as trust and support.

But like most forms of spontaneous success, a lot of planning and preparation is needed.

A business needs to understand exactly what business it’s in, particularly its value proposition to clients and why people should want to buy their goods and services compared to those offered by their competitors. Marketing 101. It’s not rocket science but it takes a bit of careful and considered thought. These are questions that need answers before any business decides to take the plunge into social media.

Ray Kinsella made a big investment building his baseball diamond -- space that could have been used to grow corn, and his time that could arguably have been used more productively for tangible benefit. But the voices in his head kept telling him that there was more to life than that.

Sceptics and doubters abound. Like death and taxes, they’re part of life’s certainties and Benjamin Franklin should have added them to his list. These folk are motivated by tangible benefits and can’t be blamed for that. A reality is that social media is heavily shaped by intangible benefits. For this reason it’s really hard to measure its effectiveness in a manner that will resonate with Those Who Must Be Appeased™.

Social media can be about selling more products and services. But I believe its biggest value proposition is about building meaningful positive relationships. Successful relationships are as much about listening and understanding as they are about talking or evangelising. They’re a two-way street. Dr Phil got rich selling that message. I believe that businesses that are clear about their intent, value proposition and point of difference can also get rich, particularly if they include tools like social media into their toolbox and work them strategically.

Social media platforms (Facebook, Twitter, Google+, YouTube, Pinterest, LinkedIn) are free. They reach different audiences. That’s as good as the free stuff gets. If a business is going to make good use of these tools they need to invest a considerable amount of staff time developing and updating content strategies and tactics, preparing the content itself and monitoring closely what’s happening. Not just on their sites but also those of their competitors. They also need to be part of the discussion, as necessary. There’s a cost involved in this, particularly when the sceptics and doubters think that that time could be better spent growing corn.

Successful social media in a business  needs a Ray Kinsella. Well, perhaps one not quite so blinkered, but a person overseeing this with passion, imagination and also good practical realism.

Yes, there are a bunch of formulae that can be used to calculate such things as return on investment and engagement rates for social media. Check out Wikipedia. I’m unconvinced about the credibility and value of such measures, largely because of the considerable amount of intangibles that take place in social media interactions.

Some New Zealand businesses have paddled in the waters of social media. They’re now giving up, possibly because it’s too hard or too intangible. Sadly many are off back to the warm, comforting glow of email spam and other “me too” marketing techniques. I believe that the reason nobody came to their social media sites is because they didn’t build them properly and have a Ray Kinsella to run them.

There are times when I wonder about academics who undertake research that examines the bleeding obvious, like this report on the hiring practices of “elite” American employers, undertaken by Northwestern University in Chicago.

This research has identified that employers prefer to hire people they like and who they think they'll be able to get on with, rather than going for the candidate with the best academic qualifications. Hardly surprising. If anything else was the case, employers wouldn't need to interview candidates. They’d save themselves a lot of time and cost if they got candidates to submit authenticated academic records and give the job to the person with the highest scores. It turns out that this is a risk no employer is comfortable with taking.

What most employers are looking for in job applicants are attributes that aren't learned at a school, polytechnic or university. They want to hire people who are engaging and interesting, passionate about the value they can bring to their place of work, who have a positive attitude, good values, great interpersonal skills, reliability, a commitment to self-improvement, and so on. In summary, employers are more interested in a candidate’s “soft” skills. They’re prepared to take the “hard” skills as a given.

Unfortunately this reality is lost on many people, particularly some students and also their parents who encourage them.

I’m not against those who aspire to academic excellence but I think that this shouldn’t be an end in itself. Students who lock themselves away grinding out an A+ academic record should also note that they’re only going to be teenagers once in their lives. There are things like hanging out with fun friends, playing sport, taking time to read, dream and let one’s imagination run wild that will help create a stronger impression with a prospective employer than will getting a 98% average in the Baccalaureate examinations. Who knows, they may lose out to somebody with a C+ degree who interviews really well and who will fit in well to any workplace.

Despite the protestations of parents whose children are ruthlessly and relentlessly abused by their school colleagues, bullying is alive and well and encouraged by our society. Role models abound.

“You cannot be serious, Brett!” I hear you say.

Just up the road here in Wellington is a restaurant called Le Canard. Until recently this French restaurant offered its patrons paté de fois gras. Goose liver paté, a traditional stalwart of French cuisine produced by “force feeding” farmed geese, prior to them being dispatched and their livers removed and processed.

Recently a bunch of extremely noisy paté protestors set up camp religiously outside the restaurant each evening, harangued patrons as they arrived and departed, and created a cacophony outside, diminishing the experience of those dining indoors. Strangely the Police said they were powerless to do anything. I suspect drunken oiks attempting similar behaviour outside licensed premises would attract a different response from the constabulary.

After a while the restaurant caved in on paté de fois gras. They had no other option if they wanted to stay in business. Yet another victory for bullying.

There are countless other examples of intimidatory behaviour used against people going about their lawful business. So-called animal welfare and “environmental” groups are a case in point, routinely chaining themselves to chicken farms or ocean-going vessels. Protestors outside abortion clinics are another.

Some of these organisations even have the gall to pretend to be charities, collecting cash from the public to pay the legal costs of their bully teams. And they are allowed to get away with it. Indeed they’re actually encouraged to act in this manner by the same media that says it’s against bullying. That’s why I believe that bullying is alive and well and encouraged by our society.