What I love about how Sir Ken Robinson discusses Changing Education is he shows clear insight of how through the evolution in innovations and technology of the last few hundred years (if not longer), our behaviour and responses to the world around us has changed in our every day life  - in what we do, what we pay attention to, and the internal and collaborative processes we use to learn, adapt and survive in a rapidly changing technological environment. He then contrasts this very eloquently with the view that for what ever reason, the pace of change in how we think about education, learning and formal learning contexts has not changed at the same pace or in the same way. He uses school education to exemplify his point. For me this video also spoke of higher education.

In higher or further education in some spaces (though not all) we have become more protective over what we know, learn and research (because its an asset to sell); more static in how we share it or educate others (because change is hard and requires resource); less welcoming of creativity and innovation – diversity in others (because it scares us); and more reliant on the standardisation and marketization of education driven by external measures of quality (because it has become the industry norm). But what do I remember about being a student of learning …

My best experiences of my own learning do no fit the picture above, my memories are about meaningful episodes of creativity and autonomy. They include: high school days when my art teacher encouraged me to ‘create’ and share ‘my voice’ on how I was seeing the world through drawing (without guidelines); or my history teacher who encouraged us to read fiction novels on historical topics as well as our textbooks (though not on the reading list); or my 2nd year university professor who taught statistics in the context of music, shopping and magazines (to make the equations meaningful); to my doctoral supervisor who encouraged my ideas on knowledge, learning and web technology (though unverifiable for a journal – they were ideas to still discuss).

I think in many ways, I was fortunate in these instance in my learning to have inspired others who encouraged me through how they saw the world. However, like many Sr. Ken Robinson describes in his video, I too traversed a conveyor belt of education, in age cohorts, expected to perform higher and better on standardised measures to enter the halls of academe to continue the process. So I became conditioned. Certainly we all are – all in society, not just the educators. But the politicians, the policy makers, the teachers, the lawyers, the parents, and grandparents … and increasingly the children. Conditioning us in what formal education is and in this losing sight of the aspiration what could education be … perhaps built instead on a model of what ‘inspires learning’ … not just how to measure, sell and protect it.

For me Social Web technology in the classes I design and deliver has been a way to start to unpick my own preconceptions and practices around how I educate and see learning in business management education – especially in marketing and organisational communications. Social web technology has helped me to start to think differently and let go of control in what education is. Letting go of control is I believe our first step to changing how we think in this embracing fear. It doesn’t matter how much I use social web technology, there is still the fear when standing in front of a class of 100 new students introducing them to the world of blogging, wikis, Twitter and Google docs, wondering “what challenges will I face this semester?” coupled with the excitement of wondering “what will they create and learn this semester?” And these challenges come from all places, to my own preconceptions. I live, work and traverse a complex system of people, practices and social norms.

Sir Ken Robinson, raises an excellent point in his video. To change what we do in education we need to change how we think about education, learning, learners and creativity. Over the past three years, I’ve been doing my best to unpack my thinking about the role of ‘lecturer as distant expert’ and ‘controller’ of the space, and instead create a learning space wherein, ‘we are learners, sharing, contributing and helping each other’ and ‘move the focus away from the grade to a focus on learning’ (I’ve certainly not cracked it yet, but I’m trying). I’m only a few years into the journey, and it is hard because it is not just I but also my students, my colleagues, my discipline, the sector, and those associated with it who see the world in different ways. Shame our learning systems don’t yet embrace divergent thinking in education design and practice. To heed the words of Sir Ken Robinson in the above video, to change what we do in education, we need to change how we think about education.

In this … “We are all learning!”

Smiles

Kelly

Share and Enjoy

This blog post includes a narrative of key points made by Professor Costas Andriopoulos during his talk at the Cardiff University Innovation Network seminar on 25th January 2012.

