As with last year’s Big Yak, I had the privilege of facilitating the event. It is an experience that is something akin to a free-fall jump from a light aircraft, but without the parachute – you never know quite where or how you will land. Communicating with professional communicators, and organising professional organisers is about as intimidating as it gets, so I am very grateful for all the fantastic feedback I got on the day and since. I have facilitated dozens of unconferences, both corporate and those very much less so, over the last several years, but The Big Yak remains the most intense and diverse. There is huge a range of skills and experience in the room, due to the breadth of backgrounds that the internal comms world attracts, and the many different places that it sits within businesses operating structures. There is always something new to learn.

With over 30 sessions during the course of the day, and my time spent hopping between them to check that everything was ticking along, it is hard to pick out a particular session. HR comms was a very popular topic – or rather, how to make HR comms interesting!

It was striking how many times the issue of leadership came up, and the prevailing sense of change in the work place – changing employee work styles, changed communication styles, changing expectations of the workplace and changed work roles. Digital comms has become a mainstay, and the challenge with technologies like Enterprise Social Networks has moved from “how do we deploy this?” to “How do we use this most effectively?”

The eBay offices in Richmond provide a great venue for an unconference. There is a healthy mix of formal and informal meeting spaces, and the main room provides enough space to get everyone up and moving about to ‘break the ice.’ There were six tracks of sessions running though out the day, which probably could have been pushed to seven, given the number of people prepared to run sessions.

It was very encouraging to see unconference “first-timers” throwing themselves into the proceedings, running sessions and shaping the conversations. The “everyone gets to play” structure is a wonderful way for people to get to know each other, and to discover the expertise in the room. It was during an unconference in the eBay offices 5 years ago that I met a group of people that have shaped the most recent years of my working life. The Big Yak is about more than exchanging expertise, although that definitely did happen, it is about building support networks and connecting with the pulse of the industry. It is about people giving up their Saturday to grow their expertise, and share their skills with others in the industry.

I strongly encouraged folk to create “useful artifacts” from the day, and that was clearly taken on board, with an array of blog posts:

• The Big Yak: a snapshot by Helen Deverell.
• Don’t touch my magazines by Kate Shaw.
• Keep on yakkin’ — Authenticity in internal communication, From cascade to conversation, How can you make HR comms cool? and Change communication – top ten tips by Katie Marlow at CIPR Inside.
• Tea, cake & social collaboration by Belinda at NixonMcInnes.
• Return of the Yak and the continuing evolution of Internal Comms by Paul Thomas.
• The yak the gives back by Dave Wraith.
• The connectors get connected by Anna Lowman.
• Having a Yak – by Eloise Hindes at ab comms.
• The Big Yak 2014 – by Jez at ego-creative.
• Bigger, better and more yakking than ever! by Steven Murgatroyd (and on the words and pictures blog).
• The Big Yak and the future of internal communications by Beth at 106.
• The Big Yak – wisdom of IC Crowds – by Gloria Lobardi at Simply Communicate.
• The Big Yak 2014  – The Sequel Group.
• #thebigyak -My Three Things – by Katie Marlow
• Rachel Miller’s podcast and post.
• Confessions of an internal communicator – Jenni Wheller and her favourite bits.

There is also the  buzztale story (thank you Andris Berzins for the use of the pictures from it in this post) and a snazy infographic by Kate Jones. I made a storify from the tweet stream and posted some pictures to Flickr.  I am always happy to talk about running unconferences in corporate settings, or share digital communication success stories. I am buzzing with ideas after The Big Yak, now to go a put some of them into practice!

The post The Big Yak – Encore appeared first on Redcatco.

The story centres around the publication of a paper in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America (PNAS) under the rather Orwellian title “Experimental evidence of massive-scale emotional contagion through social networks” So, what did Facebook do, and WTF (why the fury)?

The Experiment

Researchers from the Core Data Science Team at Facebook, the University of California, and Cornell University used almost three quarters of a million users (689,003 to be precise) in a study conducted in mid-January 2012. The nature of the academic review cycle meant that it took until June 2014 for the research to be published. The researchers set out to manipulate the emotional state of users over a one week period, by reducing either the number of emotionally positive or emotionally negative items in the participants Facebook News Feed, and then examined their posted status updates for positive or negative emotion. The participants selected were all users who viewed Facebook in English. It isn’t clear from the paper if that included “English (UK)” users – or indeed “English (Pirate)” users for that matter. There were also two control groups, where status updates were omitted at random, as News Feeds that were not manipulated already contained a positive emotional bias (22.4% of posts contained negative words, 46.8% of posts contained positive words).

Happy talking – The Findings

The findings are described as “controversial” in the paper itself, but for different reasons than those being discussed online. There are certainly a number of methodological questions about the research. Machine algorithms were used to identify the emotional content of the messages, which is something that is fraught with problems in short bursts of text like status updates. The researchers were only assessing the emotional state of the Facebook users based on what they posted to the platform, their actual emotional state may have been quite different. Those two things aside, the findings suggest that reading emotionally positive updates (let’s call it “happy talk” for now) results in writing happy talk, and reading emotionally negative updates results in users posting emotionally negative updates. The study also indicated that people who were exposed to fewer emotional posts (ones with neither positive nor negative content) were less emotional in their own updates in the following days.

Subjects versus Participants

The bigger controversy is over the participants. This is an historically thorny issue for psychologists. In the 70’s it was common to write about “subjects” in research papers. That isn’t a term you will see in use today, at least not in a psychology or medical journal. At the start of the 90’s the BPS updated their code of conduct and ethical principles to refer to “participants”, enforcing the strong belief that people should participate in, rather than be subjects of, research. After much self-reflection over many dubious studies that caused long lasting psychological harm, researchers realised that their positions of power over participants required them to hold each other to account over how they carried out research. Telling someone that they are participating in an experiment is not enough to constitute consent. The BPS guidelines state that people should be “..given ample opportunity to understand the nature, purpose, and anticipated consequences of any professional services or research participation, so that they may give informed consent to the extent that their capabilities allow.”

There have been long standing ethical differences between the APA in the US and the BPS in the UK, not least of which is their historic views about psychologists involvement in torture – the APA allowed its members the ‘Nuremberg defence’ while the BPS warned that members would be struck off for even “countenancing” cruel, inhuman or degrading procedures. It is a harsh example, and after half a decade that gap was closed, but it is a stark reminder that psychology and psychological research in the US and Europe (and the UK within that) are distinct in their histories, perspectives and practices.

Were the Facebook users participants, subjects, or just human guinea pigs? The paper states that research was carried out “ ..such that no text was seen by the researchers. As such, it was consistent with Facebook’s Data Use Policy, to which all users agree prior to creating an account on Facebook, constituting informed consent for this research.” I’m not an ethicist, and nor do I play one on TV, but I struggle to understand how that might be construed as “informed consent.” The key word there, in both the APA guidelines and the UK’s BPS ethics guidelines is “informed”. I did a quick small survey (n=9) and none of my respondents realised that accepting the Facebook terms and conditions had enrolled them as participants into unlimited psychology experiments [see update: they actually didn’t] – the text of the paper implies that Facebook has conducted a number of these studies.

There are instances where participants, because of the nature of the experiment, have to be mislead or misinformed about their participation. These are the exception, and that sort of experiment usually undergoes considerable additional ethical scrutiny, and even in the US, are prohibited if they put participants at more than minimal risk.

There are also other forms of experimental design that under go increased ethical oversight, specifically those involving children, and those involving emotional manipulation. The paper appears silent on the age of the participants (are children honest and accurate when they fill in their ages on Facebook, even if they screened by age?), and participants weren’t debriefed (which would be a normal experimental requirement). There are places where psychologists are allowed to run riot, as it were, for example people in public spaces who could reasonably expect to be observed. But in the Facebook experiment, this was not observation, it was wilful intervention, and it was not a public space, it was a privately run, commercial online platform.

The long and short of it is that I am very surprised that the academic institutions involved allowed the research to go ahead. If one tried to carry it out in the UK, it would be a very short conversation with a university ethics board. The imbalance of power between the participants and the researchers is quite staggering.

It gets worse

What I am going to say next in no way lets Facebook, UoC or Cornell off the hook: There is worse. When asked for comment, the body that gave ethical approval essentially said, Facebook manipulates the News Feed all the time, so it is fine. Let’s call that the “stuff happens” defence. There will definitely be questions about the ethical approval in the US, especially if federal money was involved (Cornell has back tracked on an earlier statement implying that state funding was), as there is a strict approval process (IRB).

In the UK in 2012 (the most recent figures from the ONS) there were 5,981 suicides in people aged 15 and over. That is 11.6 deaths per 100,000. Bending the statistics, and scaling that number to the Facebook study, that is 80 people within the study population size. That isn’t suicide risks, that is 80 deaths. Now, that number may have little accuracy, but start to think about the number of people in that study who may have been suffering from depression or mental health issues. What effect might it have had on them? We are not talking about one or two people, we are talking about thousands. Remember, the impact of the study wasn’t known before it was conducted, and in reality, it still isn’t known. Were people permanently impacted  by their unwitting participation? This is the sort of thing that got psychologists into hot water in the 70’s, only then it was studies involving just a few dozen people. These news studies at Internet scale. What happens if that negative sentiment had spiralled out of control? Who would have pulled the plug? Could it have impacted on the stock market? The shadow cast by Milgram and Zimbardo hang a heavy over the shoulders of psychologists, even today.

I said it gets worse, and it does. If I was a software engineer, with no qualifications in psychology, no membership of an appropriate professional body, and no experience in conducting experiments with human participants, but I worked for a large social network platform, I could carry out this sort of manipulation and experimentation on a daily basis with no ethical oversight and no external accountability. This happens everyday, all the time. We call it behavioural marketing, marketing optimisation and a host of other terms. All effective marketing is manipulation. Traditionally the marketeers’ tools were blunt, and there was relatively little feedback to guide the precision of our blows. Much like the behavioural psychologists of the 1950’s, we hacked our way through customer markets, gradually learning. The scale of The Internet, and the emotional transparency promoted by social networks has changed that. Now marketeers and engineers alike are turning into emotional surgeons, with no responsibility after the body leaves the operating table.

Is it time for online marketeers to have a code of ethics, and to be subject to ethical oversight? What is and isn’t an appropriate form of emotional manipulation? Which discoveries have to be publicly disclosed and which do not? Facebook has rubbed the big data lamp, and the social engineering gene is firmly out of the bottle, and now users want to know what it wants to do to them.

No Harm, No Foul?

The emotional effect found in the study is relatively small, and with such a short study people (7 days), it doesn’t allow for systemic change. Users might “mute” negative users over time (or even “positive” ones for that matter – friends constantly going on expensive holidays and raving about it, we are looking at you). It also doesn’t allow for the effects of normalisation – the experiment produced a shift in the emotional content of the News Feed, over time, it is likely that users would normalise to the increased level of “happy talk”, and revert to their normal emotional balance.Perhaps. There are other secondary effects that make operationalising this sort of research very problematic too. If users realise that “happy talk” updates are more likely to appear in their friends’ News Feed, will that influence how people post to Facebook? I can already imagine big brand agencies working hard to post the “happiest” updates, as if corporate Facebook pages weren’t awkward enough already.

In reality, the findings of the study tell us very little that we didn’t know already, and includes references to two other studies of many with similar findings. What the study does tell us a lot about is Facebook itself, and the ways in which they conduct research. It raises questions about if, and how, social platforms are accountable for the well-being of their users. Marketeers, and platform owners, aren’t likely to get away with being ethically “vague” for much longer. Just because you didn’t pay for a service, it doesn’t give the service provider the right to turn you into a guinea pig. Perhaps we need to stop using the term ‘users‘ just as psychologists stopped using the word ‘subjects‘. Language drives attitudes, and viewing people as ‘big data’ leads to a mindset that is dangerously abstracted from the human consequences of action, or inaction.

