Did you read an awesome article this week?

Every Friday morning, a notification pops up on the top corner of my screen. It’s Basecamp, asking me, “Did you read an awesome article this week? Tell us about it and what you learned.” This automatic check-in encourages the Metis senior team to share some of the interesting pieces we read throughout the week, whether related to client work, current events, management lessons or something else entirely. The question kicks off the conversation, and from there, it’s up to the team whether it turns into a lively debate, brainstorm or a piece to keep in your back pocket to read or reference later.

Below are three of the articles our team found worthy to share recently:

“The Never-Ending Performance Review” — Rachel Feintzeig, The Wall Street Journal

Employers, including Deloitte and PricewaterhouseCoopers, are reevaluating the annual performance review process and moving toward more frequent feedback programs. It’s a challenge for managers and employees to adjust to the constant mini-reviews, but the transition means more digestible feedback that helps keep the organization and team focused on improvements.

At Metis, we have a balance when it comes to performance feedback — while we have a formal annual review, every employee always knows where he or she stands, and our team culture focuses on transparency with each other. We often leave meetings and presentations asking each other how we did, what we could have done better and where we excelled. Feedback is crucial to growing, and we aren’t willing to wait 365 days for the next review to share it.

“Google and Facebook’s Idealistic Futures Are Built on Ads” — Ashlee Vance, Bloomberg

With humble beginnings and goals like helping people find things online quickly and connecting college freshmen, Google’s and Facebook’s goals have evolved and become much more ambitious: curing death and creating a global community. However, these goals are sustained by advertising dollars, and engineers at both companies are dedicated to using all the data the businesses have on users to create and modify algorithms that will get people to spend more time on their sites, so they can sell more ads.

Google and Facebook are embedded into our lives, for everything from how we connect with one another to how we do business. Is the tradeoff of advertising and data to these companies worth it to help maintain our daily habits, and hopefully one day see these companies’ aspirations become reality? Our team has yet to come up with an answer.

“Don’t Let Facebook Make You Miserable” — Seth Stephens-Davidowitz, The New York Times

This opinion piece served as a reminder that social media is not always reflective of reality. How people actually behave in real life does not always match what they share on social media, because of a desire to create a particular persona and look a certain way. To create an image of the “perfect” successful and glamorous life, we have a habit of curating and showing off only the most attractive parts of our lives on Instagram and Facebook. Instead of comparing our lives to what we see our friends posting on social media of their curated perfect lives, we need to keep in mind that the grass is probably the same brownish-green on that side, too.

This article brings up an important question about how marketers need to think about social campaigns when their audiences are being less than honest about their daily lives. While social personas may be less than authentic, it’s worthwhile to build audience profiles based on aspirations and who people want to be.

This article originally appeared on the Metis Communications blog.