On quitting the 'like' button

I came across this article recently, and it struck a chord with me. So I decided to quit the 'like' button myself for a while and see what happened. And not just on Facebook, but on my company's intranet social spaces, too.

This 'like' thing is rather weird isn't it? I bestow upon your post my approval with my mighty 'like' button. Wait. What?

This puts me in mind of earlier conversations I've had about blog comments. Stephen Downes once said in a blog post I now can't find (it was a long time ago), that he didn't think he needed to respond to every comment on his blog posts. That they were perfectly able to stand in their own right and he wasn't arrogant enough to believe they needed validation from him. That has stayed with me (obviously), and when I read the article about the 'like' button, it occurred to me that it was a similar thing. Quite apart from the fact that the bots at Facebook towers are probably building a profile of me based on the things I like.

It can be a bit fraught. If five people comment on a post of yours, and you've 'liked' the first four, do you feel pressured to 'like' the fifth even if you don't like it? If you follow me.

It reminded me a bit of my grandfather. Bear with me. When I was little, my grandfather had this little noise he would make. Somewhere between a grunt and a 'yeah'. It meant "I know that you've spoken. I don't know what you've said, and I'm not really interested. But I acknowledge that you have addressed me." Since I was (you'll be astonished to learn) a chatterbox, I heard that noise a lot. A lot.

Isn't the 'like' button a bit like that?

So this is what I'm doing instead:

I will either engage with something enough to take the time to post a proper comment on it. Or I will let the post/comment stand on its own merit. The 'like' button is off limits for a while. And several of my Facebook friends have decided to join me.

How about you? Shall we turn this into a growing social experiment?

Corporate social media - something to remember in the exit interview

One of the services I provide is to assist organisations with their social media presence.

Managing the social media footprint of a business is in many ways similar to that for an individual, as I covered in a recent post. But there are some key differences and it's pretty vital to bear these in mind.

Most importantly, the account is a company asset. Sometimes senior management is all to willing to relinquish control of the account to a staff member and to disengage from it themselves. This sends a clear message about the (lack of) importance they impute to the social media campaign. I would venture to suggest that this is short-sighted. And, while it might work fine for a while for the account to be the sole province of a staff member, it is a risky path to take. An individual who has set up the account, managed it and nurtured it through the rough times might become a bit precious about it, and there may be consequences, more of which anon.

If you're the person who looks after a social media account for your organisation and it's taking up too much of your time for too little reward to either you or the organisation, it's time to re-evaluate the situation. Is this the right space for your organisation to have a presence? Would the organisation's strategic goals be better served by focusing its/your attentions elsewhere? I recommend a pro-active approach. Gather some metrics and approach your management team with a suggestion solution. Something like "Let's ditch the Facebook account, because it's not serving any purpose, as shown by my handy little graph. And let's instead focus on upping our presence on LinkedIn, because as you can see from these statistics, this would benefit us in X and Y way."

Important point for managers: when the person who manages a social media account on behalf of the company leaves, the admin rights for the page need to be passed on to someone else, and the leaver's admin rights revoked.

You expect them to hand over the company phone, the company laptop and the keys to company car, right? So why are you letting them walk out the door with (sometimes sole) access to intangible company assets related to brand and market presence?

I have encountered situations where the person who manages the account has left for pastures new, taking with them the only log in details and admin rights to the page. In one instance, when the organisation finally realised that this was the case, the person refused even to reveal their identity, placing the page (and the company's brand) at risk.

Clearly, it is unwise to have only one person with admin rights to any of the organisation's social media sites, and then to forget to do something about that when the person leaves. A person with access like that and an axe to grind can do a great deal of harm, and it could take a while before they can be stopped.

Sue Llewellyn (et al) on the psychology of social media

On Monday, as part of  at the FT digital learning week, Sue Llewellyn delivered a session about the psychology of social media. This is a topic that is of great interest to me. Much of what Llewellyn shared was pretty much common sense to those of us who have been active in the social media space for a while, but I've been ruminating over it for a while, because...

Attending the session were people from the FT and the wider Pearson group, looking at how to use social media to benefit the business. We're talking about large corporate endeavours here. And yet, most of what Llewellyn had to share seemed aimed at people who were looking to promote their personal brands. And this is what I found quite telling. Nearly 15 years after the publication of the cluetrain manifesto, and about eight years since the publication of naked conversations, this is the core message coming through. Many companies I've spoken to over the years have had a social media presence, but they haven't really set the world on fire. Largely because it has been seen as part of the traditional marketing/comms programme. Running a social media 'campaign' like a mailshot distribution just doesn't cut it. In this social age - and this has been one of the themes running through the whole week for me - people want to engage with people with skin on, not some faceless corporate monolith.

Social media have seen us move into a space where individuals have a voice, and aren't afraid to use it - for better or for worse. The digital era has shifted gear. We're no longer in a space where it's all about writing code and publishing stuff online. We've moved into the engagement space. So 'people people' can be tech-geeks too. In fact, they had better be! And they had better be well informed, too. Many is the brand that has suffered damage at the hands of someone delegated to do the job because they have the technical skills, but who have not done the brand any favours as they have revealed their own lack of insight or have been dragged into exchanges of personal insults and potential libel (one example: Gillian McKeith).

Which brings me back to Llewellyn's presentation. All the rules that apply to promoting your personal brand through social media, apply to building your business brand.

WIIFT?
Turning the traditional 'what's in if for me?' question on its head, Llewellyn suggested considering what's in it for them (your followers)? She talked about finding the behavioural trigger than makes people want to engage with the content you put out there. She used the term 'psychographic' - don't just think about the demographic of your follower group, but their psychographic: what matters to them? What do they want to hear about?