Update: It transpires that the “research” clause was not in the Facebook terms and conditions at the time that the study was conducted. A Facebook spokeswoman told the Guardian that “when someone signs up for Facebook, we’ve always asked permission to use their information to provide and enhance the services we offer. To suggest we conducted any corporate research without permission is complete fiction. Facebook clearly hasn’t yet grasped the difference between “permission” and “informed consent”  or between “scientific experimentation” and “corporate research”.

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In true Automattic tradition, the WordPress release is named “Smith” after after a jazz musician Jimmy Smith (there’s always a bit of jazz with WordPress). The most important feature in this release is a complete update to the editor (tinymce), to make the process of creating posts a much more pleasant experience. Rather than juggling between the media uploaded and the editor, you can now drop images straight into the editor (then hit “insert into post”).

As I just did there. It removes a step from the posting process. The mysterious Word icon is now gone too, with the editor taking care of stripping excess html when you paste text in, fixing one of the biggest bug bears in corporate use of WordPress (people pasting text in from Microsoft Word and including redundant styling and font information with it).

There are additional improvements for dealing with images in posts: You can now create and view an image gallery directly in a post, and the drag and drop feature enables you to quickly crop, resize and rotate imported images. The media features now support playlists for audio and video clips.

There are also improvements so theme editing, including better header image uploading, and a new theme installer interface. This video from the WordPress team gives a quick overview:

A few days earlier, the BuddyPress team announced Juliana, the latest release of the suite of tools that turn WordPress into a fully-featured community platform and social platform. The release is “2.0” more by virtual of the fact that it falls between releases 1.9 and 2.1, rather than it being a major revision. That said, the update features a big revamp of the BuddyPress admin interface, making it much easier the manage large communities, and deal with the inevitable spam user accounts that occur on a public community site.

BuddyPress 2.0 also features welcome updates to the user activity steam, including real-time updates, and also some significant improvements to the database performance (for our larger communities – 30,000+ users – this will make a significant difference in server load).

I am looking forward to the next set of platform builds and updates with the combination of these two updates. Together they provide a great step forward in usability and performance, and even for personal blogging, the WordPress 3.9 updates make blogging a much more pleasant experience.

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Karen Haller shared many insights into the impact of colour. I have to admit that I started out a little sceptical, despite having invested in consultancy to choose the best colour scheme for a user interface in the past, but Karen quickly cut to some hard science and data, and I was won over. Colour psychology and colour physics have been rich areas of research in recent years. While people spend lots of money on visual identity, there isn’t always with a lot of science behind it. Brand colours that give out a different signals take away from the intended brand message. Think about it: We see the colour long before we see the words. If I were to name a big brand I am almost certain you could bring their brand colours to mind. Think of fast food… You are probably thinking about reds and yellows – uplifting and energising when they are the dominant colours – very popular with fast food chains.

People make their initial judgment in 90 seconds, and most of that judgement is apparently made based on colour. If you spend all of your money on great copy, but have the wrong colours, the readers might not get as far as reading the words – you lost them at the first glance. And it isn’t just the first impression, it is making that impression last: the correct use of colour can increase brand recognition by up to 80%.

Colour choice has also become something of a personal branding ‘thing’ – for example, look how Apple have extended the colour options of their product range. Similarly, head phones and other accessories are now usually available in a range of choices. Colour is a means of expression, but colours can give mixed messages too. Followers of behavioural economics will know that we tend to buy on emotion, then justify with logic. Colour is purely emotion, it gets into the game early. Colour signals go to the hypothalamus in the brain, which controls hormones and the endocrine system – it is a very primal connection. Karen says that colour is like your secret sales force. You need the right colour, for the right purpose, for the right use. And it is not just colour, it is the tone too. Good marketing means not trying to be everything to everyone; colour lets you focus on a target market. It isn’t just about bright colour to stand out… it is creating your identity and triggering the right emotions, standing out from your competitors, or associating with them. Take a read of Karen’s blog,  and her ebook “7 mistakes most business owners make with their brand colour”.

A final note on colour, that came up during the Q&A: There is “colour in culture” – we inherit cultural meanings to colour, for example red in China means prosperity.  A colour can provided a sense of belonging and identity – for example, in London, grey, black and dark blue let you fit in.

Craig Sullivan has worked with an impressive client base, putting millions of people though split tests and A/B testing all sort of different options on web pages. He likes to talk about closing the “air gap” between what we observe or know, and what we can apply to web design. The web, somewhat uniquely, let’s us try out new design ideas and measure how they affect customer responses straight away, enabling digital marketeers to iterate and improve.

Craig’s talk, as his talks always are, was action packed. I have embedded the slides here so that you can flip through them and watch a slow-motion action-replay of Craig’s talk. A more general tip that I took away from Craig’s talk, was a way to motive staff in their jobs: connect people with the outcomes of their work. For example, Tesco putt IT people on the front line to experience the impact of what they did. Let developers and designers know the results that they achieved. It creates meaning and purpose, and drives motivation.

The measurement action isn’t just on-line, there is an increasing amount of off-line measurement too, as things like agile development had lead to the use of focus groups  coming back into vogue. focus groups really have to be used with caution. Craig was quick to point out that filling them with friends or co-workers is likely to lead to some very dubious results. Even with the right selection of people in a focus group, you have to be careful when you listen to what people say – Are you leading or influencing them? Separate what people operationally want, versus what “grinds them” – as Craig puts it. Listening is good. Measuring is even better. That said, get into the loop with your own products and services – do you sign up for your own newsletters? Do you call your own phone number, order your own products? Immerse yourself in what you do. You will be amazed at the opportunities for optimisation that you discover. Get the customer’s voice, not just surveys (although I think surveys are good of course), but observe behavioural feedback, and use tools like the 4Q task gap analysis.

One of Craig’s key calls to action was to make sure that your analytics are working – many business don’t have even basic working analytics on their digital properties. Instrument, calibrate, and get insight… Collect the right data, make sure the data is clean and aligns with KPIs, and make reports usable useful, insightful and actionable. Move from guessing, to action from insights:

• Measure customer intent groupings
• Measure bad things and errors
• Measure interactions, not pages

The majority of gains in site optimisation come from playing with the words. On average five times as many people read the headline, so by the time you have written the headline, you have span 80cent of your dollars (to paraphrase D. Ogilvy). Every word, every piece of copy, each error message, all the email, the forms, the pages that you put out are your BRAND and EXPERIENCE. The words set the emotional landscape, and lens though which your entire product is viewed. Get them right, and keep making them better. Check out www.stickycontent.co.uk Think about hiring a direct marketing copywriter (they are very results focussed) and cross train them.

I am looking forward to the next PsychUp event – lots of insights to take away, and put to good use!

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H.A.L.T.

If you are Hungry, Angry, Lonely or Tired, step away from the keyboard/keypad and deal with that issue first. This one actually has its origin in addition recovery programs. I’m  not going to comment on the addictive nature of social media, but the idea here is to use HALT as a test before you do something. How are you feeling before you post? You might still go ahead and post, but remember that during heightened arousal (hunger and anger), our executive function that controls self-regulation tends to go out for a picnic, leaving us to do silly things that we later regret. And yes, for the person sniggering at the back, ‘heightened arousal’ does include sexual arousal, so the ‘H’ could be for horny if you are a teenager (or a sexting-politician). Did you really want to send that picture?

We all know that anger causes us to act irationally and lash out. Clearly amplifying that by engaging the power of a global communications platform (be it email, Facebook or Twitter) is unlikely to end well. It seems obvious, but sometimes that anger isn’t apparent until we see the hurt reaction from our unintended victims, and by that point the damage is done, with the evidence there for all to see. And no, deleting the tweets later doesn’t help (hello Kanye West). At best you are going to end up looking a bit silly.

Tiredness and loneliness fall into a different bucket, but are problematic. Loneliness is a shockingly common phenomenon – do a search for current statistics (or go through the UK Office for National Statistics). If affects not just people who live or work alone, but people who physically live and work with others on a daily basis.

Even though it was almost two decades ago, I still remember the first ‘teleworker’ I set up. We were so proud of creating a technical set up that enabled them to overcome the travel restictions that they had, removing the physical distance between them and our main office. Happy days. They resigned a few months later. We had taken them out of an environment where they sat with their friends and interacted on a daily basis, and put them in a box room at home, alone with their keyboard. Loneliness isn’t just about being with or without people, but I will come back to that later.

If we use social media to create a sense of connection and overcome loneliness, that is great. If we use it to re-enforce and reward the feeling of loneliness, that is not so great. Social media augments physical human interaction, but it is a poor substitute for the real thing, so don’t let it be.

If I have to explain the dangers of tiredness to you, you should probably sneak off and take a little nap right now. Everything looks bigger and more scary when we’re tired; the screen, however big or small. has a habit of sucking us in, until we can no longer keep our eyes open. There are remarkably few things that can not be more easily conquered after a good sleep and a hearty breakfast. Close the lid, shut the eyelids.

Count the Strikes

My recollection is that I learnt this when I was working along-side Motorola, many years ago. It was an organisation with all sorts of curious cultural quirks, but there is one particular habit that the group I worked with had, and it has stuck with me ever since.

Three Strikes and You’re Out

I send you an email, you send me an email, I send you an email back, you send me an email back, I send you an email. Now you stop, pick up the phone and call me. Three rapid exchanges and take it off-line. That doesn’t mean aggressively message someone three times, then run away! It means if you find that you are about to rapidly respond three times in a row, it is almost certainly time to go face to face.

If communication has become emotive or emotional in anyway, it is time to pick up the phone, fire up Skype, or (best of all) walk across the hallway and look each other in the eye. Text-based communication (SMS, Twitter, Yammer, email, …) does not contain prosody. Prosody is the intonation (pitch and boundaries), timing and stresses in speech that give us critical cues to about the meaning and intention of what is being said. Without cues beyond the text, interpretation is prone to errors, especially when it is forced to take place rapidly.

Words are a faint brush that paint a shadowy picture. If you don’t believe me, get permission to record a conversation you are involved in, then listen to it and transcribe (word for word, sound for sound) exactly what was said. The conversation in your mind, and the words that went across the air are wildly different. When a conversation is stripped of context and all of the expression that exists outside of the literal words, it is almost meaningless. The power of ambiguity in communication is that it lets us negotiating meaning. The danger of that ambiguity is that we often bring our own meaning, to it, drawn from whatever we are most agitated about at the time. Context is a key part of communication, which is one of the many reasons that communicating at a distance or across cultures can be so fraught. It is also while I like breakfast tweets, they create ambient context.

Email, text, IM and Twitter often promote reactive responses – shoot first, ask questions later. They also delay closure and agreement, because we don’t see the important cues that signal them, like broken eye contact and body posture. Talking to someone face to face, and looking them in the eye, require a degree of bravery. Be courageous, if you can’t say it to their face, you are probably not in the right place to say it digitally either. We have already talked about communicating when angry. If you are messaging rapidly, change communication platform, or slow down the pace. I try not to argue on Twitter, if you ever see that I do, say “@BenjaminEllis Should that be a blog post?” – slow media is that much more civilised.

Real or Showreel

My thanks go to Pete Phillips for making me rethink this one. Social media is “continual partial transparency” – people constantly revealing little snippets of their life. It looks like transparency, but in reality it has much more in common with a show reel. It is purely the edited highlights, even if it does include breakfast tweets.  Don’t compare your people’s social media “highlights reel” against your, unedited real life. It isn’t comparing like for like, and you’ll end up unliking it, unliking them and unliking your own life.

The Showreel Effect of social media makes life look great and exciting, and entices us to put the the very best edited, polished highlights of our life, wherever we can grab them from. It is like photoshop for biographers.

Skipping back to loneliness, and that remote worker I mentioned earlier. One of the most crushing things they experienced was receiving our regular employee newsletter. You know the kind of thing, “shiny, shiny, look how great it is to work here, look how much fun it is.” Now, to be frank, it really wasn’t. The people were lovely, that is for sure, but it was paint-dryingly boring most of the time. Hundreds of people tapping in front of computer terminals and answering phones, repetitively running around procedural hampster wheels. To relieve the boredom I would regularly instigate office chair races, and my more prank-driven colleagues would swap around screens and keyboards when a co-worker went off to get a coffee. Oh the hilarity. Now, strangely, these escapades never seemed to end up in the employee newsletter, although they definitely did attract the attention of HR from time to time.

