Old and new models

(WORLD) Back at the turn of the century I was busy working my way around a couple of local authorities here in the UK. I ended up in one where the Chief Executive took a shining to me and basically allowed me to write a job description for the post of 'Corporate Youth Officer', focussed on embedding youth participation into the councils operations—it was the first ever post of its kind in the UK.

One of the things I held dear at that time was Roger Harts 'Ladder of Participation' (which is still very much in use today and which every youth professional knows backwards across the globe):

Image credit

Spring forward into the latter end of the last decade and I'm delivering keynotes and masterclasses to several youth services across the country (and world) and mashing up the above ladder with another one which show how people use the web (below is the latest verion):

Image credit

Looks familiar, huh? Maybe great minds were thinking alike here or maybe the Forrester guys were inspired by Mr Hart?

All I know is that participation as a term and model can be substituted for many of the social media phrases such as conversation, community and/or user-generated content, and maybe that's why I feel so at home in this space as I've been doing stuff like this for over a decade.

I want to challenge you…

To stop for a day, put all your projects in a shared space, including all problems, remove your job title, leave your authority at the door, include everyone in the company, and invite everyone to work together to change things.

Every day people follow the same routine, invite the people they know and love to meetings, include certain people in email circulations and work really really hard at achieving something mediocre.

Why would you accept that? You have access to an incredible wealth of minds, be that employee’s, friends, family or followers. Why would you limit yourself, your projects and your business to the same old invited few?

Think about it. People are employed because you have a job that needs doing or you fulfill a position that needs your skill set, right? But how long does it take before that ’spark of enthusiasm’ dulls, and that role becomes tedious, or worse that company becomes stale. Why drive your friends, employee’s and acquaintances to utter boredom?

The limits of the job description, does just that, limits people. Limiting their passions, their ideas, their enthusiasm for getting up in the morning and it limits the development of a great cultural, collaborative, participatory working environment. Meetings are closed (invite only), managers tell people ‘as much as they need to know’, people are urged to work towards a collective goal but only given a piece of the puzzle to play with. Stop doing that. It’s counter productive. Have you ever considered that environment you instill in a workforce, breeds the very culture you are desperately wanting to get away from?

The reason I think people don’t try something new, is because they are afraid that someone else’s priority won’t get done. That urgent thing which determines if Sales get made and wages get paid won’t happen. The fear is that ‘new’ equals ‘will most likely fail’. That is wrong. People love their jobs, people love their teams and projects and ‘want’ to do a great job. But they also want to contribute to the success of the company, not just their corner of the office.

Give them that chance. I challenge you. Put it all on an internal Wiki, everything. Invite everyone to contribute. But here’s the biggie. Give them the time, and remove all priorities from their workload. Clear their minds of worry for that day. Don’t just stop the day, create the space, and move the deadline. Take the pressure off and reward the people you work with and for and want to make use of. Make it happen midweek, on Friday, or whenever you like.

Don’t just encourage evolutionary working, create revolutionary rethinking.

Take that (perceived) risk and I guarantee you’ll see rewards.

Am I talking rubbish? Bring it on in the comments.

Photo credit: lmwarner517

Newbie alert

(GBR) It's with lots of high-fives and spontaneous cheers we welcome a new member into the MediaSnackers family.

Here's what our new 'Business Development Director' got to say for himself:

Hello! I'm Karl Hakeem.

Senior Gig Hunter, Youth Trainer, Community Enterprise Champion, Business Development Specialist, Innovative Network Creator and Social Media Ninja.

Co-Founder of several young enterprise networks, utilizing social media to innovatively communicate and deliver skills based training and educational events nation-wide.

I also have over 10 years of sales, marketing and business development experience with various international organizations and award winning training providers.

"I have come here to chew bubblegum and kick ass… and I'm all out of bubblegum."

Thinking he's going to fit right in…

Please say "hello" and make him feel welcome…

The final hush, hush gig.

(ENG) For the third and final 'top secret' new service session we're in London today.

We promise to announce what this is all about probably next month but definitely in the March 2010 email digest, so be sure to keep an eye on the blog sign up to our newsletter on the right hand side there to get the news first.

Related post : Top Secret Session #1 and #2

A hard lesson in web security

(WORLD) Well if you hadn’t noticed, the mediasnackers.com website had gone messy over the past few days, I’m pleased to say that its back in action and so far, all is healthy. Without Kieran Mastertons help, we would have been screwed, because even though I’m the ‘web dude’, I’m far from knowledgeable about server intricacies to know what to do in the event of matters so catastrophic as what we’ve just experienced.

So what happened exactly?

A little link in our admin area that said ‘upgrade’ wasn’t clicked—so small, yet so important.

From that neglect, the site was compromised, code was placed all over our pages. Google, Blogger & Twitter blocked us, plus anyone that tried to access the site through Safari, FireFox, Chrome and many others. However if you’re an IE user, surprisingly (or unsurprisingly) you would have just seen our temporary page showing the site was down.

It would be easy for people to think ‘Oooo, Wordpress is baad’, and it would be easy to think that ignoring a warning message was the fault, but much more than that, not understanding the implications and repercussions of ignoring a warning message is far, far worse than any ignorance on its own.

Post exploit, it’s now all about damage limitation.

One of the first things that was done, was removing public access to the site by putting up a temporary holding page, redirecting and informing all visitors of how we can be contacted, and then trying to identify the malicious code and remove it. Apparently the database had been compromised, so no matter what I tried to remove from the pages itself, it would always reappear. The full extent became clear after setting up Google’s Webmaster Tools for the website which reported malicious code on 7 pages.