She provided some useful guidelines as to what made people share your content with their own follower audience and talked about how to trigger those responses. I'm not going to go give away all her suggestions and observations free of charge, but - in addition to the practical suggestions she made - it boiled down to being 'neighbourly': if you ask people for feedback, thank them for it and put it to use, share the link love, give credit where it's due... all that stuff.

Tracking/analysis
This was the biggest take-away for me. From a business perspective, it is important to track what works and what doesn't. Think about why that might be and what you can do to influence that. I suspect this is where a lot of corporate social media campaigns fall down.

You're allowed to be funny (and even silly)
One of the points Llewellyn made strongly was to show how much response there is to 'silly' posts. A picture of a bear in a hammock, shared by BBC News World Edition on their twitter account racked up scores or retweets. A corporate 'entity' is allowed to have a lighter side. In fact, it had better have a lighter side. It's part of the whole personable thing. We like to laugh. We like say 'awww'. So using emotive triggers is not only acceptable, it's advisable and possibly even imperative.

Areas for neutrality
While an individual can have a strong political/religious stance, a corporate image needs to keep neutral on these topics. So while it may be acceptable to share the news of the kidnapping of 200 Nigerian girls, it probably isn't wise to use that as a platform for religious prejudice.

Summary
Llewellyn summarised her advice as keeping content relevant, interesting, timely, engaging, and to ensure that it added value.

What she didn't explicitly mention, but it was the inherent thread throughout her presentation - and many of the others during the week - was that even a corporate twitter account needs to be personable and relatable.

Social media etiquette conundrum

From time to time, I have noticed an interesting development in the space where face-to-face relationships bump into online relationships. In my extensive network are many people whom I know both on- and off-line. In some cases it was online first and then a personal encounter. In others it was the other way around. Some of the relationships are purely personal, others are largely professional. Some have become a blend of both.

I have noticed that some of the people with whom I have both and on- and off-line relationship are competent at conducting a single relationship in two spaces. Others less so. In some cases, there is a strange split. There is one relationship going on online and another offline, and that it seems to be 'not done' to break that wall. So you might have an exchange of messages online in which something deep and tragic is shared, or a disagreement is aired but the next time you see each other, no reference will be made to he online conversation, and there seems to be no enhanced understanding demonstrated offline based on the revelation online.

I recently had an experience that has puzzled and bemused me. Totally by chance, I discovered that I have been 'unfriended' on Facebook by someone I encounter face to face on a regular basis. Her behaviour towards me does appear to have shifted very slightly, but superficially the 'all is well' signals are being beamed bright and clear. She has given me no indication as to what the problem might be, which has left me unsure as to how I should behave toward her.

I recently felt compelled to unfriend someone on Facebook that I have known since childhood, although we were never close. However, before doing so, I made it clear that it was due to her repeatedly aggressive behaviour towards my other FB friends on my page. She might not agree that I had just cause, but at least she knows what it was that caused me to reach this decision.

In the situation where the boot is on the other foot, I am totally clueless, and it leaves me feeling disempowered and slightly bewildered.

My relationship with my husband has many facets, but it is one relationship. We talk on the phone and continue that conversation when he gets home. I forward an email to him from the school, we exchange emails a few times, and then perhaps pick up the phone. We interact on Facebook, as we comment on photographs, one another's status updates and so on, and tease each other about that when we meet up. We connect in many spaces, but it remains one relationship. If he suddenly stopped talking to me, or touching me, the rest of the relationship would be affected. Of course, it would. And I would be looking to find out why. But here we have someone who is prepared to sever one aspect of a relationship and to continue the others as if nothing had changed, without discussing the action.

In cases where people pursue two separate relationships with me, I have come to regard that as a sign of an inability to assimilate an online space into an existing relationship. An indication that there is a level of maturity still to be gained. By and large, this two relationship experience tends to be restricted to those for whom social media tools are little more than toys.

I am struggling to formulate this as cogently as I would like, but I would be interested to learn whether others have had similar experiences.

Twitter in the surgery

I'm posting this fresh off the back of last night's stimulating #lrnchat on Twitter. I don't watch Grey's Anatomy, but Jane Hart shared this fantastic extract from a recent episode, showing the use of Twitter in surgery. Just look how the walls of the OR melt away and surgeons and hospitals from hither and yon get on board to save a patient's life!



I still have friends who tell me that Twitter is a space for the idle chatter of egotists. I wish I could just show them its potential.

Social tools in the workplace... when they fail and why

Jane Hart has written an excellent article about the top-down implementation of social tools for workplace learning and why that approach is doomed to failure. As she points out, top-down is the traditional approach for implementing a new initiative, but in respect of social media for learning:

1. Those that are already collaborating, sharing and learning with one another, will resist attempts to force them to use other social tools or platforms in order to track and control what they are already doing. This may well push their activities even further underground.
2. Those that have yet to experience, understand and feel comfortable with social media will not want to be forced into sharing and collaborating when they are not ready for it, and are likely to resist attempts to make them do so.

Hart suggests a more bottom-up approach. Providing support to those who already are sharing and collaborating with one another. I would also recommend a performance management attitude that gives kudos to those who are seen to be supportive of their colleagues. In this post in December, I talked about the value of the enabler within your team. Give these people kudos and the space to 'do their thing' and you stand to gain a great deal. As Hart's article says, "autonomy is a powerful motivator" and "better results come from getting out of the way".

I wonder how many managers have considered that the biggest barrier to excellence in their team's performance might be their own attitude to people management (and people, come to that).

