Week 11 - Case Study presentations episode 2

Today's presentations and the creative approaches used were amazing! Not only was it super-neat to see our course learnings applied to a wide range of scenarios, each presentation also added to my knowledge or ideas list to possibly apply to my own case study: indicating specific improvement opportunities in existing online presence (Laura), thinking of a Wikipedia page for the organization (Adriano), and hearing of new sites such as GigPark (David), and Vizu (Jessica). There were some really good reflections of James' talk (Adriano used the triangle too!) And we ended with yummy cookies!

Now on to the final assignment... goodnight and goodbye blog!

Week 10 - Case Study presentations episode 1

A social media strategy is about thinking how the business wants to be. Offline. Then the support comes in with social media and other forms of marketing. And all tools and techniques notwithstanding, it is still the human creativity and 'knowing your audience' that makes the difference in getting people from curious to connected to committed to engaged, the stages James mentioned in his presentation last week.

Our class discussion to determine a social media strategy for the case study Jaigris shared had some aha moments for me. For instance, hearing examples of situations where Facebook may hurt rather than help. While that was an example of target community members being intimidated by aggressive opposition, this was conceptually good to keep in mind regarding other possibly harmful side-effects. For instance, in the professional world, if an organization is building credibility and one of its members' personal/ Facebook life receives negative press, the organization itself is affected. It holds for British intelligence executives as well as school teachers. Another great thought was tapping unusual sources like the perspectives of criminals (or ex-criminals) affected by firearm ownership laws.

During my presentation on a social media strategy for Grace Educational Trust, the questions and suggestions offered by the class were really helpful (and it was so neat to see the class recognizing and supporting colleagues' ideas!) Through the questions I was able to see where more information could have been provided or clarified - such as specifics about the organization's resources, structure, ages of children, etc. (where was that button again when all assumptions are automatically understood?) The suggestions helped identify areas to potentially strengthen some strategy points, such as commenting on the overall site content organization, looking for strategic partnerships with schools involving children who may be involved with similar activities (hat-tip Laura), exploring open-source education (hat-tip Jaigris) and freely available educational resources, or ensuring that any online contributions (such as comments on blogs) do not inadvertently mirror any overused selling technique. I also learned about sites like the KhanAcademy (hat-tip David) and videos of Schoolhouse Rock (hat-tip Jaigris).

As I work to refine the strategy and articulate it concisely within the 10-page paper, I'm looking forward to the other case studies being presented next week.

Week 9 - Social Media Strategy

“Education: a debt due from present to future generations.” -- George Peabody

Neelima Pratap is clearing her debt by spreading education and supporting community development. As co-founder of the Grace Educational Trust, she and her 'partners in education' are giving children of a small village of Betim Ramnagar in Goa, India, the opportunity to break the poverty cycle. In partnership with a courageous social worker and counselor - Francis Dass - from India, Neelima started the organization with her own funds and resources, and has steadily built a community of donors / supporters who know her and/or are inspired by her work. And as is true of all worthy causes, the resources are always lagging behind the need.

Social media allows us to do things differently. Currently, the funds raised through Neelima's efforts (as well as her own resources) are used to support the organization's work in India. There is an opportunity to use social media, reach out to a community of contributors of educational content and instruction, and enable these contributions to directly and virtually support the work in India. Specifically, this means collecting digital educational resources as well as inviting educators' time contributions to deliver instruction in India over the internet or through mobile technologies. This model can be used both for the kids and for the professional development of teachers in India.

A quick SWOT: Grace has a great story to tell. Its current social media usage is at a very early stage, and resources are obviously a concern. But social media philanthropy is on the rise, and so is use of digital resources as well as mobile technologies for education. We can connect the trend with the need.

The plan to implement Grace's social media strategy needs to be sensitive to the organization's constraints. Social Media is not "free". There is work and investment involved in building and maintaining relationships with the community. So in Grace's case, the 'slow and steady' principle needs to be observed. The strategy of building a contributors' community can utilize a careful and incremental process:

• Listen to where the relevant conversations about early education are occurring (e.g. build a Google reader page of interest)
  
• Find key motivated contributors and engage them by soliciting advice on specific questions or commenting on their contributions to existing educational communities
• Relate back about how their contributions helped the organization
  
• Use as much community resources as possible (e.g. organizations like Taproot which help connect non-profit organizations with professional pro bono services)
  

The four pillars of a social media strategy - communicate, collaborate, educate and entertain - can all work together in the above model to effectively achieve the organization's goal of sustainability. The traffic from the targeted educational communities coming back to Grace's site, and conversion rates (e.g. newsletter sign-ups, contributions in kind, or donations) can be tracked with analytics. These measures/ metrics and reports can be used to refine the strategy.

