by Rob Cottingham | Jun 12, 2009 | Online Community, Social Media, Social Signal
I like to think there are lessons to be had from even the oddest event.
Take today’s “holy-crap!” story currently making the rounds of the digital watercoolers: that poor guy in Georgia whose house was torn down by mistake. Reports say the demolition crew went to the wrong location, reducing a half-century-old brick house to rubble. There’s also been some suggestion that overreliance on GPS coordinates may have played a role in the error.
What can those of us in the online world take away from this event (other than “never, ever leave your house”, which is probably wrong) (although come to think of it, many of us seem to abide by that advice)? How can we avoid our own inadvertent piles of smouldering debris? Here’s my list of five lessons… some of them, admittedly, a stretch.
- Clear communications are critical. We like to pride ourselves on the clear instructions we give to our design and development partners: exactly what workflow we’d like, where a particular hierarchy is important, and where there’s space for them to improvise or suggest improvements. Being as clear as possible about the things that matter – and as clear as possible about the boundaries of any wiggle room – has saved us countless headaches, and saved our clients a lot of money.
- The longer the workflow, the more likely it is to break down. In this case, the people actually wielding the backhoe were apparently subcontractors to the subcontractor hired by the contractor. Similarly, if you’re requiring your community members to jump through multiple hoops – page after page of registration forms, or several copy-this-url-then-paste-it-in-this-box steps – not all of them are going to make it.
- What’s obvious to you may not be obvious to everyone. I’m not suggesting that you should be pitching your documentation and interface to the kind of people who’d knock down a perfectly good house without double-checking. But bear in mind that, if you’ve been developing an application or a web site, you’ve been down in the weeds for a while. Your prospective users haven’t. So you may need to guide them a lot more thoroughly than you might think. One way to get a handle on that: usability testing.
- Confirmation screens can be life-savers. Would that the bulldozer and backhoe on that Carroll County property had been equipped with “Are you sure you want to knock this house down? y/n” dialog boxes. Before you let your users do something life-alteringly destructive, give them a chance or two to rethink things: “Do you really want to delete all your photos?” “Really remove your profile? You will be unable to restore it if you do.” “Are you sure you want to send this sex video to all 12,493 people in your address book?” And use unambiguous explanations on the buttons: “YES, I’m really quite impressive in it.” “NO! This was a private, beautiful moment between me and the cast of The West Wing, and I don’t want to cheapen it.”
- People trump technology. It’s so tempting to put all your eggs in the tech basket, spending your entire budget on beautiful design and rich features. But a community relies on talented, dedicated animators. So just as relying unquestionably on GPS coordinators may have steered the contractors in Georgia wrong (the news reports are unclear at the moment), relying on technology alone to get your community off the ground won’t do you much good, either. In each case, what you need are good, smart people… with solid, sound judgement.
By the way, if you’re still worried that your house could be vulnerable to misdirected sledgehammers – or if you’d just like a handy reminder that crap happens – here’s the PDF for our “Please don’t demolish my house” sticker. It’ll look great just above your “Firefighters, please save my Drobo” sticker.
by Rob Cottingham | Jun 2, 2009 | Social Media, Social Signal
A few days ago I got a super-special birthday present (xoxo, Alex!): a new 12″ Cintiq, Wacom‘s combination graphic tablet and display.
I don’t doubt that it’s going to revolutionize the way that I draw Noise to Signal. It integrates the retouching phase and does away with that whole scanning phase, not to mention the chasing-the-three-year-old-who-grabbed-the-pen-and-ink phase and the scrubbing-the-ink-off-the-three-year-old phase.
But it’s not exactly portable. The tablet comes with an external power supply, a converter box and a slew of cables – and now, for the sake of everyone’s sanity, its own carrying case (h/t Kate Trgovac).
My intention was to park it somewhere instead of hauling it from place to place, but Alex had wise advice: take it around with me, use it in several circumstances and see how it could be useful. Because while I think right now that I know how I’ll use it, I actually don’t.
This is a tool with unknown possibilities. Maybe it’ll turn out to be great for taking notes, for mocking up ideas or for sketchblogging. Maybe I’ll cartoon with it, but it will change the way I do that in some way.
Most really powerful tools are the same way. That’s especially true for the tools of the social web: even the oldest ones are still new by most standards, and it seems every week brings another innovative way of applying them.
A way for geeks to log their daily web surfing highlights becomes a way for someone to share their cancer battle with a circle of loved ones; a way to keep tabs on blog updates becomes the engine behind podcasting; a way to share videos of cute animal tricks becomes a tremendously effective political communications vehicle affecting the outcome of a presidential election.
Which is a good cautionary note for any of us working in the field. It’s tempting to pigeonhole tools: Twitter works for this, Facebook is for that, mobile is for the other.
But if you can count on one thing in Web 2.0, it’s that no category is permanent. Somewhere out there, someone who hasn’t pigeonholed those tools is going to find an amazing new use for them, a way to reach people in a way they haven’t been reached before.
Hey – why shouldn’t that person be you?