It's funny how these things go in waves, because yesterday, Aliza Sherman published an article called 5 Reasons why Corporate Social Tools Fail. Top of the list for her is the lack of a social culture. As she says, mandating the use of x and y tools isn't going to change anything if you don't already have a culture of mutual support and collaboration within the organisation. Too many organisations make this very mistake. It's not about the technology. The technology is a just a conduit, a tool. You can give your 17 year old a car - that won't make him a competent driver! But, if he is already a driver, having his own car will enable him to do so very much more.

It has to start with culture. So we find ourselves back at Hart's article which identifies the need for more autonomy and more getting out of the way. Less micromanagement and more belief in your people.

Facebook hospitality

Because I originally signed up to Facebook as part of an experiment to see how it impacted my learning experience, I took a deliberate decision to treat it as a melting pot. This is less true of other spaces my great big digital feet tread. For example: I have two blogs (well, three, but we won't go into that third one right now), and I address two completely different groups of people. In my mind, I am writing for a person, an archetype, if you like. On this blog, you're it. On the other, it's someone else entirely. While I have LinkedIn contacts who are personal friends, I look on that as a purely professional space, and use it to pursue purely professional interests. I have two separate Twitter accounts: one for personal and eclectic bits and bobs, the other for learning-related contributions.

By contrast, my Facebook friends include people from my youth, people from my career path, people from my church, people from my leisure pursuits... and people that I've 'met' on Facebook, of course. And it has been fascinating to watch them interact with one another in reaction to something I've posted on my page.

But one thing has come home to me with a vengeance this past week, and that has to do with hospitality and the respect or abuse thereof.

My husband and I are rather hospitable souls who enjoy nothing more than having a house full of people to feed. We head up a team called Connect in our local church, where we take it upon ourselves to meet anyone new to the church and find out a bit about them. We then introduce them to other members of the congregation who share their interests or who are at a similar life stage. If you know me in person, you will know how perfectly suited I am to this role. The initial meeting with new folks happens in a small room off the main hall, where we serve coffee/tea and something to nibble... something I have baked myself. We like to treat people as if they are our guests.

We then take this one step further. Once a quarter or so, we host a dinner (a very informal dinner, mind) at our home, to which all recent visitors to the Connect room are invited, together with a few likely candidates for them to get to know. Once again, we have the host/guest thing going on.

But what has this got to do with Facebook, I hear you ask. Well, rather more than I would have thought, actually.

You see, I wouldn't expect the guests in the Connect room to be rude to us or to one another. I wouldn't expect visitors to my home to pick a fight with one another. Disagreement is fine, but healthy, respectful conversation is not an unreasonable expectation, I would have thought. And I feel the same about my Facebook page. After all, it is my Facebook page, and if you're there, you're there at my invitation. As my guest if you like. As I am, when I visit your page.

Recently, I felt I had to 'unfriend' someone I've known for more than 30 years. For the too-many-eth time, she mounted an aggressive, irrational attack on someone else on my page. Someone who didn't know who she was and who was too polite to retaliate in kind. She threw out insults left and right, many in shout-implying capital letters. She even took a few side-swipes at me.

Now, I don't want people being reluctant to come to my home because they're afraid my dog might attack them, or because they're afraid that X person will also be there. Similarly I don't want people being unwilling to comment on my Facebook posts for fear that one of my other friends will tear into them.

I love introducing people to people. I love to see those people form a new relationship that is independent of me. But if some of those people cannot respect my hospitality, I have to withdraw the invitation.

Not so?

Craig Taylor's open letter

Craig Taylor is a comparatively recent convert to social media as business tools, but he has taken the bit between his teeth. He spoke about the use of social media tools for workplace learning at the recent Learning Technologies conference, delivering one of the most engaging presentations I have seen in a long time. The guy's a natural!

His recent blog post has attracted a fair amount of interest. Well it would, wouldn't it, with a title like "An open letter to those organisations who block Social Media sites…"?

What makes the post particularly interesting is that Craig is using Livefyre for his comment stream. This alerts people who have been mentioned in the comment-versation. Paul Simbeck-Hampson decided to test this by mentioning me and a few others in a comment:

...and of course, I weighed in with my response, as did Jenna Langer and Jordan Kretch - the people behind Livefyre (I suspect that they won't be able to keep doing that if their app gains traction). Later, Kate Graham mentioned Jane Hart and hey presto, she popped in, too.

It's an interesting way to tag people and invite them into a conversation. I do have concerns that there might be some misuse, and that some users might resort to emotional blackmail/passive aggressive tactics to try to attract specific people to their sites. It remains to be seen.

But Craig's post (and the ensuing comments) could do with a little exposure to those who delude themselves into thinking that they can control staff behaviour by blocking access to social media spaces as a matter of course. To prove his point, this post was generated from his organisation's gents' room, using his phone.

Choosing whom to follow on Twitter

I can always tell when there has been a learning event somewhere in the world, because I suddenly get a whole raft of new Twitter followers coming through at once, instead of the trickle that is the daily norm.

I don't use any auto-refollow tools, so there is always a bit of a lag as I catch up, because I go through the list 'by hand' and decide whom to follow (or not).

I tweeted about this after the recent Learning Technologies conference and was asked:

This is a question I get quite often, so let me give a comprehensive answer in a space that affords me more than 140 characters for the purpose.

First, and almost without saying - no spambots, as David mentions. It isn't always easy to tell a spambot right off the bat - they're getting devilish smart. But a few indicators are:

• Their names are often firstname+number. So Maxine1234 (or something like that) would have me doubting her humanity from the outset. However, I do have some Twitter friends whose names are something along those lines, so it's just a rule of thumb, not an absolute.
• They tweet the same flipping thing (or a few very similar flipping things) over and over and over again.
• They have no biography.
• They follow thousands of people (and may be followed by a similarly large number), but have only ever tweeted a handful of times.