What has all this got to do with posting updates to social media you ask? In the furtive attempts to create the ultimate social media show reel, be careful not to alienate the people you were trying to engage.

Social Media enables us to get drawn into a game of “my cat’s blacker than your cat” that spreads across the bounds of both time and space.

• “I am at the airport, about to fly to Manchester.”
• “_I_ am at the airport, in the BUSINESS lounge, about to board to Paris.”
• “I’m next to the FIRST class lounge, looking at a glass of champagne and ready for Rio.”

When you post, think “real” rather that “showreel.” Is that update about to declare the relative chromatic characteristics of a proverbial feline companion? You might just want to store it away for a rainy day, in a text file titled “actually-my-life-is-ok-really.doc” which you open whenever you get depressed by someone else’s “Just look how utterly amazing my life / business / book is.” Oh, and that last tweet, that’s the taxi driver who has been waiting for two hours in the freezing rain to collect a passenger. They are about to drink from a can of Rio light juice, as they look at a giant airline poster advertising the first class service they won’t get to use. On social media, anyone can sound like a rock star, that doesn’t make anyone feel like one.

And one last, very dark, point on the Showreel effect. When we can’t find clippings for our own showreel, there is a temptation to pick up other people’s highlights from the cuttings floor. By all means, join in celebrating the success of others, but this is never OK:

 “<insert reference to tragedy/natural disaster/human suffering> – OMG! I was totally at that airport just 36,576 hours ago.”

What kind of idiot would do that? Well, it turns out, almost every Twitter micro-celebrity. Hands up, I have  done it. The Showreel effect is a powerful force, we always want to be in the movie, and we always want a big part. Even worse is tying that to some sort of demand for social capital, for example asking for retweets (hello Kellogg’s, how did that pan out for you?). Do not let the pursuit for attention lead you into co-opting the suffering of others. Do what you can to relieve it instead.

Check First

Before you post, think:

• H.A.L.T. – How are you? Check your emotional state. Should this wait.
• Count the strikes – Are you about to fire the third bullet? Stop and switch channel.
• Real or Showreel – Save it or send it?

The post Stop Posting to Social Media When… appeared first on Redcatco.

While is is about memos, it applies just as well to email. And while point 10 is harder in today’s global businesses, with flexible working and distributed locations, it is still the best option. Technology is great, but remember to talk to people!

Keep it short. Keep it sweet. And be clear!

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Via Lisa John – @lisajohn82

Early on Saturday I found myself at PayPal’s London offices, gathered with over 150 internal comms folks from around the UK (and beyond). It was a fitting venue, as it was home to the first Tweetcamp, where I also had the privilege of facilitating a very dynamic series of conversations.  The IC Crowd  pulled together an amazing event – if you follow @jenniwheller, @AllthingsIC or @danaleeson on Twitter, you’ll have expected no less!

A very quick SurveyOptic survey before the event suggested that the majority of the people arriving had not experienced an unconference before. That made me a little nervous, but it shouldn’t have done – everyone threw themselves into the day, even those that were a little sceptical about the unconference format. I like Dan Slee ‘s comment: “My head has never been the same since my first unconference. I think, connect and do differently.”

The Big Yak is an “unconference” – is that a new or familiar style of event for you?

If you aren’t familiar with the format, it is essentially an emergent event, that starts without an agenda or structure. The people there on the day determine what the content is, and what happens. These were the minimal rules that I set out at the start of the day:

1. There are no attendees there are only contributors -a traditional conference consists of ‘speakers’ and an ‘audience’. That is a great format if you have a few experts, and lots of people who need to learn. At the Big Yak we had a room full of experts. Everybody had something to learn from each other. That is where unconferences excel – everybody has something to contribute.

When it comes to comms, how would you describe yourself?

2. It’s your agenda, because you make the agenda. Own it. Shape it. Share it. The people there on the day, quite literally, build the agenda. Everyone had the opportunity to suggest or lead a session, within the constraints of the available time and space. Similar topics were combined, and popular ones extended.

3. The only prerequisite for proposing a session is that you host it and enable people to participate. You don’t have to be “the expert” to lead a session. You simply need to create the space – guiding and balancing the conversation, so that people get to ask questions and share their insights.

4. If you find yourself in a situation where you are neither learning nor contributing, use your feet to go somewhere productive. Better known at the rule of two feet, which Harrison Owen states simply as: “If at any time you find yourself in any situation where you are neither learning nor contributing, use your two feet and move to some place more to you liking. Such a place might be another group, or even outside into the sunshine. No matter what, don’t sit there feeling miserable.” Or, as I like to put it: Life is too short to be in the wrong meeting.

5. A session goes on as long as it needs to, or until the next session starts. This is something of a classic open spaces rule. In our on-line social world, I like to add: Just because it ends, the conversation isn’t over. There is a finite amount of time for a session, but it doesn’t have to fill it, just for the sake of using the time. Similarly, the biggest output of the session is often the discovery of new people with similar interests, for whom this is (hopefully) just the first of many future conversations.

 6. Create artefacts. They help you to understand and remember, and they provide access to others. Andrew Hesselden asked me via Twitter what I meant by artefacts. Artefacts are things civilisations leave behind that show that they existed. In this context, that’s tweets, photos, blog posts, Vines, anything that captures the conversations, and makes them accessible to others. On the day, we had hundreds of people following from all over the world via Twitter. Social technology enables us to bring people into the room who couldn’t (physically) be in the room.

Ruth Harper: @benjaminellis explains the solar powered constraint management system…

That was more than enough to get us going. The day was organised using my favourite solar powered constraint management system: a white board, some postit notes, a collection of pens, and Dana Leeson’s sharp eye for detail. We ran 4 tracks, across 6 sessions through the day, with a fair few side discussions. We re-adjusted the overall timings three times during the day, including a rework to allow for train delays, and an adjustment at lunch-time. Pretty good going! 24 packed out sessions, and a huge amount of energy for the length of the day, spilling over to some time over refreshments at the end of the day. Here is my Storify of the day, featuring many of the tweets that caught my attention.

It was a great experience working with the IC Crowd, seeing how much they put into making The Big Yak into a quality event, and following the process as it evolved from an idea, to a plan, to manic stuffing of goodie bags, and finally to a very well received event. Here are some of the blog posts that have been written about the day already:

•  A proud day to be an IC pro – Rachel Miller
• #thebigyak: a truly social learning experience – Gloria Lombardi
• The big Yak – unbelievable unconference – Paul Thomas
• Yakkety Yak! – Jenni Wheller
• Any many more that will appear on the IC Crowd site (take a look at the Vines!)

And, as I said at the end of the day, the biggest thank you goes to the people who provided the content and created the event on the day – those who came along or joined in via Twitter – thank you for the insights and expertise that you shared!

The post The Big Yak – Unconference for the Conferenced appeared first on Redcatco.

Photo by budgea

The latest in Microsoft’s Business Reimagined series of events looked at change across the public and private sectors, at The Hub Westminster. Although they are very different worlds, I’ve always found that they have much to learn from each other – often we don’t really understand our own environment until we have looked at it from the outside. The panel consisted of:

• Nick Matthews, Principal of Customer Engagement at Yammer EMEA
• Tim Lloyd, Head of Digital Communications for the Department for Business, Innovation and Skills
• Nick Keane, Digital Engagement Business Advisor for the College of Policing

And Sharon O’Dea, Senior Manager, Online Communications at Standard Chartered Bank, joined via Twitter.

I built a Storify to capture the main points that were tweeted, you can see it at the end of the post. The key thoughts it triggered in my mind were:

“Measuring ROI is not necessarily that important” when it comes to social media in both the private/public sectors

Yes, you need a business case for things, but the biggest, most important changes in a business rarely have a business case. If you can exactly measure the value of a strategy, you are probably so far behind the curve that you are just following proven ground, in which case, it’s about program management, not business cases. Big change is compelling, either because it is unavoidable, or because it is irresistible.

“@nickkeane What are the benefits of this change? How do we figure out the ROI of new practices”

“@timolloyd – few years ago, question was how could gov. use digital. Now question is how do they do it well”

Social isn’t a thing – it’s a collection of things

“@timolloyd Need to identify right channel for discussion – may not always be twitter or Facebook, could be forums, blogs, etc”

“@nickomatthews 2 types of company, those who are transparent because its buzzword + those who know its essential to future”

There are multiple tools and channels to choose from. Pick the right tools for the right job. Also remember that ‘Social’ is part of a bigger series of changes affecting organisations. Workers today have very different expectations and behaviours than those of just a decade ago.

“@NickOMatthews Successful change is driven by 10% technology, 40% culture and 50% leadership from the top of business”

You march at the pace of the slowest

“@NickOMatthews social is great for people to ask questions, but need to make sure internal processes allow for speedy answers”

Your outside can not, reliably, move faster than your inside! If you want your business to move at Internet communication speed outside, it needs to move at Internet speed internally too.

“Innovators often have a horrible time in organisations – innovators disrupt, which is often unwelcomed by others.”

Make room for the innovators, and if you are an innovator, be prepared that you may have to make changes, then move on. Change is not easy. It is hard on the organisation, and it is even harder on the change-makers.

The organisation is flat – get over it

“@liamthomson Interesting talk around how hierarchical orgs like the Police manage and embrace innovation at the #bizreimagined panel discussion”

Internal and external communication are blurring, and communication bandwidth, while overloaded, is growing. Communication via social technologies does not respect hierarchy, it flattens it. External communications reach back into the organisation, short circuiting internal communications. The impact of ‘external’ communications feeding back into the organisation is something social tools have totally transformed, creating new communication paths, and internal amplification.

“@timolloyd We use the web to amplify announcements that may otherwise be drowned out by other news #bizreimagined“

“@NickOMatthews gives example of whole policy being changed at 1 businessjust due to discussion on an internal social network#bizreimagined“

Business communication is multi-facetted

Businesses use communication to inform, to influence, to engage. There is no one-size fits all. Just as the telephone system isn’t the preserve of one part of the organisation, social technology shouldn’t be either.

“@timolloyd Digital isn’t sectioned off at BIS, spend 3-4 days a week with policy teams discussing how it affects them#bizreimagined“

“@Annemcx …that complexity/diversity of communication and the story of social organisation is what will make it rich”

There is no learning without mistakes

“@dcoplin: “The biggest blocker is the interface between the keyboard and the chair”… that’s you and me, by the way.”

Mistakes will happen. You can give people a list of “don’t”s but it is impossible to instrument every possible mistake into a list of rules. The technology and best practice is moving too fast. Better to help people understand the impact and consequences of what they do. Guiding principles will give better results than policies written by people who have never used the tools in the wild. Internal social networks provide a safer environment for people to hone their skills :- practice in private before you perform on the public stage.

Presumed competence and setting norms – two very good guidelines from @nickkeane

@timolloyd You need to accept occasionally people will make a mistake, but this is quite healthy, don’t lose sleep over it

@KatyCooney Mistakes will happen when we use social tools and that’s ok-it’s more. Important how the institution responds to mistakes

@nickkeane 3 things orgs can do to combat stupidity: effective policy, monitoring and proper training

You are who they say you are

The ‘branding’ mindset has become pervasive. Many organisations believe that they are “who they say that they are.” They are not. The social identity of an organisation is produced by the interactions of those inside and outside of the organisation. The wording of a press release is drowned out by the words  on the web.

When the ‘brand’ presented in the communications does not match the brand that people perceive from the conversations, then there is trouble ahead. Organisations can no longer have different internal & external ‘values’ or ‘voices’ – People can not consistently behave in a way that is inconsistent with who they are.

