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.

The secret history of the brain

For those who are in a position to access BBC programmes, either in real time, or on iPlayer, I would like to recommend that you catch BBC4's The Brain: A Secret History. It is a documentary about the history of experimental psychology, and the first of three episodes ran last night at 9pm GMT.

As I had expected, it was simultaneously enlightening and deeply disturbing. There was coverage, including direct video footage of several of the experiments we've read about or studied: Pavlov, Skinner, Milgram et al.

The cruelty to animals and the breathtaking lack of concern for people's human rights beggars belief, as always; and the views expressed by some of the experimental researchers in their heyday fills me with impotent rage. At one point, my husband had to leave the room. I think I might have followed if this were my first exposure to the concepts. As it is, my exposure to the work of the likes of Pavlov and Skinner dates back to the Time Life Library series which my mother acquired when I was about 7 or 8, and the issue that addressed this subject was one I returned to so many times that it eventually fell to bits.

I was an by the time I first heard of Stanley Milgram and his eponymous experiment. My very first reaction was to ask whether the naieve subjects were given counselling afterwards to help them cope with the revelation of what they were prepared to do to another human being. I mean: how do you make peace with such knowledge about yourself? Last night's episode included an interview with one of the few surviving subjects, and it was plain that the man is still traumatised, nearly 50 years later! There are times when one doesn't want to be vindicated. For me, this was one of them.

Coverage of electroshock therapy included a case study of one young woman institutionalised for brain reconditioning by her mother because of arguments about a new boyfriend. This involved interviews with the (now much older) woman herself... well, suffice to say I was seething. Nevertheless, it is heartening to see that the human mind is more resilient than expected.

The show is presented by psychiatrist Michael Mosley, who at one point takes a hallucinogen as part of the programme. His passion for his subject is infectious, although I might be the wrong person to make that call, since I had a pre-existing fascination with the subject.

Did anyone else catch it? What were your views?

Exploring mentalities and mindsets

I find it fascinating to explore what motivates people to behave the way they do. The more I understand about what motivates people, the more likely I am to create engaging resources.

Yesterday, as I drove along the winding country road to fetch my son from work, no fewer than four times did I come around a bend to be faced by a car taking the bend hell for leather from the other side, encroaching onto my side of the road. In one instance car was plumb in the centre of the road (which a friend of mine refers to as 'taking your half out of the middle'). On that occasion, we narrowly avoided a collision, because there was nowhere for me to go: an embankment came all the way up to the edge of the tarmac on my side. On the other three occasions, I had to mount the grass verge to avoid a partial head-on.

I know that I am a particularly defensive driver. These other folks, I would hazard to say, are plainly not. Why not? Why do I drive differently from them? Have two near-fatal collisions in my life have given me a glimpse of my own mortality and fragility? Is it because I'm a Mom and have become accustomed to protective parent mode? Do I care more about my car than they do theirs? Am I over-cautious? Are they thoughtless? Do they have that same sense of 'it won't happen to me' that sees people having unprotected sex or experimenting with addictive drugs? Do they rely on the other person giving way (a kind of 'chicken')? Are they playing the odds that no-one will come from the other side in the few seconds it takes them to get through the bend?

If you're someone who drives like my four close encounters yesterday, I'm really curious to know. What goes through your mind as you cross over the white line on that bend?

Entitlement and the impostor syndrome

Responses to my post yesterday have got me thinking about what Artichoke tells me is called Impostor Syndrome (BTW Artichoke's is one of the few pseudonymous blogs still in my reading list).

So let's look at this for a moment.

Until recently, my drive to work every morning took me past a private high school. In spite of the head teacher's protestations to the contrary ("our student body represents wide socio-economic diversity"), the student body is drawn largely from the haves and have yachts. I am fairly confident of this, because I made enquiries there when looking for schools for my own sons, and I know what it costs. There is a pedestrian crossing (with traffic lights) across one section of the road, and an elevated pedestrian bridge across another, so that the boys can cross in safety. Nevertheless, many of the boys choose to ignore both these provisions and cross the road in between the heavy traffic. Many is the time I have had to slam on anchors to avoid a tragedy. The boys themselves make no effort to look before crossing - they simply step out. They make no acknowledgement of those who have had to stop for them. They seldom bother even to look in the direction of the motorist. On one occasion, when it had been a little too close for comfort, I hit my hooter. The child in question laughed at me. There is no aggression, no middle finger, no "Yeah, what of it?" defiance. Simply what appears to be an assumption of entitlement.