Second, I like to see a bio, and the more interesting or quirky it is, the better. For example, my Twitter friends' bios include such lines as:

• Dad, entrepreneur, and Star Wars freak (@dbswe)
• I'm all about learning, fashion, football, social media + cricket, not always in that order :) (@kategraham23)
• Often laughing. Always learning. Collaborating nonstop. You ready? (@marciamarcia)
• I'm passionate about training, L&D. I also bake fantastic chocolate cake. (@susiefinch)

You see? You know something about these people already. You know that Dave (@dbswe) takes being a Dad more seriously than he takes himself. You know that Kate defies stereotypes with girly girl interests and a love of sport. You know that Marcia is all systems go, and she'll take you with her if you give her half a chance. You know that Susie doubles as a homebody and would be good company over a cup of coffee. Real people. Just like you.

I also prefer a link to a blog/website, so I can get an idea of what floats your boat. If there is no bio or blog link, only a kick*ss series of tweets will get me following you.

If you're following me on my @learninganorak account, it must be because we share a passion for learning (I have a personal account for more eclectic musings). So I will visit your page, and see what you tweet about. If you only ever tweet quotable quotes, homilies and truisms forget it. I want to know what you think! If you only ever retweet (RT) what someone else has posted, hmm... probably forget it, too. I can read those things first time around. Don't get me wrong, I use the RT feature a lot myself, and I appreciate it when other people do, too. But if that's all you do, what value are you adding?

And if you only ever tweet about one narrow subject, such as LMSs or PSS or whatever, then after a couple of days, I'll probably have read everything you're likely to say.

Twitter is a conversation. A hectic, everyone-talking-at-once conversation, and it is my number 1 personal learning tool. So... contribute already.

I don't choose to follow only those people who agree with me. How boring would that be? I could sit at home and talk to myself (yes, you're right - I do that, too!), but if you're going to disagree (with me or anyone else), be grown-up about it. I can't be doing with name-calling, peeing contests (to put it politely) and slanging matches.

I think that's about it, really. I know it sounds like a lot, but I'm not really that precious. I do follow over 900 people, and keeping up with them is a tall order. How people manage with thousands, I have no idea! Maybe I'll find out one day.

Job hunting with social media

As you know, I have been job-hunting lately. And I've been thinking about the history of job-hunting... or at least my experience of it.

My first few jobs were part-time or holiday affairs while at school and drama school, and they were a case of word of mouth. I was advised by someone in the know that John Orr's was looking for holiday sales staff for the Christmas rush. I was advised that Communikon School of Performing Arts was looking for part-time drama teachers. I was advised that the provincial board needed adjudicators for drama eisteddfods. This was in the very late 70's and early 80's.

Once I graduated from drama school, and while I was waiting to be discovered by Hollywood (or at least the SABC), I found a couple of jobs in the small ads of the local newspaper. This was in the early 80's.

My first office job was found via newspaper ads, again. But this time, it was a feature ad. The same applied to my next office job.

In much the same way (feature ads in the newspaper), I found a job at a theatre agency in Cape Town, but I treat this one separately, because this job led to my getting a few photographic modelling assignments and a contract as a TV presenter (at which I sucked, royally).

During this phase, I met and married my husband. For a year after this, I tried and failed to find a steady, 'proper' job. Of course, my efforts were never enough to please the in laws, who felt that I was sponging off their son. This was in the late 80's, and my search consisted of cold-calling and responding to newspaper ads. It was soul-destroying. But I took every opportunity to upskill, and did run the occasional computer applications training course (as they were then known) during the dry spell. This was to prove the best move I'd ever made. After nearly a year, I finally landed a job working in a learning centre... and found my vocation. The company that had set up the learning centre was way ahead of its time for the market, and the initiative didn't take off. I found myself back on the job market within 16 months. But this time, I had built up something of a network and a reputation.

I went freelance. I tapped the network for opportunities, and they came. I worked as a freelance training consultant until we left South Africa, fitting my career around my children. During this time, I got to work with some of the big names of South African industry, as well as taking on ad hoc overflow work for specialist training organisations. I was offered a few chances to take full-time posts with some of my clients, but, with my husband's full support, I opted not to accept them. I will never regret having been able to be a hands-on Mom, even though it almost certainly impacted my career development.

When we arrived in the UK, in 1999, I took a year out to settle the family in to our new home. By the time I started job hunting again, it was via the local newspapers. I took a part time job at an FE college. We had pretty much decided that I would go back to work full time only once both our sons were in secondary school. However, I continued to scan the papers for opportunities. When a 'perfect fit' full time job came up earlier than expected, we decided to take the plunge. The office was 3 miles from home. I could make the trip in 7 minutes. Our kids were 11 and 9, and would be home alone for 1.5 hours each afternoon. We lived in a safe neighbourhood. This was 2002.

During this period, the Internet began to come into its own as a place to go job hunting. I found and applied for my next job via the world wide web. I felt so modern! This was 2005.

In 2008, the wheels fell off and I found myself at a crossroads. I decided to take the plunge and go back to being self-employed. But it had got a whole lot more complicated since my last shot at it. And I was under pressure to earn more, because our commitments had been based on what I had been earning while working for 'the man'. That was in 2008. I did look for alternatives, and didn't find a whole heck of a lot, so the Learning Anorak was launched.

Now that that venture is coming to an enforced close, I am job hunting again.... and it looks very different.

I have automated searches in place with several of the biggest recruitment agencies. Almost daily, there are jobs I can apply for. Sadly, as I have mentioned before, the first-line screeners are not the very clued up. They are utterly unable to identify that skills in X map across to requirements for Y. So I get turned down for a lot of jobs I could do blindfolded... sometimes within minutes of submitting my application.

I also check out the online vacancies pages of some of the organisations I am consciously targetting. This is a huge plus.