Cintiq photo: Tobias Rütten. Used under a Creative Commons license.
by Rob Cottingham | Apr 30, 2009 | Blogging, Social Media, Social Signal
There’s a convergence going on: some big social and business trends that have one thing in common – the word open.
Whether it’s open-source software, or enormous information repositories that are open to be accessed and sometimes even edited by anyone, or the growing requirements for transparency on the part of organizations and governments, your customers, supporters and audience are expecting you to be open to them.
Not just in the sense of open-minded… or having a contact form on your web site. But open in the sense that they know what you’re doing, how it affects them, and why. That your organization’s leadership is available and accountable. That they can engage with you and your brand as peers.
Books like Wikinomics and Tactical Transparency explain not only the forces driving the trend toward openness, but the real value that businesses and other organizations can gain when they let in some sunshine. Freeing some of your intellectual property, for instance, can allow your users to run with it – sometimes as brand ambassadors, other times as analysts who generate new and unexpected insights for you. And opening up internally, by creating a place for conversation that cuts across departmental walls, can give your organization new opportunities to collaborate.
Even the more intimidating aspects of openness, like the increased accountability it imposes, can be positive when it keeps organizations true to their mission and their brand values – and aligned with the communities they serve.
There’s more – a lot more – to openness than blogging, of course. But a blog can be the way your organization opens the windows a crack, sniffs the air outside and decides whether to go further.
Here’s how to start opening up:
- Nobody’s expecting you to run naked through the digital streets – and certainly not right off the bat. Get buy-in from your organization, start small, and open up gradually… validating what you’ve done at every step.
- Your first step can be a modest one: bringing in a manager as a guest blogger, for example, available to respond to reader comments and questions about their area of responsibility. A successful outing there can lead to more ambitious efforts later on.
- Focus your efforts on relevant openness – things that actually matter to your readers. And aim at first for the areas with the least controversy and risk, while you build up your organization’s comfort level (and your own knowledge of your community of readers and commenters.)
- Openness is as much about getting to know people as it is about hard facts and controversial issues. Introduce your readers to the behind-the-scenes folks who make things happen. If those people are willing, give your readers access to them with a Q & A or live chat on your blog.
- Let your readers in on what goes on backstage. Take them through the process of making that hot new product you’re selling, or walk them through the processing of a donation all the way to where it makes a difference out in the world.
- Share your challenges. Is the economic downturn causing breaks or bottlenecks in your supply chain that are causing delivery delays? Has heightened interest in your organization meant a slow web server or site outages? Be the first to tell that story to your readers, before they hear it from others or experience it themselves; they’ll appreciate the candor, and respond well to your lack of defensiveness.
- Anticipate the risks of openness: backlash, criticism and tough questions. Plan in advance for how you can deal with them, so a brief spark doesn’t have the time to flare into something more destructive.
- “Open” doesn’t mean “floodgates”. You probably have reams of data you could share on your blog, from the cafeteria’s daily specials to the new guidelines for office allocation. Be judicious, and choose the information that will mean the most to the people you want to reach.
- If you have an especially thorny problem, consider throwing it open to your readers. Be very clear about the kind of help you’d like, so you can focus their contributions and ideas where they’ll actually be useful.
- When the time comes to make a decision that affects your readers, use your blog as consult them
- See if you can make your organization’s logo and wordmark available for reuse (perhaps under a Creative Commons license), and post them to your blog. Invite your readers to use them, even to remix them, when they’re talking about your organization. Do the same with photos of your organization’s leadership, audio and video clips of products or services in action, and other digital assets that your readers can run with.
- Do at least as much listening as talking, and build the reflex of responding with access. If you’re seeing a lot of blog chatter or reading a lot of comments about a particular issue, find ways to open up around it – by exposing some of your internal conversations about the issue, for example, or inviting a conversation between your readers and some of your organization’s key people.
- Look for ways to bring people inside – not just virtually, but in the physical world. Hold a real-world meetup in your offices, for example, or a townhall with your organization’s key leaders. And complete the circle by linking it back to the online world – for instance, via a Twitter feed or liveblog of the conversation.
You’ll know that openness is starting to pay off when:
- Your research and monitoring show an increase in public perception and description of your organization as open, accessible and accountable.
- Ideas from your blog’s readers start getting discussed in your organization, and taken seriously.
- Your organization steps back from the brink of a bad decision because of concern over how it will be received in the community. And your organization takes a courageous good decision for exactly the same reason.
- Internal collaboration starts to cut across silos, as the culture of openness soaks in.
- People in your organization start to approach you with things they’d like to ask or share with your readers.
by Rob Cottingham | Apr 27, 2009 | Social Media, Social Signal
I’d been looking forward to catching the session on metrics that Beth Kanter was going to facilitate at NTEN/NTC, and it didn’t disappoint.
Participants Danielle Brigida of the National Wildlife Federation, Qui Diaz of Livingston Communications, Sarah Granger from PublicEdge and Wendy Harman of the American Red Cross tackled the tricky question of just how you measure social media (or, more to the point, participation in and impact of social media).