While there are still lines between the communication, the barrier is eroding. That means good communication tools and skills are becoming more and more important, and in a world with greater transparency, a good organisation culture is becoming more important too.

Read the full Storify from the event here.

The post Business Reimagined – Public and private approaches to change appeared first on Redcatco.

If you are looking for a great event to develop your marketing skills, you might want to check out the upcoming Chinwag Psych event, which covers psychology, neuroscience and big data for business and marketing.

The post Business to Business Marketing – The b2bhuddle Event appeared first on Redcatco.

Today is Posterous’s last day. Posterous started in July 2008 and was a great and easy way to share  short-form blog content, and it rapidly became popular. In fact so popular that Twitter acquired it last year. This was clearly a technology and talent acquisition rather than a platform one, and so a little while ago the Posterous team announced the inevitable:

On April 30th, we will turn off posterous.com and our mobile apps in order to focus 100% of our efforts on Twitter. This means that as of April 30, Posterous Spaces will no longer be available either to view or to edit. – Thanks from Posterous

If you were a user of the platform, you actually have until May 31th to retreive your data, although best to get it now while you remember.  It is fairly straight forward:

1. Go to http://posterous.com/#backup.
2. Request a backup (clicking “Request Backup” next to your Space).
3. You’ll receive an email when it is ready.
4. Go to http://posterous.com/#backup and download the .zip.

Importers are available for WordPress and Squarespace. If you used an earlier version of the WordPress importer, do check that your images were imported, not just hot linked, to avoid problems when Posterous finally shuts down. You can also migrate to Tumblr using  Justmigrate.

This month, Yahoo! has also announced the closure of it’s Upcoming service. Consolidation and churn is not unusual in the Internet space, but the closures serve as a timely reminder: Who own’s the land (platform) under your building (content). Today Facebook, Twitter and Pinterest are all hot properties, and it makes good marketing sense to use them effectively. However, they are only part of your overall communication strategy. While it might not be as ‘sexy’, don’t neglect your own real-estate. Your company (or personal) blog is built on your land (if you own the domain name) and is far more durable. Before leaping on to any new platform, it is always best to check how ‘portable’ your investment is going to be, before ploughing days and hours into building and growing a presence on a platform that someone else is looking to monetise.

The latest Technorati Digital Influence report says “consumers are turning to blogs when looking to make a purchase.” – ranking blogs above other forms of social media. Your own blog remains a critical component in optimising your discoverability on-line (including via search engines). The last few quarters in the Social Media world have focused heavily on platforms, but it is content that remains key. By all means use other platforms, but think carefully about how they are supporting (or weakening) your owned spaces.

Platforms come and go, and any thing that wants to call itself a digital strategy (rather than a set of opportunistic tactics) must be designed to take that into account.

The post Goodbye Posterous appeared first on Redcatco.

In surveys completed by the winning organizations, on average, fewer than one in five employees (19 percent) reported experiencing chronic work stress, compared to 35 percent nationally, and 84 percent of employees said they were satisfied with their job, versus 67 percent in the general population. Additionally, 77 percent of employees said they would recommend their organization to others as a good place to work compared to 57 percent, and only 11 percent said they intend to seek employment elsewhere within the next year, compared to almost three times as many (31 percent) nationally.

Let me list that out:

• 35 percent of employees reported experiencing chronic work stress.
  
• 33 percent of employees are not satisfied with their job.
• 43 percent of employees would not recommend their workplace.
• 31 percent of employees intend to seek another job within 12 months.

If those were statistics from a customer survey, the management team and the board would probably be panicking. But this is worse. These are statistics on the working parts of the business, and health indicators across the working population. In this case, it is the US, but the UK has issues of it’s own.

“Good leadership has the power to energize, engage and motivate staff to go the extra mile for their organisation. Poor leadership will have the opposite effect, creating a demotivating environment and leading in time to poor team performance including high staff turnover and frequent absences.” Melody Moore, Hay Group.

Melody goes on to point out that leaders tend to use coercive leadership during times of crisis, and that the UK has seen a dramatic increase in the use of this leadership style:

“…a crisis is an event, not a prolonged state. Over-reliance on the coercive leadership style is unsustainable over the long-term, eroding innovation and creativity among employees.”

The current economic crisis has been on going for a long while, and shows very few signs of abating, so it is time to rethink how managers are leading. If you were told that a third of your workforcewas rendered ineffective, wouldn’t you want to do something about it?

The winners mentioned here, our good friends at DHL, and many others, are of course. It is often the best workers that are the least engaged, and so the most at risk of leaving or completely disengaging, leaving the poor performers to steer the ship.  Here are three steps to get your work place started:

1. Assign shared, senior responsibility for employee engagement and well being – it is often a leading indicator for customer satisfaction.
2. Assess employee engagement – we do this via surveys and social platforms, it doesn’t need to be expensive.
3. Actively identify and resolve engagement issues – this frequently comes down to better communication.

What one thing can you do today to improve your workplace?

The post Unbreaking The Workplace appeared first on Redcatco.

Whose words are these?

Remember how you use Google to search for ‘stuff’: people do not search for adjectives / adverbs, they search for products, brands and product types.

The key here is to use the language of your reader, not your own. Technology companies can be particularly bad at this, posting in company or product-specific terms that no-one is likely to search for, or that (in the worst cases) are completely unintelligible to potential customers.

How do your reader’s talk about your topic? Do you need to explain some of your terms?

While I agree with using adjectives, my observation is that people search for problem/solution terms more frequently than they search for product names, unless they are a long way into the buying cycle.

How do you search?

Think about how you use Google yourself, and note what kind of language you use when you search. As an example, the most used search phrases related to “iPhone screen” are “iphone repair” and “iphone display”, which have  about the same monthly search volume as the phrase “how to repair an iphone.” By comparison, the phrase “iphone cracked screen repair” has only a tiny percentage of that volume. Have a play with the Google Keyword Tool.

Google does not understand inference, allegory, clever headlines or abstract content

It certainly doesn’t. But it does make assumptions based on what you link to and what links to you. Make use of relevant links in your posts, and write for humans first, search engines second. Having a precisely keyworded title is no good if no-one clicks on the post to read it.

How do you read?

Google measures which search results are clicked through to, so winning people’s interest and attention is key, especially in the age of social. While we are on the topic of Google, don’t forget that it isn’t the only player in search engine land, Microsoft now has a 16% share of the search space.

10. Try to summarise with a fact / top tips box-out copy

Writing for the web isn’t the same as writing a book or an email. People scan web pages, rather than reading them. Have visual anchors in your pages. Do you see how that worked? Bold text, call outs and images all provide places for readers’ eyes to rest, and potential entry points to your writing. Try the following techniques:

• Strong summary at the start.  Clear conclusion at the end.
• Highlight keywords or phrases – links are highlights too.
• Get a good site design with sensible colours, fonts and spacing.
• Add sub-headings that are meaningful to new readers.
• Include lists – oh how we love lists.
  
• One idea per paragraph – make it easy to skip and restart reading, and create more entry points.
• Be terse – less is more when you only have seconds.

Practice

Short and to the point – something I’m still working on! It’s an art, not a science. There’s only one real way to find out what works for you and your audience: Practice – Read lots. Write lots.

Get out there and write something – that might even be a comment here!

The post Writing Good Web Copy appeared first on Redcatco.

At the end of last month, NokiaAtWork got in touch and asked if I’d like to give the Nokia Lumia 920 a try. A couple of days later, the Nokia #switch box arrived, and the adventures began…

Two things that hit me straight away: The colour (yellow?!?) and the size (even in Stephen Fry’s hands, this phone would look big). I’ll come back to those two issues…

Within a few minutes I had the 920 on the network, my contacts, calendars and emails synced, and my social network accounts set up (Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, FourSquare and Flickr all built in). It’s the fastest phone on-boarding experience that I can remember. No downtime, no disruption. New phone out of the box, and back to work, within the time it took me to drink my first cup of coffee for the day. That was partly enabled by the wonders of ‘the cloud’ of course, but that’s a topic for another post.

If you come from the iOS or Andriod worlds, then you are likely to find the Windows Phone interface startlingly different. Once I got over the initial shock of a new way of interacting with the phone, I was won over. A swipe of the finger and you can get to any of the installed apps. And, get this, they are listed in alphabetical order. Radical. I’ve lost track of the number of times I’ve had to use the iPhone search facility to find an app, because I’d lost track of which page it was on. As you install more apps, there’s even an alphabetical index heading (‘a’, ‘b’, …). It sounds simple, but that one feature alone has saved a fair chunk of time.

On the main page, the Live Tiles are a game changer. They provide the ability to ‘grok‘ information with a quick glance at the phone. You can see at a glance not just that there is an update, but what it is, without even tapping/swiping/clicking. The ability to have large or small tiles gives much more flexibility over how you build the screen. It’s more like having an information dashboard, than the traditional ‘list of dead icons’ that populate the home page on other platforms. I think the app developers are only just starting to explore what can be done with live tiles, and I suspect there will be a range of apps that put them to very good use. Another neat little feature is the ability to ‘pin’ contacts to the home screen. Not only does that create a quick way to call or message them, but it also gives you quick access to all of the social feeds for that person. You can check where they are and what’s happening in their world before you make that call.

The biggest wow moment came when I was stuck in traffic, driving to a meeting. I’d paired the lumia with the rusty old bluetooth car kit in my car, and tucked the phone safely into one of the storage trays. Suddenly a voice told me I had a message from Twitter, and asked if I wanted it to read the message. I said read it. It did. No hands. It even asked if I wanted to delete it afterwards. When I got the next SMS message, from my other half, I had to chuckle when the Lumia correctly read out the ‘xx’ at the end of the message as ‘kisses.’ – this time I took it up on the offer of speaking a reply, which it captured and sent 100% accurately. Since then I’ve even dictated Tweets via the speech to text interface, as well as adding notes and diary entries. This was the sort of thing I’d hoped to do with Siri, but we fell apart after our first date. I’d even asked her to marry me. Siri was great for party tricks, but never seem to get to grips with business. My lasting memory is of her plaintif voice complaining about not being able to do various things in the UK. The Lumia seemed unfazed at being in a country where we spell colour as ‘colour’ and and pronounce metals in ways that have absolutely no bearing on their spelling. The Drive+ navigation application was great for getting around too. Maps that work when you don’t have a network connection? A massive productivity win when you are running late for a meeting.

Nokia have always lead the way with cameras. I early iPhone camera was a train wreck in low light, a key reason I ignored it. With the iPhone 4, it was meant to be better. I held out for the iPhone 4s, and gave in to the hype about it’s photographic capabilities. I was disappointed. To be fair, I am a demanding camera user. On one hand, I’m an (at least semi-) professional photographer. On the other hand, I like to take pictures of flip charts and meeting room board scriblings, receipts and all sorts of other artifacts that I come across in my day-to-day work. That means low light, and no flash. The Lumia 920 might not be an 808, but it’s a great camera, and excellent at video too. Two capabilities that are increasingly required, even in business use.

What don’t I like about the Lumia? Yes, I’d like a few more features in the email client (like being able to flag emails for action when I’m back at the laptop), but the email client feels faster and (actually) slicker than the iPhone’s. It has almost made email pleasurable again, and that’s quite an achievement. So, to the big question. Would I switch? Much as I enjoy the Nexus 7, I couldn’t go back to Android for a work phone. Picking the iPhone back up, it felt… Dated. I started by saying that the first two things about the Lumia 920 that hit me were the colour and the size. There’s something quite refreshing about having a phone that ISN’T black and white (although Nokia do those colours!). Somewhat ironically, the Windows Phone has become the ‘think different’, and more importantly, the ‘work different’ – and that size thing? The iPhone feels tiny to me now. Despite the wonders of the Retina display, it feels like I’m squinting at things. Nokia have done it. It’s time to switch.