But I am also able to be far more pro-active than before. When I was job hunting way back in 1988/9, I was at a loss as to what else I could do. Other than cold-calling and responding to ads, what was there? Especially in a city in which I was unknown (ergo, no network). This time around, I have put feelers out across the network, which is global. I have made my position known on Facebook, LinkedIn and Twitter. I have written a blog post. And all of those have taken several hits.

The support from my beloved community, while thus far not yielding anything, has been enormously comforting. Harold Jarche even created a hashtag for me on Twitter (#YesYouShouldHireKaryn). Okay, so it didn't get a lot of take-up, but the fact is that he did it. It was a very kind gesture from someone who has become a real friend, even though we have never met face to face. This is the beauty of the network. And it didn't go unnoticed. Someone, a complete stranger to me tweeted something to the effect that he didn't know who this @karynromeis person was, but she must be worth hiring, based on the support she's getting from Twitter "big hitters".

I have had several job offers, actually, but all of them have been spam, bar one. The one genuine job offer I received was at a lower rate of pay than I was getting 5 years ago, and involved 3 hours of commuting time every day. It wasn't easy to pass up on the bird in hand, but I decided that I had to. The level of sacrifice by my whole family simply wouldn't be worth it. Fortunately, my incredible husband has been staunchly supportive. He simply will not have me sell myself short. He has always had more faith in me than I do in myself.

It remains to be seen if this method of job hunting yields something more quickly than previous methods have done.

Watch this space.

Amber Naslund on the ROI of social media

Here is a woman whose point of view very closely reflects my own. There are some things that simply cannot be quantified.

I can’t believe nor understand how many companies can’t also accept the fact that deeper and broader personal connections can net stronger business ties, too, whether or not you can capture the data proof points that bear that out. It’s been that way since the dawn of time.

Read the whole post here.

Edublog awards 2010

The 2010 award nominations are now open. Nominations are invited in the following categories:

• Best individual blog
• Best individual tweeter
• Best group blog
• Best new blog
• Best class blog
• Best student blog
• Best resource sharing blog
• Most influential blog post
• Most influential tweet / series of tweets / tweet based discussion
• Best teacher blog
• Best librarian / library blog
• Best School Administrator blog
• Best educational tech support blog
• Best elearning / corporate education blog
• Best educational use of audio
• Best educational use of video / visual
• Best educational wiki
• Best educational podcast
• Best educational webinar series
• Best educational use of a social networking
• Best educational use of a virtual world
• Best use of a PLN
• Lifetime achievement

You will notice that the list includes things like wikis, Twitter, webinars, podcasts, PLNs, social networking and so on.... so it's no longer just about blogs, per se.

Nominations can be made in a variety of ways. Find out more here.

On being Google-able

Today my Twitter stream includes this observation from Rob Brown.

Being anonymous does not serve your purposes. If people find nothing about you online, they move on to the next candidate.

I was surprised that this has been his experience. It is certainly not mine. Although my CV contains links to various parts of my digital footprint, I have found that these are seldom followed. When applying for jobs or bidding for work, I openly invite people to research me online to gain fuller picture of the person behind the application/bid/tender.

On one occasion, I applied for a particular job at a large organisation which claims to be progressive and innovative. The man who would line manage the role set up a phone interview. In preparation, I googled him, and partway into the interview, I asked a question based on something I had learned from this research.

He was slightly taken aback and asked, "How did you know that?"
"I googled you," I explained.

There was a pause.

"You did what?"
"I googled you. I did a search on your name on Google. I had already researched the company, and I wanted to learn a bit about you. After all, we would be working together."

The whole interview changed after that. Not only had he not done any research into me, but he was affronted that I had taken this bold step. To him, what I had done was tantamount to stalking. I might as well have rifled through his garbage can and taken photos of his wife collecting his kids from school.

I wanted to have the argument with him. To explain that, if you put stuff out there in public space, it is with the tacit understanding that people can and will access it. I wanted to point out how much more he could have known about me, had he reciprocated.

But there seemed to be no point. There was no way he was going to hire me after that. Besides, I wasn't sure that there would be space for me in an organisation which didn't seek to leverage every available means of effective talent management.

Bearing in mind that I work in the field of online learning, and the beneficial use of social media in the workplace, you would think that my (very) public profile would take a lot of hits from people considering doing business with me.

I wish.

Jane Bozarth: Social Media for Trainers

This new book by Dr Jane Bozarth is currently enjoying a 'blog tour'. Today is the turn of this blog.

I'm not going to make any attempt to do a full book review. However, I would like to suggest that this is an important and timely publication.

In my line of work, I come into contact with many classroom based trainers who see social media as something 'other' having nothing to do with them. One of the primary reasons the book needed to be written and now needs to be read, can be found pretty much within the very first paragraph of the books itself:

Those in need of information need it—and need to know how to find it—in the moment, not when the training department happens to offer it. And they have learned to find that information from one another, rather than depend on traditional, slow, inefficient, and often inaccurate top-down means. It is critical, if workplace trainers intend to remain viable and credible, that they understand how to participate in the networks and use the social media tools to extend their reach and enhance the development of the employees they are charged with developing.

The book starts with the basics of what social media are, how they can be used in training and which ones to select.

It then moves on to looking at a few social media in greater depth: Twitter, Facebook, Blogs and Wikis, as well as a few 'other tools'.

The book can be found in print and as an ebook at the following places:

Pfeiffer
Amazon UK (it also available at Amazon US and Amazon Canada)
Barnes & Noble
Borders

There is also a Facebook page, a Twitter account and a Twitter hashtag (#SoMe4Trainers).

The challenge (as always) is to get this book in front of the unconvinced. Fortunately, Christmas is coming! ;o)

Where the heck have I been?