Share and Enjoy

Tanya tells her experience of being an aspiring actress in 1998 in Chicago Illinois, a young women who because of the forces around her, helped shape an idea to start a Theatre Company. Her world of work was then controlled by the perceptions of others and their expectations of what she should be and what role she should play as a Latina Actress. Expectations that often judged her culture, her gender, her race and ethnicity. Expectations that didn’t showcase and champion her artistic talents or the life stories she felt were not being told. Instead they judged her – casting call after casting call. These experiences led Tanya to the idea of creating a theatre company.

Through a collaboration that started between Coya Paz and Tanya Saracho that grew into an ensemble of 10 women from diverse Latina/Hispana backgrounds, Teatro Luna in 2000 was born. A theatre company formed through on group of women each sharing stories and experiences, an ecological system of collaboration and cocreation based on sharing. The sharing of stories, from which the group learnt. Creating meaning in who they were, what they were doing and in this, created a voice and the power to share with hundreds of people who came to see their productions, the stories of Latina/Hispana women and their communities.

Why was this collaborative group so important to each of these women and the formation of the organisation that is known as Teatro Luna? Tanya states it very eloquently: “In the group there were no outside forces telling us women could not be funny.” It became a supportive and dynamic collaboration that evolved from the interactions of a group of artistic women, cocreating a creative process, a process formed from discussion, sharing and learning about the stories of others, stories of Latina/Hispana women with the central idea of telling these stories through the medium of Theatre.

Teatro Luna is Chicago’s first and only all-Latina theatre, organized for the purpose of exploring the varied experiences and cultures of Latina/Hispana women, showcasing their creative talents and telling the often political, social and emotional stories of their communities. This is a wonderful and insightful story on how collaboration through the power of stories when shared both within and outside our organisational communities, shared through communication, shapes us. And as I spoke about in my last blog post everything communicates not just the words we use.

Please share this video and the story of Teatro Luna.

Tanya Saracho from Arts Alliance Illinois on Vimeo.

Smiles

Kelly

Share and Enjoy

The first, the difference between brand and branding. He eloquently alludes to a brand as emergent from conversation, as organic through interactions over time, an image, and it is over time that these interactions shape our image of something – in this case a brand. That brand management is the process by which an emergent brand image is influenced – not controlled, and the role of public, private enterprises in this.

The second, the emergence of brand image. Brands have always been emergent, emergent over time in our minds in how we think, interact with and talk with others about them. However now with growing user-generated social technologies from Facebook to YouTube, Twitter and blogging platforms, a brand is not just emergent in our minds/perceptions or between other of our immediate social circles, but increasingly emergent from a partnership between public-private enterprises and the wider community on a mass scale. A brand is emergent from community conversations, community interactions, a social web of people bought together by their interest and/or action about a brand.

The third, the importance of brand community. This view of a brand emergent from community lends itself much to the the thinking of Albert Muniz and Thomas O’Guinn in their (2001) paper on Brand Community. Wherein a community sharing similar rituals and traditions, history and moral responsibility form a community around a brand, what they term a brand community. A community that regulates and inspires the brands meaning and in this can also harm the brand image.

And lastly, how everything communicates. Everything we do, say, share and cocreate communicates – be it the image of a person, place, organisation, movement, idea or product. These interactions cocreate meaning over time, something not new to social anthropologists interested in media and social research. However, today social and search technologies play an increasing role in their aggregation for search, retrieval and mass sharing.

As everything communicates, and social/search technologies give greater emphasis to the communities of conversations, with this comes new mindsets and digital social literacies. Literacies not just for professionals in organisational communication who attempt to ‘manage’ brand image (and more often than not think they own the brand and thus try to control it), but also the digital social literacies of personal-professional communication across most industries and professions – teachers, artists, politicians, nurses, doctors to name but a few.

In summary, this an interesting example and philosophy of emergent branding through/from community, using the example of Rebranding Greece. Here is the video. Please share.