The full circle of an effective social media strategy follows good business practice: define goals and measures, use the appropriate tools to support the goals, monitor and evaluate, and refine goals and strategy. The social media strategy is not and should not be an independent component, rather an integrated and complementary part of the overall business model and strategy. Life is, after all, one indivisible whole.

Week 8 – Social Media Measurement

“The only man who behaved sensibly was my tailor; he took my measurement anew every time he saw me, while all the rest went on with their old measurements and expected them to fit me.” - George Bernard Shaw

The debate continues on what model (if any) can measure the effectiveness of marketing/ advertising. The challenge is that we first need to figure out what we need to measure. AllBusiness warns us: “Advertising is not an exact science. There's no precise way to measure the success of an ad campaign.” And while we're trying to figure things out, (quite annoyingly) the world continues to shift in its habits, mechanisms and the factors that influence consumer/ audience behaviour. The one good thing is: rate of change in technology is somewhat helping come up with new tools and services to facilitate measurement of various factors – these are our clues. And enough clues exist about the potential of social media's effectiveness to achieve some goals. So like good investigators, we take the clues, blend them well with expertise/ caution/ intelligent analysis, and produce the 'smoothy' answer to our whodunnit (i.e. what did the trick to help achieve our objectives, or not).

The process for measuring social media effectiveness is similar to any systematic cause-and-effect based activity. Answering a series of questions, thoughtfully and methodically, and acting on the answers with discipline is a time-tested technique. Works as well for weight-loss or personal financial management as for measuring social media effectiveness:

Pre-experiment:

1. What do I want to accomplish? (objectives)

2. How will I know when I've done it? (SMART success targets/ metrics; measurement mechanisms)

3. Where am I now? (baseline or starting measurement)

4. How do I get to where I want to be? (strategy and plan)

Post-experiment:

1. Are we there yet/ how far am I? (final or interim measurement)

2. Are my measurements reliable? (intelligent analysis)

3. How strong is the relationship between my strategy and my outcomes? (ditto)

4. What else/ what more do I need to do? (refine objectives, strategy, plan, tool selection, analysis... or my favourite: do nothing!)

While each step is important (and many have sub-steps), the significance of #2 and #3: understanding the data and strengths/ weaknesses of tools in piecing together the story cannot be over-stressed. Many a distorted number has led to many a distorted decision.

If all this is making you go “but where's the social media in this long diatribe”... well, there are two general paths in life. There's the “fly by the seat of one's pants” way. By definition, the method (or lack thereof) is unique to each situation and therefore as “tinglingly” (my word) exciting as a new romance. So fans of this philosophy may induce in me a heart-flutter and, at times, envy (because it can and sometimes does work). But this path of life has not yet gotten my followership (snacking habits notwithstanding).

And then there is the Stephen Covey way. He gave us 7 principles of highly effective people. Not 7 adventures or 7 short-cuts. But 7 principles. This method decreases the heart flutter, and increases the likelihood of repeatedly producing desired results. The process outlined above for measuring social media effectiveness is also a principle-based approach, therefore it is not specific to social media, and doesn't sound very flashy or exciting. When it's our clients' or audience's money on the line though, I'd rather decrease my heart flutter, and theirs.

Week 7 - Publishing Plus!

Unavoidably, I missed class, seeing everyone, hearing about the integrative week experiences. And spent a frustrating but eventually rewarding few days trying to figure out this video publishing process from PowerPoint to YouTube. Finally there. The results of my humble, and clearly newbie, publishing efforts are on my newly created YouTube page. I also used the technique in one of our earlier readings to make it private using un-intuitive tags. Just for fun.

Week 7 – Web 2.0 and Internal Communications

Somehow intuitively the concepts “open collaboration” and “CIA” (obliged to utter secrecy) feel oxymoronic. And as such, the success of CIA's internal wiki, Intellipedia, feels like an accident. It isn't. It's a remarkable story that supports the known and proven principles of social media as well as communications and knowledge management. Intellipedia – an online encyclopedia of intelligence information, was carefully conceived and created with the support of Sean Dennehy, the CIA’s Intellipedia and Enterprise 2.0 evangelist, and the CIA community maintains the repository. It has 80,000+ intelligence community members, and 5,000+ contributions daily. The #1 contributor is 69 yrs old.