You find in me in not such a very good place, right now.

A sequence of events - both good and bad - has taken place at such breakneck speed as to leave me little time to think or breathe. Life has been lived in a purely reactive mode, and only the noisiest wheel has been oiled at every moment.

I have hardly blogged. I have Facebooked only superficially and largely only socially. I have Twittered only sporadically. I have not worked at all. There has been neither the pressing need, nor the time. Instead, I have graduated. I have taken my mother on day trips hither and yon. I have prepared for a momentous event (more of that anon). I have taken a family holiday.

But now the dust has settled.

The problem is that is has left me space to reflect far too much on the most recent and most momentous of the events, namely my elder son's departure for his gap year in Australia.

Another of the events that took place was the loss of a major contract that was to have kept me busy for about 12 months, while supplying a source of income for the same period. The loss of that contract - under slightly fishy circumstances, to say the least - has left me with the double bogey of financial concerns and too much time to grieve.

Because it is grief.

Even though my son has only gone for a year, his departure has left such a great, gaping hole in my life that I found (find) myself bereft.

Even this provides the opportunity to learn. Geek that I am.

I have learnt about a parent's capacity for self sacrifice and for simultaneous multiple heartaches.

For much of their lives, we have encouraged our sons to take a year out after school to go and work abroad. To try out the parental value set for size and adjust it for a more personal fit. To discover what it means to have to earn and pay your way. To see a different culture going about the daily business of doing things that you have always done a certain way by default.

I always viewed it from the perspective of my sons and the benefits they would reap from such an experience.

However, as the departure date for the first of these experiences loomed nearer, it dawned on me what the experience was going to be like for me. I'd never thought about the impact on my life. I began to dread it. I changed my mind. I didn't want my boy going to the other side of the world, where I couldn't reach him in an emergency. Part of me realised that this was part of the point. Another part of me realised that I was going to be learning about letting go as much as my son was going to be learning about becoming independent. I could only think about how un-prepared he was.

But I learned through bitter experience many years ago, that "it is possible to do something important for someone precious, even while it rips your heart out". These were the very words I recently wrote to the 'someone precious' who was at the heart of that first bitter lesson. And I also learned that I have a parent's capacity to take on personal pain for the benefit of your kids. I was rather pleased at this discovery. Looking back over my life, there has been ample evidence of it before. It is only now that I have formally recognised it for what it is.

In the midst of all this, there is my younger son. He was inconsolable after his brother left, and I felt his grief in addition to my own. Every time I found him in tears, I would realise afresh the extent to which a parent can carry two griefs simultaneously.

I also realise that my younger son is being forced to witness in advance the impact of his own gap year departure on us. My husband is stoic and Scandinavian, and bears his pain much better than I do. So it is my grief that is the danger. I so desperately do not want my son to decide that he cannot bring himself to be responsible for such heartache... especially since his departure is likely to result in an empty nest, leaving his parents rattling around their rather large house.

I have watched my younger son try to step out of his more naturally self-contained mode to supply the hugs and cuddles that are his brother's habit to bestow upon me - not because it is in my elder son's nature to be tactile, but because, with the alarming insight that he has always had, he identified early on that I needed that physical contact.

I always knew that this was going to hurt like the dickens. I have learnt over the past week just how much a dickens hurts.

I have always known that parenting is difficult. I am discovering just how difficult it can be, and realising that it could be way worse.

I am grateful for Facebook and Skype and text messages. These things have turned the world into a much smaller place, and I am able to have real-time and almost-real-time contact with my son quite frequently. These technologies that I tried to look at so hard as professional learning and development tools (and they are, I haven't changed my stance on that), are also a way for keeping families intact across the miles.

Of course, I should have realised that, since I also swanned off to the other side of the world, leaving my own mother behind. But it tastes a different colour from the parental perspective.

What I now need to learn is how not to try to be awake during the waking hours of both my sons when they live 7 time zones apart.

Zzzzzz.....

On belonging

Like most people, I have a strong need to belong. To feel accepted. Like most people, I am also picky about where it is that I am accepted and by whom.

When I originally started blogging, I stood in awe of the likes of Kathy Sierra and Stephen Downes (among others). I hovered on the sidelines of the spaces they inhabited and then grew brave enough to contribute my twopenn'orth to the conversations they were having. For different reasons, neither of these two people are particularly strong on responding to blog comments - Kathy (who no longer blogs, to my knowledge) received so many comments that she was physically unable to respond to them all; Stephen believes that his readers' comments have validity in and of themselves, without needing his affirmation or validation (or so I seem to recall from somewhere... blowed if I can find where he said it). At one point, I posted something that took an opposing stance to something Stephen had said and almost fell off my chair when he spread a little link love and referred to my post in his OLDaily the next day.

It was this kind of acceptance that made me feel as if I belonged. And social media are great for this. They are such levellers. For example, to extend the Downes story for a moment, the nature of the relationship I have with Stephen has become increasingly relaxed over the years, as we have become connected in a wider range of social media spaces, to the point where we engage on personal issues as well as shared professional interests.

Switching tack for a moment, let's look at this belonging thing from a slightly different angle:

Because of a quirk of genetics, I always found it very difficult to find clothes that fitted me. I was the woman who hated clothes shopping, because after three stores full of nothing that fitted me, I began to feel like a freak. Things that fitted here, didn't close there, and things that closed there, hung like a sack everywhere else.

Then a wonderful woman called Sarah Tremellen established Bravissimo, an outlet for... well, check it out for yourself.

I don't know who developed her marketing plan, or whether she is naturally insightful, but she has formed a community for women who - like me - had to put up with all the strife that goes with being the shape that we are: quite apart from the struggle to find decent clothing, there are the assumptions about our morals and our intelligence levels, the ribald remarks, the failed attempts to conduct professional conversations with men who later wouldn't recognise your face if their lives depended on it.