Smiles

Kelly

Share and Enjoy

I however was more drawn to another topic, Digital Identity Management. A topic I am consistently observing that is a consequence of our growing use of digital and social technologies, technologies that not only function because of our use of them but because of the sophisticated functions they have that aid the vendors who own them in the collection, storage and analysis of our usage data. The topic I decided to cover was about Digital Identity Management, especially as it pertained to digital social technologies. For me it is not the illegal black market identity thief that worries me, but the legal businesses to whom we give all our data – freely, easily and increasingly.

Data is the Currency of Now!

“There ain’t no such thing as a free lunch!” (TANSTAAFL) is something we should always keep in mind as we sign up to the next new FREE social networking site or share our family or friend photos on the latest and coolest visual platform for photo blogging. Don’t get me wrong, I love what social technologies are doing for business, education, arts, politics and the very essence of the values that the advocate users of them find dear – like community, sharing, engagement. Being part of something that is bigger than ourselves, and in this we can have a voice. no matter how young, old, small, big, talented, poor, rich or controlled.

However in all this ‘opportunity’ let’s us not forget, that many of these social technologies are a business. A business built on large data sets or user data and expert analysts who provide the insight for business decision making in their use. Yes, they offer free access to users share information with friends, colleagues and the wider market. But somewhere we do pay. We pay by giving away gigabyes and terabytes of data, about ourselves, our family, our friends, our organizations and our communities. All for FREE!

A smart company is a data driven company. From this data, Google, Facebook, YouTube, WordPress, Blogger, MySpace, Ning … the list goes on … collate, analyse, segment, and share the data. Often it is shared with shareholders or internal stakeholders for corporate decision making – to improve the services you are using. But it is also shared with external stakeholders (like advertisers, market researchers) to improve the supply and demand for other fee-paying services and/or information that actually finance these social technologies. However it is also shared with other parties, paying clients or businesses interested not in you, or your values or the service you are using to improve the service, but the money they can make from your data. Our social behaviour is just as much a part of our identity as our name, address and post code is. When you add differing types of data together, you get a much richer and commercially attractive product – a data asset. This is very much reminisce of the Tesco Clubcard business model in the UK. However what is different is a) we don’t get a coupon for it; and b) the data is richer because of the addition of digital social network data. A type of data much richer than any grocery shopping panel data Tesco has ever collected. 

[ Profile + Demographic + Behavioural + Transactional + Network Data ] / Over time = a very rich (££) data set

Take Facebook as an example. Facebook search is Bing indexed, so our data and information is shared with Microsoft. Every Application (App) we’ve given permission to interact with our Facebook profile has also been given access to our data. We rarely get the choice on ‘what’ data we authorise to share, more often it is just a yes/no decision. If we use an App on our mobile phone to sync with our Facebook profile, it is not just the data we enter that is shared between our phone and our profile on the Facebook servers, it is also our location information through GPS and the telephone numbers of our friends that suddenly appear on the Friends list of our profile. This information (and much more) Facebook and advertisers use to cleverly target users with contextualised advertising matched to the keywords in the status update you just posted and to sell in various formats to finance the very service we have applauded for being FREE!

Awareness : Education : Responsibility

So what did I recommend in my talk? I didn’t recommend not using these services. Quite the contrary I love the use of them, but advocate an informed use, especially in organizations where use of them is increasingly being mandated. I recommended three key things critical for effective and responsible use of digital social technologies in both our personal and professional lives. Three things we should take account of during our use of them and are ongoing. As the technologies develops so too should our:

1. Awareness. As users be aware of our own activities with/through social technologies, and the data we are potentially freely sharing with anyone and everyone. Googling yourself is an example of how you can remain aware of what information is publicly available about you, your family or your organization.
2. Education. As users, be active in our education (and that of our staff/employees) in how social technologies function so we can use them both effectively and responsibly, especially in the privacy settings each may have; and our rights as users.
3. Responsibility. As users take full responsibility for the data and information we share through/with social technologies. In this I mean not just the data/information we are sharing about ourselves, but increasingly the data and information we are sharing about our friends, family, colleagues, workplace and wider social network. Policies and guidelines are well and good, but it is a feeling of personal/professional responsibility that truly regulates behaviour.