I wonder if that doesn't come with the territory of being privileged. Almost all these kids are male (they only have girls in the post-16 section of the school). Most of them are white. With the exception of those on scholarships, they are from wealthy homes.

The comments on yesterday's post seem to indicate that the being male bit is no defence against impostor syndrome (although a handful of comments hardly constitutes a valid sample), although there seems to have been a fair amount of research that indicates that it is more prevalent among women.

I have a view that socio-economic conditioning might also play a role. If you have been raised to 'know your place'. If your parents, grandparents, etc. were manual labourers, you might grow up with the intrinsic and extrinsic expectation that you, too, will work with your hands, rather than your head. I wonder, for example, if those on scholarships at the school I waffled on about earlier don't often experience this sense of impostor-ship. Even your own parents might be somewhat put out if you get 'ideas above your station'. My first brother-in-law (ex-brother-in-law? brother-out-law?) was the sixth of eight children... and the first to want to finish high school. His mother wouldn't hear of it. All his siblings had left at 16 and gone to the railways to get a trade. He was not to think he was any better than they were. He should go and serve his apprenticeship and get a railway house like the rest of them! My sister was never approved of by the other wives, because she had 'airs and graces'. Actually, my sister is a pretty down to earth person without a single air or grace, but I suspect her comparitively high level of erudition made them uncomfortable. They were very 'I told you so' when the marriage failed, and rather relieved to see the back of her.

I wonder whether there might not even be an ethnic/cultural factor in societies where prejudices exist (I guess that might well be everywhere!). I was marginally involved in the establishment of an affirmative action programme within a company in Cape Town in the early 90's. It was an exciting time in South Africa, and it was a wonderful challenge to seek out the diamonds in the rough among the previously disadvantaged communities and offer them development opportunities previously witheld from them. Watching a person blossom as they see their horizons expand... well, can there be anything more rewarding? Of course, where people from these groups were promoted to supervisory and management positions, there were all sorts of hurdles to overcome. Not only were the employees unaccustomed to reporting to, say, a black woman, but the new supervisor/manager had to be sympathetically supported to overcome what I now recognise as impostor syndrome. Sadly, this find-and-develop approach was seen as being too slow. There were not enough quick wins. So a window-dressing approach was adopted, and people were appointed left and right on the basis of gender and skin colour... which was a tactic that had been applied before, only this time it was a different gender and a different skin colour than before. The transformation was fast and largely unsupported, which meant that Impostor Syndrome became like the elephant in the corner that everybody carefully avoids mentioning.

If you hear something said often enough from early enough, you begin to believe that it's true. Similarly, if you never hear something said at all, you are likely to assume that it does not apply to you. It's why so many parenting books advocate that we do not tell our children "you are naughty"/"you stupid boy" but rather, "that was a naughty/stupid thing to do".

So I reckon that Impostor Syndrome might be the outworking of all our stereotyping, and shaking off the conditioning of a lifetime that tells you you are unworthy... well, I guess that might take another lifetime. Or perhaps an epiphany like Janet seems to have had (see her comment on my post yesterday).

As to why it should be so prevalent among 'gifted' people... well, that's a mystery to me! Perhaps I'll understand it better when I've read the books jammasterjay recommended.

Faking it

Edit: Apologies to Clarita, who should have been acknowledged for the photo used in this post.

During an exchange of emails with my MA programme course leader today, I had a proper, fullblown panic attack.

As you will know if you've been reading this blog for a while, I failed an assignment earlier this year. All my other assignments had been assessed as being of merit or distinction standard. This was the one I felt most confident about going in and I was utterly certain it would net me another distinction grade. The impact of that fail extended far beyond just the course and I have yet to get back on track.

My course leader was making enquiries about my progress and the exchange of emails forced me to look into the abyss.

I had to acknowledge that I felt humiliated. Unmasked as a fraud. Exposed as an imposter masquerading as a member of the intelligentsia.

To my surprise, I was informed that this is very common among female academics, this sense of being a fake, and this terror of being unmasked as such. Apparently this has been researched, although she did not reference her assertion (tut, tut).

Of course, I'm not really an academic - I'm the token corporate anomaly in the cohort, but the principle probably still applies. It's not a constant, though. I am not afraid to challenge a client's perceptions and I relish informed debate with other learning professionals (as long as it doesn't get ugly... then you won't see me for dust). In those situations, I ooze confidence.

So I'm curious. Do the other women out there secretly feel that they're faking it and fear discovery, or is that idea past it's sell-by date? And, come to that, do men actually feel the same deep down and just adopt a more pragmatic approach to that feeling?