I was an early adopter of Bravissimo and am a fan of just about everything about it: the decor in the stores, the defiant quotes on the walls, the professional fitting service. But most of all, I love that I can walk out of their stores feeling like a shapely woman, rather than a freak.

Recently, I was in one of their fitting rooms, when I overheard a woman in the next cubicle make a discovery: due to significant recent weight loss, she no longer fell within Bravissimo's target audience. The store no longer catered to her. She was utterly crestfallen as she said, "It looks like I'm just not a Bravissimo girl any more."

Why do I relate this story?

Because, in spite of the fact that the woman in question had achieved goal weight and all the attendant health and aesthetic benefits, in spite of the fact that she could now buy clothing from any high street store at a significantly lower price, she had effectively ousted herself from the community, and that was causing her genuine distress. And yet, one becomes a member of the Bravissimo community in the first place as a consequence of being excluded from all manner of other communities.

The difference is that Bravissimo deliberately fosters that sense of community, that sense of belonging.

As we build our learning environments and create our communication spaces, let's look for ways to foster that same sense of being part of something that make a person feel special. Something they will be reluctant to leave.

Corporate Learning at eLearning Africa

Edit note: Please note that I have just discovered that my carefully recorded voiceovers in the PowerPoint presentation below don't work in SlideShare. If anyone has a suggestion as to how to fix this (since my slides are meaningless without audio), please let me know!

By contrast with ICWE's annual Online Educa in Berlin, eLearning Africa focused predominantly on formal, institutional learning. Corporate learning didn't occupy a lot of space either on the programme or within the venue. Our session was scheduled for what f2f trainers call the graveyard shift (straight after lunch) on the first day, and we did have a few dozers, it has to be said.

The first speaker was Mads Bo-Kristensen from Videnscenter for Integration in Denmark. He spoke about tools in use in Denmark to assist immigrants in gaining proficiency in 'business Danish' to enable them to communicate within the workplace. I can see enormous potential for a tool like this within Africa. It is a hugely multilingual continent. Every country boasts innumerable 'local languages' and speakers of all these languages must work together within large organisations. Quite apart from this, aid workers coming to the continent could fare much better with skills in these local languages.

Next up was Mehdi Tounsi from Gatlin International in France. Mehdi is Algerian and we found immediate synergy in the fact that we hail from African countries that often do not refer to themselves as such... and in the fact that we both consider ourselves African in spite of this. Mehdi spoke about a sustainable and affordable business model for e-enabled learning in Africa.

To my surprise, the challenge to both their presentations came from the young, outspoken delegates who have been educated abroad. One of these told us that Africa is not ready for elearning because the generation currently holding teaching posts had not learned to use computers at school. Another told us that Africa was not culturally suited to elearning. I promised to address both these points in my own presentation. I have recorded more or less the same words over the slides (I didn't really use notes... as usual), so here it is:

Putting the learner in the driver's seat

View more presentations from Learning Anorak Ltd.

During the question and answer session that followed, one of the young bucks was arguing a point about learning, when I realised that he was referring to an academic situation. I tried to explain that I was talking about workplace learning. Learning on the job. The young man knitted his brows and looked at me blankly. And he was not the only one. If it isn't an academic course of study with an accreditation at the end of it, it fell outside of the frame of reference for many of the people present, even though I had so carefully crafted my story about Abi and his workplace learning needs.

The other started up again about his contention that older people in Africa had not encountered computers in school, so I pointed out that I was an older person, educated in Africa without computers... and yet I did this stuff for a living. I was a bit irked that he was prepared to write off his entire continent as beyond e-redemption based on this flimsy fact and it must have showed, because the chairman had to pull me up.

I maintain that social learning absolutely fits with African culture, but like the rest of the world, Africa has to break faith with the idea of the instructor/teacher/whatever as sage on the stage. One teacher in a pre-conference workshop emphasised the social structure of the classroom dynamic and spoke of the need to retain it. This is not unfamiliar territory to those of us who have been championing the social learning cause for a while, but these traditions run perhaps a little deeper in Africa than elsewhere.

One young man informed us in our corporate learning session that we must walk before we can run. I was disappointed. I had hoped that my anecdotes of TV and passenger flights had demonstrated that this was not a requirement.

Who knows? Next year perhaps the ethos will be subtly different.

It is worth noting that there were several delegates on Twitter and Facebook throughout the conference, using these tools with the easy confidence of seasoned social media pundits.

On social media policies in the workplace

TrainingZone magazine is running an interesting article by Neil Davey, looking at the rise of social media in the workplace.

Of course, many organisations have a blanket ban on the use of such media... or at least, they think they do. A closer inspection will almost certainly reveal the presence of all manner of social tools in the workplace. This tells me a few things.

Firstly, the understanding among senior execs (and even the IT gatekeepers) of what constitutes social media is often as full of holes as a Swiss cheese, which results in inconsistent bans and rules. So there are often workarounds to access various social media.

Secondly, people are more resourceful than management gives them credit for. Where such bans are in place, many users are resorting to using their phones to access them. At a recent Twitter workshop, several attendees 'owned up' to using Twitter via their phones because of the ban at work.

Thirdly, the 'threat' aspect has been identified, but the 'potential benefit' aspect has been ignored. Davey's article picks up on one significant aspect of this and cites Ann Bevitt of Morrison Foerster:

"Although employers cannot control employees’ use of social networking sites outside the workplace, they can provide guidance where such use could be associated with employees’ employment. For example, if employees choose to identify themselves as employees in their personal social networking activities, they should be encouraged to make clear that any views expressed are their own and not those of their employer. Moreover, no links should be provided to employers’ websites."