Continuing the Conversation

For the many years now I have observed and interacted with people in both professional and personal contexts as they have used and learnt about digital and social technologies. And like many people, I too am still learning the implications of this era of social technologies on both our personal and professional selves. But one thing we should not stop doing is talking about it. No one is an expert in this space, and the only way to share learnings about the management of a our digital identities (and especially that of our children) is to talk about it more and in more detail.

At the end of the evening we were asked a number of questions. Below I have provided my responses.

1. What can an individual do if someone is being slanderous about them in a digital social space?

Peter Gwyn Williams from e-Crime Wales gave a really good response to this question. “Take a screen capture of it, contact them to inform them you have evidence of their behaviour and then report them to the authorities”. Obviously this has a lot to do with jurisdiction and given the geographic fluidity of activity in digital channels, it is often difficult to bring to account people who are not contactable, unknown or reside in a different jurisdiction to your own. However  libel, a false, malicious statement published in mainstream media (i.e. on the internet, in a magazine, etc.) is a very serious offence, and should be brought to the attention of the host/service providers of any social community or network for breach of the networks terms and conditions.

2. What is going on in the education/sector and schools to help educate children?

A lot is and isn’t going on. In my opinion it is not so much the children we need to focus in terms of digital literacy and awareness, but the teachers and the educational system so that it is more open to learning about, with and through social technologies. Banning Facebook, Myspace and mobiles is not the answer. Have a dialogue about it with children, in front of children and between members of the educational community (be that parents, teachers, regulators) is. Here is a link to a World Summit on Media for Children and Youth that was held in Sweden this year or the annual Digital Media Learning conference in the US. Having more ‘educators and teachers’ attend forums like these is critical to educating the educators about social technologies and their role on the world of youth.

3. What would I advise as an example of corporate policy for the use of social technologies?

I prefer the word guidelines to policies. Policies are very static, where as guidelines are fluid and can adapt as the technological context changes. I always advocate an organic approach, where guidelines for social technology use come from within the company, informed by the staff and personnel who are contracted to adhere to them. So they come out of discussion and debate as to what is and isn’t responsible behaviour. But often this is difficult in very large corporate multinationals. In this I’d turn to example of practice in other organizations for learning and a point of debate for their suitability or adaptation within your own organization. One large complex organization whom I think many organizations can learn from in terms of stakeholder guidance over the use of social technologies is the US Army. In early 2011 they released their Social Media Handbook on Slideshare for all to read. With over 90,000 views it is probably one of the most read social media guides available and is very detailed. MediaSnackers have also conducted a podcast interview with SSG Dale Sweetnam, the non-comissioned officer in charge of the US Army’s online and social media division.

Digital and social technologies are affording us and our organizations many new freedoms in communications and information sharing. But with freedom also comes responsibility, not just for the service providers or owners of the social technologies. But our own responsibility in our own behaviour in what we share, to whom, about whom, how and and where.

Smiles

Kelly

Share and Enjoy

My favourite of course is the podcast for Chapter 17, the Digital Marketing chapter.

If you are a student taking Marketing for the first time, or just interested in reviewing your knowledge, these podcast summaries will provide a useful review to aid you in your revision of the material covered in each chapter of our book. If interested in learning more about some of the specific areas of Marketing such as Digital, Services, International or Retailing, download just the specific chapters and have a listen.

These podcast are freely available on iTunes for all who are learning about, interested in or students of marketing.

Smiles

Kelly

Share and Enjoy

Last night Cardiff Business School hosted, Mr David Roche, President of Hotels.com for an evening lecture about the Internet: Business, not as you know it! David introduced the audience to the data-informed and analytics led business model of Hotels.com.