Those of us who have been blogging long enough, or passed their 5th anniversary on Twitter, will remember the Nokia N95. It was the blogger’s device of choice – great for media capture, and pretty much an office in your hand. Then the world changed, and the crown changed hands. Well. It might just be time to hand that crown back to the old king. Does the Nokia Lumia 920 have a thousand and one different games? No. Does it have the latest greatest app that does weird things with your photos? Probably not. Does it have the ability to make calls even where reception is weak? Oh yes, big time. Does it have good maps? Oh yes. Does it have great battery life? Definitely. Is the camera great, even in low light? Incredibly great. Does it have all you need to keep up in today’s incredibly networked business world? Most definitely. Now, I better find out how I buy one of these things, or there is going to be a bit of a fight when the courrier gets here!

The post Nokia – Time to Switch? appeared first on Redcatco.

In so much of the communication that happens in business we don’t get to see. We email, make phone calls, text, Tweet, Yammer and IM. All of these platforms loose the visual aspects of communication. Yes, they are using the written word, which is visual, but a few dozen characters doesn’t even begin to cover the facial expressions, physical posture, environmental surroundings, and all the other things that go towards providing contextual information. That information enhances and clarifies the communication.

We recently built an internal global video sharing platform for one of our clients. As it rolled out, I was struck by the power of video. It has an amazing ability to convey stories, bring remote events and locations to life, and place employees, or customers, at the front of people’s minds. It transports people to remote locations, in a matter of seconds, without them even having to move their eyeballs.

Last week I spent some time with the folks at brother, getting a view of their OmniJoin platform and products. It fulfils many of the functions of tools like Webex, but what struck me was its ability to deliver multi-party video conferencing, putting the faces of people from around the world on to multiple screens and enabling them to talk as if there were in the same room. While more and more laptops have webcams built-in, there really is something to be said for using a decent external speaker, microphone and high quality camera, so it was nice to see that brother include those in their portfolio. Sadly, the built-in mics and the webcams on most laptops leave a lot to be desired, although they are better in recent models.

equipment that used to cost hundreds of thousand of dollars/pounds (if not millions!) now costs just hundreds. The Internet has already proven that it can deliver voice and video, and social platforms like Facebook and Google+ have embraced them, so why are businesses not making more use of these technologies?

Yes, corporate networks used to be a challenge, but with falling bandwidth costs and better network infrastructures, that is less and less of an issue. The video sharing platform I mentioned earlier is delivering video streams to thousands of people across dozens of countries, using the corporate network infrastructure. A few minutes of streaming video uses less bandwidth than most of the photo-laden PowerPoint attachments that seem to arrive in my inbox these days.

It’s not just about real-time communications. Most mobile phones can now shoot High Definition video (in the case of the Nokia Pureview 808 I used recently, it can be like having a professional movie camera in your hands – see this video). So, businesses can’t say that they haven’t got the equipment. Similarly, video editing software that used to cost the same price as a high-end racing car now comes bundled free, putting professional video editing technology within reach. Of course it still takes time and skill to put even a short video clip together, but spontaneous video, either shot-as-live, or in a video conference, takes no longer to produce than the non-visual equivalent.

If you’ve been working with social media for any period of time you’ll know the importance of having a good photograph in your blog posts and Google+ updates. The world in turning visual. Check out the success of sites like Pinterest, Instagram, and a whole cohort of image-driven content platforms. People want images, and it’s no surprise when you realise that roughly two-thirds of the human brain is dedicated to processing visual information. Given that a fair portion of the rest is focused on keeping us alive (breathing, heart, and so on), that doesn’t leave a lot to deal with listening to that voice mail message you just left, or focusing on that (usually torturous) conference call.

Can you see how video could transform your communications? Get your message across more clearly, reduce miscommunication, engage people. Think about investing in video conferencing, and building so video-driving communication channels. It’s all about moving people from saying “I don’t get it” to saying “I see”.

The post Get Visual Get Seen appeared first on Redcatco.

• Personality Sorters and Social Media – Part I
• Personality Sorters and Social Media – Part II

They go into a lot of the theoretical background, but people have told me they’ve been helpful in understanding things like Myers-Briggs / MBTI, 16-PF and the myriad  of other tools in use. Tanya’s post, in that first link, was inspired by Susan Cain’s “The power of introverts” TED talk:

[Susan] argues that although introverts make up approximately 33-50% of the population, modern society discriminates strongly in favour of extroverts. Fifty years ago, our classrooms had individual desks, all in rows, and you worked by yourself. Now our classrooms are arranged around circular tables and you work in groups.

And, of course, there is the parallel in the work place, with open plan offices, huddle spaces, and a focus on teamwork and social interaction:

Currently, our work-places and schools make it easier for extroverts to excel because they are set up to focus on team work and discussion, with little time for silence or reflection. Our society values the extroverts, and the introverts have felt sidelined.

Understanding the Difference

In can be hard for Extraverts to understand that Introverts need time to recharge. Extroverts are energised by social interaction, introverts are drained by it. The mirror of that, is the ability of introverts to be energised by long periods of time spent alone digesting information, something that many extroverts find draining and demotivating. Hopefully the need for a mixture of personality types in any environment is clear – if it isn’t, then try spending a few hours in an environment that is dominated by one or the other!

Susan makes three calls to action at the end of her talk:

1.  Stop the ‘madness’ for constant group work.
2. Go to the wilderness – unplug a little more often.
3. Introverts and extroverts, value each other and understand your differences.

What’s Social Media got to do with it?

Many people view social media as a neutral tool. It really isn’t. Twitter (and almost any microblogging platform) is a very interesting lens for communication. It strips away the visual aspects, de-emphasises the emotion, and depersonalises the communication. It lets people communicate together, while remaining alone. I find it  interesting that often times Yammer is widely adopted in IT departments, but much more slowly in other groups. Guess where there’s a high concentration of introverts in the organisation? Is the reason for the adoption pattern perhaps more to do with personality types than technical affinity?

Tanya observes:

My friends who were quiet and withdrawn in ‘real life’, on Twitter were chattering away or SHOUTING REALLY LOUDLY. It was bizarre.

I decided to investigate further. I discovered (from my admittedly modest survey among mine and Vicky Beeching’s followers) that roughly 75% of Twitter users were introverts, and 25% of Twitter users extroverts.  Introverts outnumber extroverts on Twitter by 3:1.

That matches the original MBTI Twitter study I carried out a few years ago, which found that introverts were massively over represented on Twitter (that’s a good thing by the way ).

Put in the social platforms

Put platforms in place in the business that enable the introverts to have an equal voice. If you are only getting interaction from a subset of your team, you are missing out on valuable knowledge and feedback.

Let people be alone, but don’t let them be lost.

If you make heavy use of on-line tools for communication, be sure to strike a balance between letting people work independently, and helping them out when they become stuck, but are too shy to say so. Even with the best tools and platforms in place, home/remote working can be a lonely experience for some, especially if they are used to working closely with a them.

 Shut the Lid, Stop the Crisis

Lastly, make space. Even in the middle of a crisis. The biggest mistakes I’ve seen this year have not been from being too slow to react, they have been from reacting too quickly. The constant barrage of information that we face daily makes everything feel like a crisis. Take a lid out of the introvert’s book: Shut the laptop lid(s). Turn off the phone for a few minutes. Breathe. Reflect. Think about what you know, and come up with a better set of solutions than you would have done otherwise.

The post Social Media – Giving Introverts a Chance in the Workplace? appeared first on Redcatco.

What makes a good Facebook page?

What doesn’t work, is information. ‘We’re playing at the Crab and Dragon on Tuesday, come on down.’ Despite the fact that that type of information is crucial, it’s also boring. I can usually find it out from your website anyway, and you’ve probably got loads of bookings – very few of them will be relevant to me. That kind of update, followed by ‘We smashed last night’s gig at the Crab and Dragon,’ doesn’t do it for me either. You were hardly going to say it was a disaster were you? If I went I’ll have my own opinions about how it was, and if I didn’t, I’m possibly not interested, or possibly slightly gutted.

Yes, we as a fan base do want to know when the gigs are, but actually we’re also interested in you – what you’re doing, what makes you laugh, what inspires you. We’ve already connected at the level of the music, but it’s the personal stuff that brings us along on your journey. There’s a way of interacting that feels as though it is on the ‘friend’ level. A certain level of vulnerability, sharing things that matter, that injects ‘personality’ into a page and makes the reader at least interested, but usually want to engage.

By way of example

I’m going to take Nina Nesbitt as my example. Currently a little known singer, though I have a feeling it won’t stay that way for much longer.

She’s only just turned 18 herself and her audience are young. She microblogs her life, and allows everyone to be involved. All the information about her tour dates and music releases is in there, but it is wrapped up in her general enthusiasm for life and for her work, it isn’t broadcast.

We know about her cat who seems to be a fairly good photographer, the cheeky squirrel that’s causing a nuisance in her garden, the laughs she has with her producer, the euphoria when she got signed. We see pictures of her radio interviews, pictures of her rehearsing, pictures of her new guitar and the tortoise she is babysitting, pictures of her mum popping into the studio and singing on an album track, pictures of her A&R team deliberating over an album cover. She has a picture album entitled ‘People I met on tour‘ – she connects with her fans offline and online.

When she was planning her tour, she ran a competition to cover two of her songs, with the winners each winning the opportunity to support her at one of the gigs.

She’s full of mad ideas – she’s just posted a code generator on her website then posted her messages in code, which you have to decipher again using the tool on the website. Fans were responding in code and then using it to talk to each other. She wrote a message on a postcard and sent it to a fan with the challenge of sending it on – each time it was received by a different fan it was photo blogged, and it was fun to see the different countries it passed through and the embellishments each recipient made. Fans connected with each other, a community has begun to form, and each one feels that they know something about the artist, as well as her music. They are involved in what she’s doing, so when she announces a new single it flies off the shelves. So to speak. Perhaps it seems banal to you, but bear in mind the audience. She knows who they are and what is interesting to them.

I’m not going to give an example of an uninteresting page, that wouldn’t be fair and they are easy to find, but for a wider audience, how about Rodrigo y Gabriela as another great page? They may not be posting pictures of squirrels, but the principle is the same. They help you to become involved in what they are doing around their music. We get insights into rehearsals, recording, preparation for gigs. Announcements about new music and tours fold naturally into that.

Steve Lawson is fairly niche in his capacity as a solo bassist. He has however built a relatively large community, just by being his mad self. Yes, he gets very enthusiastic when he releases an album, no-one is left in any doubt when there is new music to buy, but he also regularly shares about the music he is listening to, shares about the politics of the music industry that he is involved in, the ups and downs of life as a musician, and the personal relationship he has with many of his listeners is self evident.

What about my business?

Does this apply to business? I think so. It’s the ‘in between’ bits that make the story. As a business you have dates in your year – product releases, events you organise – and these things have their place in your ‘page.’ But what goes in between? What takes those things from being announcements to being part of the natural unfolding of life? That will vary from company to season to product, but will probably include a glimpse of your people, things that are inspiring you, problems you are tackling and what’s going into solving them. It will ask questions and opinions of those that are following you and responding to comments that are made. There might be a Friday pizza, a competition to name a product, a light hearted review of the restaurants in the town you did your last exhibition. Alongside this there’ll be announcements, and perhaps advice sought about feature development choices for example.

But you’ll involve the folk who come along with you, share the journey and develop a community. Communities have a tendency to be loyal.

The post Facebook Pages – can business learn from musicians? appeared first on Redcatco.

Crowd Sourcing

Crowds – large collections of unrelated people – can be highly effective at providing information to aid decision making. Although, in his book “The Wisdom of Crowds: Why the Many Are Smarter Than the Few”, James Surowiecki makes the point that crowds are wise only as long has they have diversity, independence and are decentralized, otherwise crowds can become very foolish.

There have been some great examples of crowd sourcing data, one of my favourites being UK Snow, crowd sourcing weather information, how very British! As Clay Shirky observes, the problem now is not technical capability, it is legitimacy. Under what circumstances do you take the advice from user generated media and when do you ignore it?