This harks back to a topic I have touched on many times - that grey area. Let's look at a hypothesis:

Kate is a designer at ColourCoded, a clothing manufacturer whose lines are aimed at women who have been colour-coded and had their ideal palettes identified. In her spare time, she likes to go hiking.

When Kate engages in social media spaces about the various trails she has hiked, she is on safe territory. She can even develop a global reputation as the go-to person on the difficulty grading of the various hiking trails. No problem.

Kate's employer may have noted her skill with words and they may choose to include social media engagement among her official duties. Part of her job may be to look after ColourCoded's social media presence. This is also relatively safe territory, because the ground rules can be laid down. The dos and don'ts identified.

Where the ground gets shaky is when Kate starts to engage in her personal capacity in social media spaces on the topic of clothing: what styles to wear, what fabrics work for whom, what colours people should wear, etc. It is very tough to lay down the guidelines for her presence in this space, without encroaching on Kate's right to freedom of expression.

This is an area Davey has addressed in his article:

"Organisations – particularly those at the larger end of the spectrum – are faced with an enormous task when it comes to identifying and responding to all of the conversations, questions and posts taking place online about their brand. Businesses need the extra eyes that their employees provide. But by giving their staff carte blanche to respond to any and every post they find, they run a very serious risk of damaging the brand reputation, rather than improving. Any message by an employee that isn’t in line with the company message, or that is offensive or unprofessional, will reflect badly on the brand. The business either media trains every person on its payroll, or risks unleashing a firm’s load of loose cannons onto the web."

I'm not sure that the idea of training every person on the payroll has legs, and, as you know by now, I have an enormous fondness for loose cannons (being one myself). But most organisations have clauses in their employment contracts about damage to the organisation's reputation. Mouthing off down the pub has never really been looked upon with favour, and we're more or less in the same sort of waters, here, albeit with the potential for exponentially increased impact.

I would suggest that guidelines should be set in place - every organisation must consider its reputation, after all. I would further suggest that the organisation should have some form of online induction process, with a link to a range of tools that can provide guidance on company policy on a range of issues (including social media usage). Staff members should be able to access the organisation's policy documents on any subject at any point... and these should be easy to find (it's remarkable that I have any hair left, considering the experiences I have had trying to find policy documents in the past) and easy to read. Policy documents should also be reviewed and revised every now and again, and staff members should be involved in this process.

Staff members should be expected to consider the organisation's reputation, too, and be held to account when their actions are considered to have done damage.

However, the 'training every staff member' thing smacks to me just a little of the sort of butt-covering box-ticking compliance that makes me shudder. It runs the risk of, "Right, we mentioned once during your training course 2 years ago that this was not permitted, so you're fired."

I would like to see an approach that is more dynamic than that, and one which engages the staff members directly, rather than being handed down to them from on high.

So you think social media are for socialising, huh?

Jane Hart, who can be relied upon to have her finger on the pulse, is building up a series of case studies of the use of social media "INTERNALLY for social and collaborative learning and/or performance and productivity improvement".

The examples (at the time of writing) include British Telecom; Pearson; BUPA; WWF; Nationwide and NASA. And the list os growing. If you'd like to add to it, please get in touch with Jane via the link on her site.

Twitter v IM: a micro-reflection

Donald Clark shared via his Facebook status that "while 7 out of 10 teens use social networking websites like Facebook, only 1 in 12 teens use Twitter - Pew Internet and American Life Project - survey middle of last year 12-17 year olds."

I located said report and found it interesting reading. You might, too, if your life includes teenagers.

One caveat I found quite telling was that "the question wording for teens is quite different from how the question was posed to adults so the results are not strictly comparable."

That said, it seems that only 8% of online American teens use Twitter, while the figure for adults is 19%. It should be noted, however, that the figure for adults varies hugely across different age bands, showing a steady decline from the 37% of 18-24 year olds to just 4% of those over the age 65. So it seems that between their 17th and 18th birthdays, American teenagers experience the sudden urge to make the shift to Twitter. I wonder why? The report suggests that it "may be partially due to our question wording capturing status updates on social networking sites."

But enough of that, I wanted to focus on the 'only 8% of all teens' bit.

My own teenagers are avid users of instant messaging and have been for several years, now. Their usage patterns would not be supported by Twitter.

For example:

• They use a lot of emoticons
• They use extensive font formatting
• They frequently use more than 140 characters per message
• They conduct huge numbers of 1:1 conversations simultaneously, sharing private thoughts they would never dream of sharing in a single, multi-user stream (connected in parallel, rather than in series?)
• They change their user names often, using these as a mini status to reflect their mood, their (frequently) changing romantic status or a significant event in their lives
• They use web cams as part of their conversations (and some parents would be appalled to know some of the uses to which their teenagers put these cameras!)

Of course, this is just a single snapshot, based on my observations of my own sons and their friends, and does not constitute research. But I throw my snapshot into the pool to be aggregated with the rest of the fragments.

Graeme Duncan suggests (on Donald's FB page) "My hypothesis is kids use these media as communication tools but like it to be network building and relationship building. Twitter is a broadcast media not a two way communication channel whilst FB, MSN, etc etc are profile builders and also communication channels."

I have to say that I use Twitter to engage in conversations with people. Many of my messages start with @someone-or-other. But Donald has a view on that, too, to wit: "Spot on Graeme - Twitter is boomeresque (new word!) in that it plays to our need to either receive or transmit, not share and engage in dialogue. Even on Facebook, we're the exception to the rule -far too many boomers simply post their own entries and don't respond - you two [that would be Graeme and me] are very much the exceptions."

I'm trying to decide whether to forgive him for calling me a "boomer". I'm too young for that label, and he should know it ;o)