“The objective of [knowledge management systems] is to support creation, transfer, and application of knowledge in organizations.” (Source: reading 1) In order to appreciate the variety of ways in which Web 2.0 technologies are supporting organizational communications and effectiveness, here are just a few examples, covering public and private organizations:

1. Blogs to build relationships:
   The Sun Microsystems CEO, Jonathan Schwartz, publishes a popular blog in which he discusses his company’s strategies, products, opportunities, and challenges. Customers and employees can then engage in an open dialogue with the organization.
   

2. Crowd-sourcing to build knowledge base:
   Microsoft launched a project – the MS wiki – to create free, complete, up-to-date and reliable documentation about Microsoft products.
   

3. Real-time information channelling to increase efficiency:
   Wells Fargo uses an enterprise RSS solution to monitor customer data and warehouse schemas, routing inconsistencies and problems to appropriate business analysts in real-time.
   

4. Data mash-ups/ consolidation to increase effectiveness.
   Government of BC's Family Search Program provides a search facility for parental support enforcement, bringing together 15+ sources of information to assist enforcement officers. As a result, reliability and collection of parental support payments increases and the need for government to provide support payments instead decreases.
   

It's no wonder then that many organizations are eager to harness their intellectual capital and build virtual communities of practice (Source: reading 2, p. 456, and reading 3, chapter 2). Admittedly, organizations have struggled to identify the true ROI of knowledge management, and one source suggests using the real-options approach. (Source: reading 3, chapter 4) However, many examples suggest that the benefit of effective knowledge management is not just a warm, fuzzy thing. According to one report (p. 11): "IBM's intranet has transformed from a corporate information portal to a platform used by most employees to work and collaborate across the company [... leading to] Productivity savings of an estimated $80.6 million." Not recognizing the value of employees' knowledge can be fatal for a company, as ING Baring learned. (Source: reading 3, p. 20)

One may therefore argue that by using Web 2.0 technologies, in these and many other ways, organizations can perhaps bring forth and productively use both the tacit and explicit knowledge (to which both reading 1 and reading 2 refer) of its members and partners. "[I]t is precisely in applying technology to increase 'weak ties' (i.e., informal and casual contacts among individuals) in organizations [...], and thereby increase the breadth of knowledge sharing, that IT holds promise." (Reference: reading 1 p. 112)

Week 6 - Sharpening the tools

“Progress isn't made by early risers. It's made by lazy [people] trying to find easier ways to do something.” Mr. Heinlein was clearly on to something. Apparently, we humans can't have enough of easy! It "shapes what we believe, how we invest, and who will become a supermodel".

To make things easier for individuals and businesses, if the list of tools in our textbook didn't seem sufficient, there are many more aids available. It's just not enough that in 140 characters or less we can share with anyone who cares what we think of Google's Buzz (thanks David!); services like Ping.fm ensure our opinions reach all our "friends" and "professional contacts" - and whoever else remains - all at the same time! And when we get tired of just filling other people's mindspace quicker, we have to preserve our own by tactics such as using a start page to organize information coming in. (This is where we preempt and filter out others' use of Ping.fm!)

The "grown up digital" among us don't just like it this easy... we expect it! Google gets this. They make things super easy - searching, advertising, working, living... their product is "changing people's lives." The problem and opportunity created by information overload is evident in discussions and progress of Web 3.0 or the semantic web. As "How stuff works" describes, we are moving towards a world where you could type "I want to see a funny movie and then eat at a good Mexican restaurant. What are my options?" The Web 3.0 browser will analyze your response, search the Internet for all possible answers, and then organize the results for you.

The business-world impact of all this? Well, businesses (tend to) start out small, and every nanosecond and even a half-penny needs to be spent wisely. So would I recommend any business and especially a small business to use productivity tools? Yes. Unqualified. Because half-pennies can be quite costly! For the business and its target audience. And so businesses need to respect their audience's time and money at least as much as their own, using any and every tool and tactic available to them.

But tools can't do it all (yet). They have to be cleverly used. A search engine helps our target audience find things, if we help the engine find the things we want found, for example with search engine optimization. Since we (seem to) have choices, we can also use tools badly (hat tip: Guy). Either way, we'll bring about an effect. What's the key to ensure it's the effect we want and need? Let me illustrate with the help of the Pink Panther:

• Inspector Clouseau: [gesturing to the hotel's dog] Does your dog bite?
• German hotelier: No.
• [Clouseau bends to pet the dog; it bites him.]
• Inspector Clouseau: I thought you said your dog did not bite!
• German hotelier: That is not my dog.

So the key is questioning our assumptions and asking the right question(s). What are we trying to accomplish, and will this path take us there? Otherwise, we may learn that the Answer to the Ultimate Question of Life, the Universe, and Everything is 42, but the Ultimate Question itself will remain unknown.