From Talk to Action

All talk and no action obviously isn’t a recipe for change, the insights gained have to be put into practice to make a difference, but Social Media is closing that loop too. Back in 2010, Orange launched a “mobile volunteering” program, creating apps to turn people’s spare moments into useful actions. Again, many people doing something small to achieve something big isn’t by any means a new idea, but social platforms have drastically altered the mechanics and economics of self-organising groups. After the 2011 Summer Riots in London, something dramatic happened.

“Hundreds of people armed with brooms, binbags and rubber gloves turned out across London to help clean up the damage caused by a third night of rioting, looting and arson. Co-ordinated online on Facebook and Twitter, volunteers mobilised in the worst-hit parts of the capital to sweep streets, help local shopkeepers and show solidarity with communities thrown into turmoil by the violence…” The Guardian, 9th August 2011.

Social Platforms have demonstrated their ability to connect groups of volunteers with specific needs time and time again, and it is something that echoes through the history of The Internet (see Tom Watson‘s inspirational book, Cause Wired).

There is a difficult balance between use-case-specific platforms and general purpose social platforms. It is a challenge I come across many times in the design of social intranets: too use-case specific, and the platform doesn’t achieve critical mass, too generic, and needs fail to connect with resources efficiently. The same is true in the world of the public Internet: While platforms like Facebook and Twitter have millions of users, it is hard for specific causes to connect them, or vice versa. Specific applications are required to create a focus, and a mechanism, for the two to connect.

We Will Gather

The team at We Will Gather are bridging that gap with a hyperlocal approach. Inspired by the #riotcleanup hashtag, it’s an elegantly executed application built around Twitter. Created by Dan Thompson, it connects volunteers with projects in their specific area. At their launch last week, Lloyd Davis and Sophie Collard talked through how it works, and gave some examples of current projects. Like all good tools, it’s radically simple and surprisingly powerful:

• From Twitter: Tweet with the word ‘help’, the hashtag #wewillgather and a postcode.
• The website starts a page for your action, and Tweets you a link to it.
• Add any extra details you’d like.

The post The Power of Crowds – We Will Gather appeared first on Redcatco.

There are great practical tips in there, as well as some useful context and background. Social Media is the future for SMEs. It gives access to resources and capabilities that were previously reserved for large businesses. It provides the ability to reach a global audience, and to create and distribute content globally. Combined with the dramatic technology evolutions that have happened in mobile phone technology, it allows even the smallest of businesses to put video and audio onto the web, in a very affordable way.

The future of social media is that we stop talking about it, at least we stop talking about it as a separate thing. It becomes integrated into how businesses work, not just in the marketing domain, but for customer support, product and service development, sales, supplier management, and even the way that employees communicate. It will become the way that business works; the communications glue that we take for granted, much as we treat the telephone or email today. Social media provides new opportunities too. It’s a great source for market research and customer engagement, enabling you to identify advocates and detractors of your business.

As a business owner, the scarcest resource that you have is your time, and the time of your team. Within that time, the most fiercely contended battle is the fight for your attention. That same is true for your customers and potential customers.  Social Media is all about attention; who you connect with and follow, what you read, and what you share. The key to success with Social Media is to get, and provide, a return on that investment in time and attention, which means connecting in the ways, and the places, that benefit both your business and your community. They are far more opportunities and possibilities than your business can pursue, so it is about choosing the great over the good, then experimenting and iterating.

Here are the links to the resources mentioned in the middle of the video as useful for the SME getting started in listening:

• Google Alerts
• Twitter Search
• Facebook Search
• Google+ Search
• Techmeme
• Mediagazer

Setting up some basic Google search alerts is a quick and easy starting point, the finding the platforms that are most relevant to your business and building from there.

The post Social Media and the Growing Business appeared first on Redcatco.

Well, it’s twelve months on, so it’s an interesting checkpoint to see what sort of conversations we are actually having. There are some very human conversations, like this recent set of tweets from the Solihull Police: (read from bottom up, it being Twitter):

Whilst that was a very lighthearted set of messages, if you follow the Solihull Police tweet stream you’ll see they are also using it to help track down suspected criminals, and keeping their community up to date with local information. You’ll also see lots of two way dialogue, and inbound and well as outbound communication. At the other end of the spectrum, some organisations are being much more ‘commercial’ in their social media use, by ‘commercial’ I mean in the advertising sense of the word.

Last the weekend I went to the Olympic torch ceremony in Guildford. The Lloyds TSB ‘social media’ team were there, inviting people to “have their picture taken and posted to their Facebook page.” – a very nice ad insertion for them for sure, but really not very social (or for that matter, very imaginative). Traditional marketing is being shoe horned into social platforms left right and centre. Compare that with the Solihull Police example, or companies like Dell, who are using social media to encourage their customers to share business advice, and provide technical support. I’ll come back to Dell in a moment.

The revolution of communications from broadcast, to feedback channel, to conversation, to network is far from complete, and organisations continue to make steps and missteps as they adapt to the new technology. Organisational structures are changing, and so communications channels need to adapt to suit them.

What is now often called “social business” has its historical roots prior to the industrial revolution, which enabled process at scale. As a side effect, they set the dominant forms of business communication that are still in place today. However, the business challenge, like manufacturing, has moved on. The next challenge is to enable businesses to carry out innovation at scale. That requires re-humanizing organisations, rebuilding relationships and transforming them into more friendly, enjoyable places to work, that can foster and sustain cross-functional collaboration. If you’ve missed out on the Web 2.0/Social Business trend, this Harvard video with Andrew McAfee is a handy introduction:

There is a danger that businesses do nothing more than ‘go through the motions’ of using social software, failing to grasp the opportunity to transform their culture and communications, to unlock the discretionary effort of staff and customers, and create sustainable competitive advantage for themselves. Of course change isn’t  necessary, because, as Demming put in, survival isn’t mandatory. Some businesses will adapt, and some won’t; there will be winners, and there will be losers.

If you want to talk more about how social media can be used in your business, and you are in the UK, an event to have on your calendar  is the next Dell B2B Huddle, which will take place at Microsoft’s offices in London. Put together with Kerry Bridge from Dell,  Simon Hughes of Microsoft and the insightful, and independent, Neville Hobson. You can join the discussions about the event in the LinkedIn group, or leave a comment here.

The post Social Business – Beyond Social Commercials appeared first on Redcatco.

There were quite a few things that Phil Libin talked about that caught my attention, but I was particularly caught by his descriptions for the way that things happen in their business, and the concept of the 100 year start up. He said that one of his key goals was that everyone in the business should know WHY they are doing what they do. Scroll forward a few days, and Farhan shared this video of Simon Sinek’s TED talk about “How great leaders inspire action.”  Simon’s premise, which bridges to his book, Start With Why, is that leaders in great organisations communicate the same way: Why? How? What?

• What – What you do. What needs to happen.
• How – How you do that, for example, your unique value proposition.
• Why – The REASON that you do it.

Simon says that 100% of businesses know what they do. As a side note, I’d actually dispute that, as I frequently come across employees who don’t know what the business they work in does, and others where even the leaders don’t seem! Back to the point: Very few businesses communicate ‘how’, and only a very very few communicate ‘why’. When we get to ‘why’ we often make use of “we believe” statements. Many researchers have pointed out the effectiveness of communicating at an emotional, rather than just at the level of facts. Communicating at the level of ‘why’ instead of functionally (what and how), achieves that. Simon points to companies like Apple as an example of how this works. By way of an update, have a look at how they market the new MacBook Pro, it’s not about its features (the Retina display) or how they built it, “it’s a whole new vision for the notebook” – apparently!

“People don’t buy what you do, they buy why you do it.”

Simon makes what he claims is a biological, not a psychological, defence of his argument. Sadly he does it using a very questionable model of the brain, and some murky pseudo-psychology. Please, in the name of good science, disregard that part of the talk, he goes to the back of the class for that one. Similarly for the section on the ‘law’ of diffusion of innovation, read this post on Everett Roger’s book, Diffusion of Innovations.

There is a defensible set of arguments for the observation that our decision-making happens predominantly at an emotional level. We communicate and connect not with facts, but at the level of values and beliefs. If I understand just a few of someone’s core values, I will be able to predict their behaviour more accurately than if I am in possession of box loads of facts about their previous behaviours. It’s why you should hire people for their fit with the values of your business, not for the lines on their CV. Consistent values build a cohesive culture, and make communication significantly more efficient and effective. Shared values, as with as shared experiences, reduce misunderstandings, and improve the quality of communication.

Back to “Why?”

In communicating the “why” of something, we are more likely to convey something of our values and beliefs. In doing that, we are much more likely to pull the levers of personal persuasion. If you want to change behaviours,which most leaders do, then you need to change attitudes, and if you want to change attitudes, then look to the research, things like the Yale Attitude Change Approach, and the body of research that has taken place since then. Attitudes have been a core topic of study for psychology for decades, and while it is a complicated and often problematic area, it is has shown that influence is shaped by a number of factors, including something psychologists call “source characteristics” – the things that we know about the speaker and their message, specifically:

• Source credibility – Is the source authoritative? What attitude do they suggest? Are they credible? Expertise is key: The novice and the beginner will communicate facts, the master will communicate principles.
• Liking / attractiveness – This isn’t just about looks, it’s about how we feel towards them – including winning humour, admiration, or believing they are like us.
• Affect – their mood. It’s not just about shiny happy people, it’s about how we think we will end up feeling. It the knowledge of the source has taken them to a ‘happy place’ people will tag along.

What’s in the message?

The next set of pieces are the ‘message characteristics’, which covers a number of factors, but mainly relates to the strength of the argument. Strong arguments are more persuasive, that might seem unsurprising, but you’d be surprised, it isn’t always the case! Think about the characteristics of strong arguments: They are usually specific, complete and credible. At the very least, they are coherent. In communicating the ‘why’ we instantly add credibility to our message. If I explain why I am doing something, it reduces the opportunity to doubt my motivation (source credibility) and greatly enhances the compliance. Try these two requests: “Please will you get me a glass of water?” or “Please will you get me a glass of water? I’ve pulled my back and I can’t move – I’ve had nothing to drink all day.”

Lastly, for now, is the impact of something called the ‘elaboration likelihood’ model. If I communicate at the level of “why” you are more likely to have to pay detailed attention, you have to give more thought to what I am saying. Look at the two sentences in the last paragraph, the second is more complex to process. Explaining ‘why’ causes people to stop and think, and if they have to think about what you have asked, they are significantly more likely to remember the request and carry it out.

Try adding the ‘why‘ to all of your communication. It’s worked rather well for Evernote, and I am very sure it will work well for your business, for even more reasons that the 1,000+ words here have outlined. Have you tried it? Have you seen it done? Do share your experiences with others in the comments.

The post WHY Communication Is So Important appeared first on Redcatco.

Some People Like to Watch

I was interested in a recent study published by the BBC (with many thanks to Sophie Brendel for the pointer). It was looking at participation choice, and the percentage of people who participate, and the kinds of participation that they engage in. Holly Goodier also starts from the 90-10-1 theory, coming to the conclusion that it is outmoded too. She notes:

• Participation is now the rule rather than the exception: 77% of the UK online population is now active in some way.
• This has been driven by the rise of ‘easy participation’ …60% of the UK online population now participates in this way, from sharing photos to starting a discussion.
• Despite participation becoming relatively ‘easy’, almost a quarter of people (23%) remain passive – they do not participate at all.
• Passivity is not as rooted in digital literacy as traditional wisdom may have suggested. 11% of the people who are passive online today are early adopters.

Some People Like to Engage

You can read the full report as a pdf here. It is interesting that our own observations of the social intranets we have been engaged in building over the last several years, is that the ratio tends to range very broadly. For every 100 people who are registered users, anywhere from 80-98 percent of people will read it regularly (which makes sense, given holiday patters), while contribution will range from less than 5% up to 25% for those who contribute comments, falling down to 1-2% who contribute longer form content on a frequent basis (e.g. blog posts, articles etc). It seems to depend on the corporate culture, and the nature of the business – knowledge based businesses typically seem to have higher contribution rates, while retail and manufacturing are lower. Again, we put that down to job design – opportunity to contribute – and the spread of job roles – manual versus managerial.

