Archive | May, 2009

The Fallacy Of The "Don't Be Stupid" Policy

by on May 26, 2009 in Communication

Apparently, some well-known companies have a social media policy that goes like this: Don’t be stupid. The underlying assumption is that hiring smart people means these same smart people interpret stupidity the same way. Really? That’s a pretty stupid assumption but I think I understand it. Hear me out and let me know if I’m off-base here:

Companies either…want to overcontrol the mischief their employees can make via social media so they impose a laundry list of legal “do’s and don’t's” that make everyone paranoid about doing anything online. The results are bad relations with employees, a stifling of innovative external outreach and a reputation for being a stodgy, stick-in-the-mud company.

Or…companies want to let their employees feel free to sow their wild social media oats but acknowledge that some protection must be used. So they tell their folks, “Hey, go forth and have fun, but don’t do anything stupid.” The result is that no one knows what they hell “stupid” means. It’s rather like a parent handing their 16 year old teen driver the keys to the car with an expectation that the kid is smart and nothing dumb will happen. So what does happen? The kid gets caught up in the moment of unfettered freedom and wrecks the car anyway. How many smart people has that happened to? Plenty…and I’m one of them.

So we clearly have a problem with the whole “Don’t Be Stupid” policy. Might I propose something slightly more realistic: Put a fence around your organization’s social media activity.

Yes, I’m advocating for something in the middle of the two extremes of strict legalistic policies and loose freedom. It’s something akin to what my wife explains to me everyday in her work as a preschool teacher. We all need to know where our boundaries are, regardless if we’re 4, 24, or 44 years old. The key is to set boundaries that give a person room to roam and explore their space. Set the boundary too tight and you impede curiosity and growth; set it too loose and you risk losing focus and consistency.

What to do? Here are two key ideas but remember to put them in context with your own organization’s business strategy, organizational structure, and people policies.

Purpose: Why are we engaging in social media dialogue with our customers?
It’s a simple question that far too many organizations don’t have a consistent answer to. But using social media tools without a purpose is like taking a hammer and banging on your walls: yes, you’re doing something but you’re not really sure if it’s anything constructive (probably not). Every single organization that is using or thinking about using social media tools needs a purpose. Without that purpose, then everyone’s reasons for Twittering or Facebooking or blogging is acceptable by default.

Policy: How much room do we have to roam about in the social media space?
I didn’t say I was completely against policy. What I am against are policies created solely from upon high in the organization (likely with Legal’s review) and then set in stone. What this manages to do is disconnect the actual employee practitioners from the process. More command-and-control that regards employees as cogs that can be moved as needed by management.

Policy needs to be created like this:

  • Based around your organization’s purpose, involve a diversity of perspectives and gather input into the creation process.
  • Revisit your policy on a frequent basis. Anything need to be changed? Added? Deleted entirely? Policy should be a fluid, evolving structure that gives everyone an idea of where their boundaries lie.


Peer-Observation: How will we monitor our actions and progress?
Your organization has a purpose in using social media tools. And it has a set of policies to guide activity. How will you make sure they’re used appropriately? Rather than set one person up as the brute squad enforcer or make it just management’s responsibility to curb questionable activity, create an expectation that all participants will monitor their peers’ activity. And build a process where these issues can be addressed as learning opportunities as opposed to sanctioned beat-downs. If you’re not sure if this will work based on levels of trust or camaraderie in your organization, then you might have another problem to deal with first.

The thing about social media is that you better trust your people to speak honestly about their work and their experiences. If you’re thinking of launching any social media initiative and you don’t trust your folks…well, that would just be dumb.

Great Presentations Are Multimedia

by on May 22, 2009 in Communication

Know what gets me fired up? When people blame tools for shoddy work when the blame should be pointed directly at the user. Case in point: PowerPoint.

Yes, we’ve all sat through some mind-numbingly dull PP presentations. And I guarantee we’ve all had similar experiences with presentations that didn’t use PP at all. The common denominator here is the presenter and their inability to use their presentation tools.

Paul Sloane at Lifehack wrote today about Six Ways to Transform your Presentation. Not surprisingly, step number one was Throw Away PowerPoint. This advice is almost cliché. PowerPoint is a tool just like a chainsaw. Give the tool to someone inexperienced, and yes, they might just destroy something.

Folks, the problem here isn’t PowerPoint…it’s the presenter.

I’m also going to argue that just getting up in front of a crowd and delivering a presentation without strong visual elements to augment your speaking is missing the potential of multimedia. Think which visual images would make what you’re saying stronger? Some folks learn more from what they see than what they hear.

The bottom line is: Don’t be afraid to engage all the senses in your presentation.

Beyond Engaged Community Members…Think Stewardship

by on May 22, 2009 in Communities

Yesterday, I read two blogposts that talked about the importance of engagement in online community.

