I’ve been thinking a bit about how there is almost a generational divide between those of us whose experiences have been dominated by broadcast and narrative, and those who are much more attuned to interactivity and gaming – either as players or creators.
I’ve written this up here in preparation for on occassional series of meetups as part of the Political Innovation project.
So far, the advice here has been….
Short posts are good. It’s good to pick up on bits of evidence that others have posted – you do two things here:
You add value to their observations or data – and you broaden the audience for it.
I’ve already used this quote from Flannery O’Connor in an earlier post, but it deserves a revisit:
‘I write because I don’t know what I think until I read what I say.’
Think about what that means? Thinking in public allows you to show your thought processes and reduce suspicions that you’re being self-serving in your decisions. Continue reading →
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The Hive Mind of the Internet (click pic for credit)
In a couple of previous postings here, I underlined the importance of targeting, and the need to make sure that your work is being followed by the key people that you need to influence (advocacy targets, colleagues, connectors and mavens, etc).
This post will qualify that slightly. Numbers also matter. While it’s important to have a selected close-group of readers, there are also plenty of techniques that can be used to grow the number of followers you have within defined audience-groups, either using Twitter, LinkedIn or (if you’re OK about doing it) Facebook.
And if you have a well-established and well-marketed blog, lots of Facebook friends or Twitter followers, you are able to do something that most people can’t do: Crowdsource intelligence.
This is where you throw out a question to a large number of people. If even a small fraction of that large number give you quick light answers, it may give you some data or judgements that you wouldn’t have access to normally. You can access the hive mind of the Internet. This is another aspect of my ‘downgrade your inbox‘ advice’.
The first tip in this series urged leadership bloggers to decide who they were writing for and to focus on this audience.
LinkedIn: Undervalued as a means of targeting your work
Subsequent tips have looked at how you do this with your writing and how you handle subsequent interaction. But there’s also the mechanics of getting those all-important eyeballs on your work.
Remember, though there’s a fair bit of new stuff in here, the aim is to reduce your overall workload and increase your influence. The pain of the learning curve (and there’s not much rocket-science here) has to be worth it in the end.
Here are a few options – all tips that are ultimately labour-saving ones (even if they don’t feel like it now). In some cases, if you suspect that the idea isn’t a good fit with your personal style, discard it. Continue reading →
Mashable has a widely re-circulated post saying that spam is on the way out. Apparently there’s 82.22% less than there was a year ago because of various enforcement measure (cops, ISPs etc). There’s also the alarming other side to the story: That malware is a growing menace.
I’d suggest that this landmark provides a useful context for helping to understand social media more widely – after all, understanding what it’s for is the first step in knowing how to use it.
At the start of 2004, Bill Gates said that spam would be trounced within two years. How we laughed (in 2006 anyway). Continue reading →
If you’re thinking of developing a website for your business or organisation, you can use Google to find a few articles with standard boilerplate advice about using wireframes, the linear-thinking alternative, the Project Initiation Document (PiD) with a conclusion that you should really be digging the dynamic and hip agile approach to planning your work.
Combine this with the expensive but cost-effective disciplines of usability and user experience (UX) testing, the undoubted boost any online project gets from a dapper innovative design, the need for careful use-cases, the search engine optimisation and general consultant-yield and you have a hefty build and a busily billing development team.
But maybe there’s another way? It may be that the improvisational benefits of having creative staff with some slightly-better-than rudimentary web-skills can save you time and money in the over-planning department. Because here’s the thing many non-tech managers don’t seem to know: Bootstrapping clever web-applications is no longer the exclusive role of the geek. It’s often easier now to write an app for a website than it was to get a PC printer to work ten years ago!
Do fishmongers like that ‘teach a man to fish’ proverb?
I don’t think so. Perhaps these suggestions are missing from the usual advice guides provided by web-consultants for the same reason?
I had a very instructive meeting with a senior health professional yesterday (work – not the annual check-up).
We were discussing local leadership on health issues and he mentioned a presentation [pdf] that he’d seen by Prof Keith Grint on three different kinds of leadership – the type needed in a crisis (a ‘commander’), in the case of a ‘tame problem’ (a manager – following standard operating procedures), and then the question of what to do in the case of a wicked problem to which there’s no obvious solution – where leadership really comes into its own.
I mention this for two reasons:
Firstly, because the outline of leadership that is described in this presentation is very close to the kind I’ve been outlining here in the leadership blogging series – one that places a premium on recognising the limits of tame (in-house) experts and expertise in favour of a more uncertain conversational polity in which questions are asked widely and freely.
As I’ve argued here, certainty is, in itself, not conversational – and conversationality (if there is such a word) is something that is a good thing to strive for from a strategic point of view. This is, of course, a real problem for Politicians – saying “I’ve never seen this problem before; I need to get a collective view on what to do about this” – as Grint illustrates with George W. Bush’s handling of Hurricane Katrina.
Secondly, because it concludes with a fantastic quote that just begged to be thrown out onto Twitter:
I’ve posted a few articles here about trades unions and social media, including a recent one on how trades unions have a lot to gain from understanding the potential of viral communications.
On Wednesday – on the eve of the public sector strikes – the TUC held a well-attended session for communications teams to discuss how Twitter can be an effective communications and organising tool. There were a few lessons I drew from the session and a few observations of my own that I thought I’d post here in no particular order: Continue reading →
As Peter Levine notes, there’s plenty of evidence that prosperous communities are better at civic engagement. What’s harder to work out is whether those communities are prosperous because they’re good conversational places – or whether the conversational habits are a consequence of prosperity.
His conclusion – one that I’d concur with based on personal observation – is that…
“…the quality–not the quantity–of civic engagement is related to whether communities can withstand economic crises and make difficult collective decisions that help them to recover.”
It seems to me that this is an important lesson for any business, any elected representative or any community activist. It’s an extension of the evidence around natural selection – that an abilty to diversify explains why some things survive and others don’t. A group of people who talk to each other in a civil way are surely better at collective action – when it’s needed?
Another quick pass on the question of relaxing while the internet chatters about you.
There seems to be an idealistic argument here – and a more realistic one. On the one side, there are a couple of very high-minded quotes to consider:
“..you can’t reason someone out of a position they didn’t reason themselves into” (source unknown).
…and…
“…when the facts change, I change my mind. What do you do?” (J.M. Keynes)
On the other hand, there’s The Backfire Effect [full paper - pdf]. This is where – when your deepest convictions are challenged by contradictory evidence – they actually get stronger and not weaker. Continue reading →
Political Innovation – latest Local Democracy Blog“An administrator in a bureaucratic world is a man who can feel big by merging his non-entity in an abstraction. A real person in touch with real things inspires terror in him.” - Marshall McLuhan
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