Now Break All The Rules

It is time to re-think the 90:10:1 rule, as it has become something of an urban myth, at least in the context it is usually cited in. The contribution ration really depends on the context, content and the type of on-line activity, and the experience. It is best to avoid the generalisation, and instead, attempt to understand what the benchmark is for the situation that you are operating in, and use that as a steering point.

Ultimately, in the intranet context at least, you are in a race against yourself. Set engagement targets, and measure yourself against them, then see if they can be bettered, always understanding that any context will ultimately have a ceiling. Not everyone will ever become a contributor, because not everyone needs to be – although more often than not, those who could and should be contributing aren’t. Even if that is a cultural problem, rather a technical one, there are ways to flatten the pyramid. Create different levels and styles of contribution, from comments, to recommendations, to ratings (see Bradley Horowitz Creators, Synthesizers, and Consumers for some ideas).

Moving from an audience that is used to passively consuming, to one that is actively engaged in co-creating, is a long journey. If broadcasters like the BBC are embarking on that journey, shouldn’t you?

The post The Participation Pyramid appeared first on Redcatco.

• Potential cross-site scripting vulnerability on WordPress sites configured directly by IP address.
• A couple of other potential cross-site scripting / redirect issues.
• Potential issue with privilege escalation for admin users in WordPress networks.
• Plupload issue – the code WordPress uses to upload files.
• SWFUpload issue – the old code WordPress used to upload files.
• SWFObject issue – code used to embed Flash content.

Although none of these are critical, the update(s) should be applied to minimise any potential risks. The two point releases also include some css and JavaScript tweaks, which save loading some images in the admin interface, and address a couple of cosmetic issues, including an upgrade to the hoverIntent and press-this code.

While we are on the topic of upgrades, WordPress 3.4 is just around the corner (currently in beta). The upcoming release features a number of enhancements to internationalization functionality, particularly of interest for non-English WordPress users, new features for theme designers (child themes and configuration for headers and backgrounds), and a number of performance enhancements and API tweaks, which will need a fair bit of testing with older plugins and themes before sites can be upgraded.

As ever, always keep regular back ups of your blog – you don’t want to lose any of those hard written posts, hard-earned comments or those pictures, videos and links you spent hours curating. For our business blogs, we back up databases nightly, and keep a rolling archive. Uploads and other content are mirrored to our standby servers in real-time. If you can’t afford that sort of protection, then at least take an export of your blog once every few posts, and do keep a local copy of any images or other files that you upload. And, of course, always do a full back up before any upgrade or adding plugins.

Happy, and safe, blogging!

The post Upgrading to WordPress 3.3.2 appeared first on Redcatco.

Look at your company website on your mobile. Does it look beautiful? Does it give you the impact you expect? Is that hard to fix? “Preposterous” is Chris’s new favourite word, and it applies to much of what is done in marketing today. Does your email newsletter look like your website? Are you proud of that? If so, why! Your email marketing isn’t about the design, it’s about building relationships. Email newsletters with no reply address? Why! Email is a two way communication mechanism. Have a call to action, to communicate with a human (Chris has a 70% open rate on his email marketing). It needs to be 350 words or less – if you are reading it on your mobile device, your customers are probably doing that too. Make it readable.

Likes (and their kind) are not an end in themselves. Likes, says Chris, represent an opportunity for business. No more names to broadcast too, or financial capital, but opportunities to be developed.Your sites and online presence are ‘outposts’ – they direct people to where you would like them to be. Create interesting, usable content – and that includes YouTube content too. And remember, you don’t get paid on views, you get paid on business results – so make it useful to your customers. In the same way that business cards aren’t sales, neither are likes or views.

Find the most passionate people in the business (and that might be customer service, it might not) and help them produce content and connect them with your customers! Think about the on-going use of that content. Oh, and make heroes, says Chris, make your buyers heroes. There are three stages of your brand, and the customer is central to all of them:

1. What you are known for.
2. What people say about you.
3. They way people use you as part of their story telling about their brand

Social is where people are. Social is the way that information moves forward. Brands ARE social. The ones that will be successful in the future are the ones that recognise that this is already the case. And remember, people don’t talk to logos, they talk to humans!

The post Chris Brogan at SMWF appeared first on Redcatco.

Benjamin Zander talks about ‘one buttock playing’ – being pushed over by what you are doing, what you are communicating. There is a point at which what we are doing takes over our thinking about what we are trying to do. To a professional communicator, that might sound bad, uncontrolled even. But it is the point at which you connect with the passion, and that is the point at which what you are doing makes an impact. So much communication is killed by a lack of passion, a lack of conviction, and smothered in doubt.

We have to do the things we are uncomfortable with enough times that we get beyond that discomfort, beyond the conscious thought, and into a state of flow in doing it. Be it blogging, emailing, running meetings, playing music, whatever it is, push through the discomfort to find the place where you can just do it. Be practiced enough to be confident in your capability that you don’t look up (or look down) and drop your flow.

But there is something else in Benjamin’s talk. Notice how he is aware of what he is doing, and able to explain it, very coherently and eloquently. That comes through observation. In teaching others, and watching them practice, we learn even more – and learning from the mistakes of others is usually less costly! As we practice, we spot pattens that work, and patterns that don’t.

In short, we need to practice to get things right, that’s hopefully obvious, but that inherently means being comfortable with being uncomfortable. We have to make mistakes, and watch other people making mistakes, to get to the point where, in Benjamin Zander’s words, we are playing on one buttock. It’s a difficult one to explain to the boss, but ultimately, we need those shining eyes to make a great business.

The post Communication – Becoming Fluid by Getting Uncomfortable appeared first on Redcatco.

• Jenni Wheller, SSP UK.
• Rebecca Richmond, Melcrum.
• Christian McMahon, Global CIO, Jamaza.
• Justin Hunt, Social Media Leadership Forum.
• Doug Shaw, What Goes Around.

Interesting snippet from Rebecca from their recent survey – 50% of people were unsure of the business case for social media within the business (although 50% were).

Question: Are the senior leaders the right audience to launch a social tool to?

Justin responded that a lot of senior executives aren’t big users of social media outside of work. Is it reasonable to ask your staff to use them if you (as a leader) aren’t using the tools yourself? Justin reiterated a point I drew out during my presentation: You need to create a (safe) place for people to fail. Tools can change people’s experience.

Rebecca noted that leaders are risk averse – that can make them a difficult group, but that their buy in can help with the broader roll out. Jenni strongly argued that you shouldn’t force social media on people – it’s about giving the people the opportunity to use the tools, in an integrated way. Doug suggested getting back to understanding “why” you are doing it, and that the answer is there. Understand what works for the users. Not all users in a business are necessarily even on-line – at least during the course of their business – for example, shop floor staff (although technology is increasingly closing those gaps).

Question: Is employee engagement a fad?

Doug said he’s just trying to make work better – maybe employee engagement is an unfortunate tag? But there is something about letting go of the ‘command and control’ Taylorist model that has dominated recent centuries. There have been bad, as well as good, things done in the name of employee engagement.

Justin said it was about the delivery, and giving people chances to contribute. Jenni said it is inescapable, issues of work-life balance and fostering discretionary effort was essential. Rebecca said it isn’t a fad, because it’s not new, it’s just coming to the fore again now because senior leaders are panicking. It’s about what the business’s “employee value proposition” is, and ties into transparency, corporate social responsibility. Employee’s want to have an impact on their customer’s experience – a key business issue.

A strong theme through out the day was: Problem first. Technology second. It’s all too easy to say “social technology is the answer. What was the problem?” – be pragmatic, and start with a well defined problem was the wise advice. As employees become more comfortable with using social media personally, they are more will and expectant about using it at work.

Finally, the issue of failure, and it’s inherent ties with innovation and experimentation, was revisited multiple times. Businesses leaders can be very nervous about failure, and often rightly so, but it is an inherent part of the learning process and innovation, I defer to Edison.

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Time to Move Up

Now, to be clear, Microsoft itself dropped support for Internet Explorer 6 quite some time ago, and has even been running a campaign to get users and web sites to move from IE 6, and Google has dropped IE 6 support on its sites. The challenge, in the world of the intra-webs, has been that many IT departments are stuck between a rock and a hard place. On the one hand they need to move up from Internet Explorer 6 (it’s over a decade old after all! Which is about 70 in Internet Years), but on the other there are many legacy web applications deployed in the Intranet 1.0 era that only work with IE 6. By the way, Internet Explorer 7 is no spring chicken either, at over 5 years old.

There is a clear lesson here, and for those that have missed it, a couple of solutions. Firstly, the lesson: If you are deploying a web application, make sure it isn’t dependent on proprietary web browser features. If it only works with one web browser, that is going to come back to haunt you down the line, as it effectively places an additional sell-by date on the application. When we build intranets, we test them with Internet Explorer, Firefox and Chrome, even if only Internet Explorer is in use. That way, if it works across multiple browsers, it’s much more likely to last, and to gracefully degrade. Next, some solutions…

The lack of IE 6 support in WordPress 3.2 needn’t be a huge problem. Support has only been dropped in the admin Interface – themes are still free to support IE 6, so it is only the people creating posts and approving comments that immediately need to move off of IE6. This is only buys a little time though, it really is time to drop IE6 from your network, at the very least, it’s a security risk, as it no longer receives security patches.

Living Without Internet Explorer 6

If your infrastructure is still burdened with legacy apps that require IE 6 to work, there are two other work arounds:

1. Desktop Virtualization – provide access to the legacy apps via virtual desktops or remove desktop access – Microsoft style or VMWare style.
2. Browsium – an interesting application that allows IE6 to run in a frame in more modern Internet Explorer versions – thank you to Mark at CDG for the pointer.

Minimum Requirements

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I received my first apology email today – one of the above businesses had an account for me. While no financial details were lost, my email address (and perhaps postal address?) were disclosed. More than that, my relationship as a previous customer was disclosed. It is worthy of note that in the UK, this is a serious issue for a bank (customer relationships are afforded special confidentiality), but for me it is a serious issue full stop.

The apology I received, in my opinion, fell far short of what I would expect. As a minimum I look for:

• A genuine acceptance that what happened was wrong.
• In as far as is reasonable, an explanation of what went wrong and why
  (i.e. does the offender understand? Is it under control?) – Not everyone agrees with this one.
• A commitment to a) put it right and b) ensure that it doesn’t happen again (i.e. lessons learnt).

Sorry should go beyond words. Actions speak louder than words, as they say, so I personally like to see some commitment to action – or as we said to our kids around here, sorry means “I won’t do it again.”

I’m not alone. Here are some thoughts on what should be in an apology from some good friends on twitter:

ear1grey
@benjaminellis An apology should be personal, recognise the error, take responsibility for it, and explain steps taken to avoid a repeat

shefaly
@benjaminellis Ack of the problem without passing blame, clear scope of the problem, how it’s being resolved. Then follow-up on resolution.

Modoufox
@benjaminellis sincerity, empathy, and an implied commitment to move forward in the relationship/avoid doing this again. #2centsworth

mistergough

tartancat
@benjaminellis The word ‘sorry’ in a genuine, heartfelt tone, and some offer to make amends for the wrong-doing.

ravinar
@benjaminellis 1) acknowledgement of issue 2) steps to ensure does not happen again 3) gesture of goodwill.

williamheath
@benjaminellis Acknowledgement, remorse, some sort of restitution. All wrapped in courtesy and humanity. Explanation/excuse not needed.

rachelbeer

“The right sort of people do not want apologies, and the wrong sort take a mean advantage of them.”  P.G. Wodehouse, The Man Upstairs.

Which put me in my place :). Apologies should be given, not demanded.