Patrick O’Keefe’s Be Honest with Your Members about Unreasonable Expectations

Spike Jones’s Participation is Different from Engagement

The content of both posts were rather different, but interestingly enough, each inspired a similar question from me: what, if anything, comes after engagement? It’s generally agreed that participation is a good starting point, but not enough. It’s still a bit too passive when it comes to building a vibrant community. This is why engagement is a much pursued and highly cherished goal. Spike makes an important observation in his post as to the difference between mere participation and engagement:

When you go to your meetings today, you’ll see the difference. It’s between those that are sitting in the meeting – and participating by just showing up – and those that are adding to the conversation because they are engaged. In other words, you can participate without being engaged. Engagement is the step beyond participation.

I’m in complete agreement, but there’s something gnawing at me. Is there another level beyond engagement? Is engagement enough to inspire community members to monitor the site for trolls and inappropriate comments? Is engagement enough to inspire the high level of interaction needed to sustain a community over time?

I’d like to suggest that there is another level beyond engagement. Enter stewardship. Stewardship takes the energy of engagement and adds the commitment of ownership to community. Let’s face it…we care more deeply about things we feel we own. I once wrote a post at Bailey WorkPlay called Nobody Washes a Rental Car. If you can help your community members feel a pride of ownership, they’ll not only be engaged but also provide the kind of stewardship necessary to building a strong, thriving community.

There’s so much more to contemplate and think about on this topic. I anticipate that this post will lead to some more concrete advice for how to cultivate stewardship in your community’s social structures. If you’ve discovered practices, policies, processes that inspire stewardship, what did you do and what did you learn?

VIDEO: Building Your Brand Ambassador Program

by on May 21, 2009 in Branding

Is your organization thinking about how to implement a brand ambassador program? The video here is a slightly modified version of a presentation I gave earlier this week to nonprofit leaders in Austin. Highlights are after the jump.

It all starts with using a simple but effective branding model:
1. Consistency
2. Focus
3. Trust
4. Partnership

Based on this branding model, the five keys to developing your nonprofit’s brand ambassador program are:
Key 1: Create an internal strategy first
Key 2: Create a recruitment plan
Key 3: Create a wide engagement plan
Key 4: Make telling their story easy
Key 5: Create a recognition plan
Plus…there’s a final bonus key

Hope you enjoy the video and get some useful ideas and inspiration. If you’re interested in having this topic presented live to your staff or group, give me a call at 512.394.3598 or send me an email at chris@gravit8.com.

Five Research Companions You Really Need

by on May 16, 2009 in Research

As a grad student and researcher, I’m always looking for tools that will make my academic work easier. In the past year, I’ve come to rely heavily on five tools that have become my research companions. Here they are:

Note: I’m a 100% Mac guy so nearly all of these programs are only available for the Mac. There may be PC-based alternatives that I’ve missed. If there are, feel free to add them to the comments.

1. Papers | Mekentosj: I’ve built my own knowledge management system around Papers and recommend it as a must-have program for anyone doing academic research. Built-in search functions allow you to find the latest research and easily import article PDFs into your library. Once in your library, you can annotate, keyword tag, and create smart folders for all of your articles. Plus, the folks at Mekentosj have built a companion iPhone/iPod Touch app that integrates and synchronizes your Papers library on your handheld. It’s super sweet!

2. PDFpenPro | Smile on My Mac: There are plenty of PDF editors on the market (even Apple’s Preview program has editing capabilities). What sets PDFpenPro apart for me is its built-in OCR, wide array of editing tools, and small footprint that takes up little space and sucks up little memory (its that latter item that beats the crap out of Adobe’s Acrobat program). Plus, it integrates into Papers so any notations or edits I make in a PDF are automatically sync’ed into my Papers library.

3. Bookends | Sonny Software: At first glance, Bookends may not seem like much, but once you start to use it you understand just how heavenly it is. If you’re like me, you know keeping track of bibliographies and citations in your research is a major pain in the rear. Bookends makes it simple. You can export your article citations out of Papers into Bookends and the program takes care of getting them into the right style for you. And it’s even better when you use Bookends along with…

4. Mellel II | Redlers: Yes, MS Word is a decent word processing program, but is it made for writing research? Not really. Mellel is and it does the job admirably. It integrates amazingly well with Bookends so your citations and bibliography are constantly kept up to date with your writing. It has everything you need and nothing you don’t when it comes to writing your next academic article. And it exports cleanly to .doc so there’s really no reason to even open up Word.

5. Google Scholar: I’m adding Google Scholar to this list because it is one of the most comprehensive search engines for finding published research articles. It’s simple and it’s powerful. What more do you need?

Any other research tools that you’ve come to rely on in your academic work? I would love to hear about them.