Kieran confirmed that many of the Wordpress core files had also been breached—nothing more we could do but remove the site, sweep the database of all the malicious code that could be located and reinstall. Finally dropping the clean database back in, adding the theme and plugins, getting everything running again, checking all the links to make sure everything works and pushing it live.

However, things will not be perfect for some time. Google needs to run a sweep of it again to check that its safe to let visitors back, including Twitter as well, not to mention a number of other sites and servers which we aren’t aware of.

Looking forward, it’s obvious to ask what can we do to prevent this happening in future? The truth isn’t so easy to swallow, as the answer is nothing. Nothing can guarantee that a website won’t get hacked, a server won’t be breached or a database compromised. The most any of us can do is to make sure passwords are as secure as is practically possible, plugins are updated with the latest versions, and any warnings about ‘upgrades’ are not over looked.

Fingers burnt, lessons learnt, and hindsight is 24hrs too late as usual. Ho-hum. Apologies for the turbulence people, normal service will resume shortly.

How about you? Have you had a similar experience? Or a security headache to deal with? Let us know in the comments.

Nottingham Cultural Offer Part 4

(GBR) What do you do when you want a good night out?

I’ll guess that you suggest a few places you know and love and choose one of those options. The Cinema, certain restaurants, bars and pubs etc. We all do. But every now and then we want something different, and often the effort of figuring out what is new to do, brings about more difficulties in making that decision.

• What is available?
• Where is within reach?
• What do all the inidividuals prefer?
• Is there easy transport?
• Parking?
• Buses?
• Taxi’s?
• Venue times and locations?

It’s easy to see why we get stuck in a rut and revisit the same old spaces.

Today I’m in Nottingham, sitting in on a meeting to help unify the Cultural spaces so the residents can choose and organise a good time – be that day or night, indoors or outdoors. It’s a big project, but we have some great web agencies pitching for the tender. By the end of the day, we hope to have started an exciting journey that everyone in the City will be proud of and able to participate in.

Woo, go Nottingham! More news as I have it.

Related post: Nottingham Cultural Offer Part 1 & Part 2 & Part 3

MediaSnackers Consulting

R.I.P.

(WORLD) Social media means there is no such thing as business-to-business (B2B) anymore.

Instead it's all peer to peer (P2P).

Blogs, Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn etc have all created a democratic level playing field for all involved.

The thing is though, p2p has always been the best way to think of business anyway.

Think of your best customers. You have a personal relationship with them right? You don't sell to their business you sell to them. They in turn don't buy from your business but from you.

Even if you sell products through an online store and all people have to do is press an order button, social media is a great tool to get them to your site / tell the story behind what you do / show not tell what's on offer and the values & benefits of such a sale.

RIP B2B.

Thoughts relating to recent comments in one of our sessions for more b2b social media examples.

Inspiring the suits.

(GBR) Today we're delivering a half-day social media taster for a group of CEO's on behalf of Vistage International. We'll be showing them all the groovy stuff you can do to augment and embellish their current operations so they are quicker, cheaper, sexier.

Just got around to analysing the feedback. Great stuff overall, the guys really liked the session, very valuable and the interactive nature was
much appreciated.

Comments included:

A very useful session – a little fast for me – but so helpful (and scary) to see some very exciting tools
One of the best, most-interactive days we have had
Excellent – hands on, relevant, practical
Learned new things and a great reminder of other things
Well structured session – all groups would benefit
Really helped my understanding of social networking

Tony Price, Vistage Chair

Related posts : Vistage Consulting, Vistage Training Part 1 and Part 2

Keeping track of the growing MediaSnackers Meme.

(WORLD) We probably weren't the first to apply the 'snacking' metaphor to media, although there seems to be a growing adoption in terms of describing the new media landscape—we thought it would be good to keep an eye on the growing MediaSnacking meme:

Braincandy for media snacking: Hog-isms, issue 003

Sally Hogshead and her little pdf.

I am not talking about food snacking. I am referring to how people consume information and media. With thousands of blog posts (including this one), tweets, photo comments, headlines, news feeds, etc.

The Becher Agency echoing our views when we started all this.

@steverubel since I have a Touch I’m using it instead of the laptop for surfing, reading, media snacking, etc.

Tweeted by RuudHein

Trying out Media Munchies, my new Micro blog–tiny bites of social media snacks: http://is.gd/4YdbN

Tweeted by heidimiller

Like a hobgoblin of little minds im the foolish consistency of your media snacking philosophies. Goodmorning.

Tweeted by loudmouthman

Tweetfreek Social Media Digest Media Snack - http://eepurl.com/ed8U

Tweeted by AlexClon

people media snack #ahhra

Tweeted by LorettaDonovan

@Packard_Sonic Thanks! I love Media Snackers, but I’ve never seen the other ones.

Tweeted by Kerinus

#utahtech ”Media snackers?” Delicious!

Tweeted by vpbeerman

View all ‘MediaSnackers Meme’ posts

In Stockholm

(SWE) Today we're delivering an internal event for JG Communication and their 130 staff.

We'll be exploring doing a keynote and then hosting four separate breakout sessions on various aspects of social media, exploring the benefits and value in adopting this stuff.

To the guys at Mediasnackers: Thanks a million for an inspiring day on the current social media landscape. The employees of ours who are very well versed in this topic learnt plenty of new things and the ones who aren't so well versed in this area were really blown away and inspired by the lectures and workshops.

Colm O’Callaghan, Operational Manager, JG Communication

MediaSnackers Internal Events