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One of the recurrent themes whenever I get drawn into discussions around community, specifically the ‘on-line’ sort, is that of audience versus community. It is all too often that I hear marketing folks talk about their audience as if it was a community, and occasionally their community as if it was an audience. To my mind the two are very different things: an audience is gathered to listen; a community gathers to contribute. One is there to consume. One is there to produce. I don’t see one as any more worthy than the other – sometimes I want to be in an audience, sometimes I want to be in a community. You probably wouldn’t fancy trying to co-create with Take That or the Foo Fighters – you’re there to jump up and down and go deaf, or something like that. Conversely, if I go to a vendor’s user group event, I wouldn’t expect to get shouted at or drowned out.

What emerged from the evening’s discussions was that there are many different types of community. That might seem blindingly obvious, but you wouldn’t think so from much of the writing in the social media world. There are motivated communities – self motivated, or externally motivated (i.e. lead) – and there are unmotivated communities. Unmotivated communities rarely last, and are rarely ‘rewarding’ to be part of. Communities fundamentally exist to do something, or at least to support or preserve something.

My personal favourite minimal definition of community is ‘a group of people gathered around a purpose.’ I like it because of its simplicity, and because it is so actionable. The purpose might be to change the world (thank you to Misae Richwoods for raising the bar on that one), or it might be to exchange tips and stories about a new gadget. Another flash of the blindingly obvious was the realisation that communities are for a period in time. People join, their circumstances change, and they move on. They may stay for a long time, or they may move through swiftly. Similarly, a campaign-based community may have a relatively short life or a lifestyle-driven community a very long one.

The process of joining and leaving a community is not usually a binary one. It is a journey, and those who run communities need to be conscious of that. The moments of leaving or closing are points of difference, and potential friction (or explosion) if they aren’t handled well. That thought touches on many things, which the discussion came back too…

If you have an office without walls or desks, how would you know that you are in it? It’s the same with communities. While most on-line communities don’t have obvious rites of passage, they are there – even if they aren’t explicit. The users worked out how to get on-line, they found the site, they signed up, they managed to post a message. We’ll talk more about rites of passage and tokens of membership in a bit.

The higher the walls, the stronger the community. As the walls erode, the community weakens. Look at Usenet groups in the 90’s, and now Twitter. As the barriers come down, the community fragments, weakens, and finally is engulfed in relational noise. Of course, at the other end of the scale are communities that are [too] exclusive. Barriers to entry, i.e. exclusivity, can drive people’s desire to be in a community, as much as they keep them out. If it is hard to get in, people will stay. If it is too hard to get in, people won’t bother, and may even form their own ‘anti-communities’

Technology has radically transformed community life. The Internet has bulldozed geographic boundaries, eliminated cost and enabled even the most niche of interests to sustain sizeable communities. If you don’t believe me, go for a trawl through meetup.com (an online market place for arranging and managing community meet ups). There is something there for everyone – and I really mean everyone. Newer on-line services like Lanyrd and Plancast have made it easier to discover events and join the communities around them. See where your Twitter friends go to meet, search events in your area, or on your topic of interest. If you want a community, online or offline, you can probably find it, and if you can’t find it, you can create it for marginal cost and effort.

Social platforms like Facebook have made relationships objectively visible, and transformed ‘liking’ into more than just making a connection. They have become a means of association, and a form of visible badge. I ‘like’ Brand X says as more about my identity than just the fact that I have purchased their products. Communities have an ‘identity’ and people need to know what that identity is, so that they know what they are in, and more importantly, people need to know if they are ‘in’ the community or not. They also want to know if other people are inside or outside of the community too. It is all part of forming a group identity, and having a good sense of group identity is a key part of any thriving community. That identity might be supported by the shared stories that people tell, or by the provision of props (e.g. badges, uniforms, and so on). Having an iPad, an iPhone 4 and a MacBook identifies you as likely part of a certain community, just as having a suit and a Blackberry might identify you as part of a different one!

Some badges are ambiguous, some are not, some are conscious, some are not. All are earnt. The Flickr badge on my bag has started conversations, the WordPress badge has got me business. Those badges were obtained through relationships and through being at certain events. They have a story and meaning to them. They are explicit tokens, artefacts of being a part of something. They have a value far beyond their physical worth, they connect to memories and demonstrate participation. Most communities have some form of badges. They aren’t always as obvious as a piece of metal and paper, but they are there all the same.

Community defies our instant reward, popup culture. Communities take a LONG time to develop. Although sense of community can happen within 6 months, or even less, building a viable community, of any type, is a long hard journey. One of the things that definitely helps along the way is recognising the contributions of key community members. A big part of the evening’s discussion circled around the idea of making ‘heroes’ within the community. It works because it strengthens the identity of both the group and the individual, and also because it models the behaviours that are desired within the community. It is in our nature to copy leaders and those that we view as successful. That can be a constructive dynamic in a community, but it can also be a destructive one. An over reliance on the leader or key individuals can leave others feeling unwanted or even excluded.

There was and is much debate as to how much of community building is inductively learnt and subconsciously applied, and how much is conscious, constructed application. Many community leaders are ‘naturals’ rather than consciously constructed. It’s rare to find someone who learnt their community management skills in a classroom, and so that means passing on their skills is something best done through mentoring and working alongside, rather that in a taught course in a classroom. But you knew that already, didn’t you?

At one point there was a heated debate about WordPress versus Drupal. It was notable not for the technical content, but for how much of the debate was driven from the communities that were around each of them. There are certainly big technical differences between the platforms (I’ve built community sites using WordPress, BuddyPress, Drupal and Elgg), but the biggest difference is in the communities of users, developers, content producers and consumers around each. Products, inherently, have communities.

Looking at the ‘insides’ of a community, it becomes obvious that not all community members are equal. There are various different taxonomies that can be used to group members. I lean towards looking at levels of engagement: audience (the edglings), participants, contributors, through to co-leaders. Similarly, communication happens on a continuum from ‘top-down’ communication from leaders, to peer-to-peer discussion between members. Bernie talked about the impact of sending out weekly emails to one of his communities. The community became more active and engaged. People got more involved. Broadcast communication can be helpful, as well as harmful, in maintaining community cohesion and the energy levels within the community. It is all about striking a balance. Too little, and the community fragments and disperses, too much and it diminishes to an audience.

The spectrum for audience to community is a highly graduated one. We discussed many examples of the broadcast/performance vs community/contribution dynamic. For example, the Coke Facebook page that was started by two actors. Community or audience? Participation or entertainment? They aren’t dichotomies or dilemmas, they are  characteristics of moments in the story that becomes the community. How important is the brand of the community leader? Can they be invisible, leading from the shadows, or must they be known by name? Is there a continuum from audience to community? Real world examples don’t reveal simple yes’s and no’s. In the words of Ben Goldacre, “I think you’ll find that it’s a bit more complicated than that.“

So what triggers action in a community? Conversation needs to be peer to peer, not just top down. It’s one of the defining differences between an audience and a community. People want to have meaning, and to make a difference. Maslow’s hierarchy of human needs came up quite a few times. People have a need for significance and people want to feel wanted/needed. Many community drivers are around human emotional needs.

The evening’s discussion touched on issues of mono-culture and sustainability. Consistency is important – it creates and supports identity – but difference is also one of the key drivers of community too.  Communities can be long lived. Like some strange insect that can go without food for years, even if left sleeping communities can sometimes be revived. One of the stories I have heard a number of times about the Obama campaign is how it managed to bootstrap itself from the communities formed during the previous campaigns. Once a community is made, the individual relationships and connections created by it persist, long after the community has gone away.

So what is the role of a community leader? Are they leaders or are they facilitators? The answer seems to be yes and yes. The more challenging question was about the ability of community leaders to establish new leads, and the way that can lead to communities fragmenting or taking on a different path – even splitting apart. Good community ‘managers’ are passionate about the growth of the individuals within the community. The pattern is not about the growth of the community, the community only grows by the growth of the members. Good leaders establish sustainable behaviours: ‘this is how we do things around here’ – and recognise and reward those in the community who are active in supporting it. Recognition goes a long way: It supports the contributors, and it indicates desirable models of behaviour to others in the group.

Communities aren’t owned, and unlike an audience, they can’t be bought. Did technology enable niche communities, or did it actually cause the fragmentation that lead to them? On-line communities, freed from geographic restrictions, can fragment and merge more easily. As humans, we’ve been doing community since we started writing on cave walls, but technology is making (and enabling) us to look at the processes of community differently. Community is part of a cultural megatrend. In the off-line world, many places have forgotten how to do community – The motor car, the television and the privet hedge have enabled use to live socially in the most isolated of ways. In the later part of the last century we learnt to become individual actors, rather than group players. As we escape from broadcast media, and discover the Internet, we are starting to rediscover togetherness. There is a growing desire to create communities, and reintegrate society.

Of course it is all ripples against ripples… We have always been in communities, it is the new lens of social media and the rise of Twitter and Facebook that have turned the cameras, quite literally, back on to ourselves.

In a cruel form of irony, it way well be the mass data from these platforms that starting to create mass customisation/personalisation that breaks up community again. What you read in your Twitter stream or in your Facebook updates is personalised for you. No one else reads the same things in the same context. In social networks, everyone is part of a community of one. It is a scale free network that puts you at the centre of your world. Traditional communities don’t work that way. They are about shared experiences and shared stories – they are more universal than personal. It’s all about creating the shared experience, the stories that people tell about the community and that they have in common. Shared challenges, external threats and common victories bind communities together. They create emotional connections between people.

The nature of what ‘global’ means is changing. Geographic barriers are breaking down…. However ‘Global’ has come to mean a trans-country set of niches… Physical communities are still challenged by geography, but global ones are challenged by a sea of niche interests and a dwindling commonality in what people are interested in.  As opposed to the universal markets that broadcast media and a global film industry created, social media creates micro-worlds with micro-celebrities and loosely bound connections.

Is community growth formulaic? There are certainly patterns. We discussed the early church, Toastmasters, the Mormons and dozens of examples of communities that have grown and persisted. Sometimes communities are for a reason, a season, occasionally for a life time. Communities and members aren’t forever. There is a time, a place and a purpose.

What does community mean to you?

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The evening was made all the more special by the judges personally coming over to say how impressed they were with what had been achieved. I shall stop typing and leave you with a photograph of myself, Sheila Parry and the amazing team from theblueballroom clutching our award, and the official press release.

DHL Express’ Innovative Online 40th Anniversary Celebration Scoops Digital Impact Award

FARNHAM, UNITED KINGDOM, Sep 21, 2010 — In 2009, a year of recession, DHL Express celebrated its 40th anniversary. To recognize this milestone and employees’ input with a splash yet without extravagance, DHL launched a global online employee photo competition, designed and built by internal communications specialists theblueballroom with social technology company redcatco. The competition and campaign won Communicate magazine’s Digital Impact Award for the ‘Best digital employee communication’ in the ‘Best use of digital to an internal audience’ category.

The competition generated a staggering 5.6 million hits and 2,800 photo uploads. The inexpensive, globally accessible online solution reached out to all 500,000 worldwide employees of DHL and parent company Deutsche Post DHL and sparked a truly cross-border, cross-level conversation: this user-generated ‘by the people, for the people’ platform saw 3,400 comments being made on the photos. Page views spanned the full three months of the competition, demonstrating ongoing engagement.

The competition showcased DHL Express’ amazing legacy and supported the company’s ‘One DHL’ brand positioning, which celebrates a diverse workforce, global expertise and uniqueness, and joint capabilities. theblueballroom’s expertise on inspiring communications for internal audiences, coupled with redcatco’s specialist knowledge on social technology, made DHL Express’ 40th anniversary a celebration to remember.

About DHL:

DHL is the global market leader in the logistics industry and ‘The Logistics company for the world’. DHL commits its expertise in international express, air and ocean freight, road and rail transportation, contract logistics and international mail services to its customers. A global network composed of more than 220 countries and territories and about 300,000 employees worldwide offers customers superior service quality and local knowledge to satisfy their supply chain requirements. DHL accepts its social responsibility by supporting climate protection, disaster management and education. DHL is part of Deutsche Post DHL. The Group generated revenue of more than 46 billion euros in 2009.

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