Beth started by quoting David Armano‘s prescription for using social media metrics: “Listen, learn, adapt.” From there, the wide-ranging conversation touched on sentiment analysis, the resources you should put into social media monitoring, tools and how best to apply them, and some practical stories from the field.
I’m working on my routine for tonight’s after show, so I won’t try to capture it all. Instead, for whatever they’re worth, my notes from the panel:
by Rob Cottingham | Apr 27, 2009 | Social Media, Social Signal
Here Comes Everybody author Clay Shirky manages to jam in more ideas, pithy quotes and gripping stories in one half-hour keynote than some speakers could manage in a week… but still ties it all together in a compelling narrative.
His presentation this morning at the NTEN Non-profit Technology Conference looked at how the web has broken the monopoly that organizations used to have on organized activity… and how profound the resulting change can be.
One particularly memorable bit came when he explained how moving to New York City from the midwest changed his perspective, because of the idea of a population large enough that you could sell pizza by the slice… which meant pizzas were being made before knowing who they were for.
I can’t do it justice in a single blog post. But maybe my notes can give you just a bit of the flavour of his presentation. (That one doodle doesn’t look a thing like him, by the way.)
by Rob Cottingham | Apr 20, 2009 | Blogging, Social Media, Social Signal
Social media should be a no-brainer. After all, it’s all about conversation and relationships – and in fact our conversational instincts can serve us well in blogging, podcasting, social networking and other social media channels.
Instinct alone, however, won’t suffice. You need skills, knowledge and experience to succeed in social media – from tech chops, to the unique demands of various social media venues, to the social nuances of dealing with conflict between online antagonists.
You can develop those social media muscles with training (self-directed or with a teacher), by watching others and – most important – through practice.
And “practice” in more than one sense: learning involves making mistakes, sometimes big ones. Those can be hard enough to swallow if you’re communicating as an individual, although you’ll find a lot of people willing to cut some slack for teh n00bs.
But when you’re out there on behalf of your organization, there may be more at stake. People are less forgiving of institutions than individuals, and depending on your organization’s profile, the damage to its reputation could be significant.
That’s where your blog comes in. Smaller in scale, more manageable in scope and simpler in concept than more ambitious social media projects, your blog can be the perfect place to build your skills and experience – and those of your embryonic social media team.
Here are some of the ways you can make your blog serve as a training platform as well as a conversational communications channel:
- Go in prepared. Yes, it’s a training ground – but it’s also happening in the full light of day. So before you begin, give yourself a grounding in blogging by reading other blogs, commenting on them, and seeing what appeals to you and what doesn’t. Consider blogging behind closed doors for a little while before going public, and you’ll not only start settling into a consistent voice, but you’ll have a solid body of posts to show the world.
- The same applies to team members. They don’t have to be seasoned hands, but be sure they know some of the basics before you give them the keys. (And by “the basics”, I mean about blogging generally … but also about your blog’s goals, tone, policies and culture.)
- Assemble your blogging team with some thought to the future. Choose folks you’d like to develop as potential social media team members, and let them try on different roles – from writers to community animators to editorial managers – and discover their strengths. And if you’d like to try someone on for size and see how they adapt, bring them on as a guest blogger for a little while.
- Set learning goals and milestones for yourself and your team, and take them seriously. Plan a curriculum that includes self-guided study, practical experience and – if you have the budget – formal training. And think strategically. What skills do you need not just as a blogger, but as a manager and strategist? Learn about analytics, conversions and calls to action.
- Look to the future: what kind of social media initiative will your organization likely want to pursue? Draft your blog’s roadmap in a way that will take you in helpful directions, anticipating and honing the skills that will serve you well when the time comes – by adding the odd video or audio clip if a podcast is in your future, for instance.
- Look for overlap. Think about your organization’s training needs; where do they map onto some of the skills you and your team members can develop through the blog?
- Build a peer social network on Twitter, LinkedIn or other services, and ask questions. There’s a strong sense of community among social media types, and asking for help with a technical issue or a pointer to a resource will almost always get you – if not the definitive answer – a solid starting point.
- Share what you learn among your team, and broaden it to your organization. Holding lunch and learns, lightning sessions or monthly seminars can help spread the knowledge about tools and strategies. Alternatively, social bookmarking, a wiki or an internal blog can let you organize your collective expertise and share that blog or podcast you just discovered.
- Offer training opportunities to the rest of your organization. An internal internship on your blog could help a customer care rep learn more about engagement, a marketing manager get a handle on social media culture, or your ED’s speechwriter brush up her conversational chops.
Here’s how you’ll know you’re creating a high-value training platform:
- You have a clear picture in your head of exactly what skills and knowledge your team has, where you need to improve, and where individual members’ strengths lie.
- Blogging, blog monitoring and other social media activities are faster and easier, because they’re becoming second nature.
- Team members’ performance assessments show improvements in areas related to their social media activities, such as facilitation, collaboration and communication.
- You and your team members start trying out new skills, because you’ve mastered the old ones.
- You’ve developed a network of people – peers, mentors, prospective new hires – you can count on for sharing ideas, knowledge and support.
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