It was an interesting talk that took us from the business model origins of Yahoo!, Google and Goto.com to the power of digital analytics and the loss of the high street travel retailer. In 1998 Yahoo! dominated the search business. However, by 2001/2002, who would have thought that it was the combination of a citation ranking algorithm, coupled with a pay-per-click business model and data informed decision making that would see Google evolve to who they are today, one of the most powerful multinationals and Internet businesses today.

David, reviewed the power of digital analytics for Hotels.com, wherein the value of the footprint through their and partner sites (e.g., tripadvisor.com) and advancements in industry back end systems (e.g., Sabre), has provided for advanced empirical evidence in managerial decision making in site design, pricing and service offering. Data-informed and analytic led Internet business is the business of the Internet today, and not as many people really know it.

When asked about the impact of the financial crisis for Hotels.com, he revealed that the traffic data at Hotels.com shows evidence of CFO’s cutting corporate travel budgets resulting in less traffic from these segments and a squeeze on hotel ‘price per night’. However such economic conditions are in contrast driving individual consumers online for hotel bookings due to increased choice wherein the average consumer scans a minimum of 3 sites for options at any one time, lower geographic barriers for information access and advanced price competitiveness. All resulting in increased consumer choice.

However one thing that David did touch on during the Q&A, was that, in contrast to the more traditional offline travel agent or the smaller online business, large Internet businesses, such as Hotels.com and Google do have an advantage. Something that is referred to in academic circles as ‘double jeopardy’ when talking about the power of large brands, is they have large data sets of traffic data from which to draw and teams of analysts with whom to work with. For the high street travel retailer or smaller internet business site usage and traffic data is not as reliable or large enough for any advanced statistical analysis, resulting in differing approaches in methods for research insight (e.g., focus groups), and the use of free service tools such as Google Analytics.

During his talk David raised a number of interesting points about data-informed and analytic led managerial decision making for the Internet business, but more importantly he raised a questions about skills and knowledge in digital analytics. How and what are universities and educational providers delivering in terms of skills and knowledge to ensure graduates and wider society have the necessary skills to participate in a data-informed and analytics led model of Internet business?

An enjoyable and very informative talk.

Smiles Kelly

P.S. For tweets from the event, see: #cbslecture

Share and Enjoy

As the coexistence of digital technology within society becomes ever more ubiquitous, and our everyday experiences are not as we’ve ever known them, it is unsurprising that business too is not as we know it! With dynamic digital evolution and the rise of user-generated and co-created content, it is evident that business today requires change – in our strategies, practices and ethos.

So I wonder, what will David Roche have to say about “The Internet: Business, but not as we know it!” If you are interested in business, technology and the digital (r)evolution and want to listen to one company president’s views, come along and join me and my colleagues at Cardiff Business School at this public lecture. Attendance is free, but please book your place to avoid disappointment.

Talk Details:

• When: Thursday, February 10th
• Where: Julian Hodge Building (Map to the venue).
• Time: The talk will begin at 6:30. A wine reception will start from 5:45pm.
• Book: To secure a place please email carbs-conference@cardiff.ac.uk

Speaker Bio:

David Roche is president of hotels.com® Worldwide and Venere.com™, overseeing the two brands’ more than 40 points of sale globally. Roche joined Expedia® in 2003 as senior vice president of hotels.com and Distribution for Europe, Middle East and Africa (EMEA). Under his leadership, hotels.com achieved significant growth throughout EMEA, while Expedia’s EMEA Distribution expanded significantly between 2003 and 2008. Prior to joining Expedia, Roche founded companies in the marketing and digital media spheres. He most recently worked as business development director for the leading European webcaster RAW Communications, which has since been acquired by Thomson Financial.

Smiles

Kelly

Share and Enjoy

As a doctoral student you often have many questions that arise throughout your research studies. These include questions about the seminal papers you are required to critique, the methodological constraints during data collection and analysis, what contribution are you really making, right down to what is expected of when you go on the market. However for doctoral students researching the digital and social web, new questions are arising, questions around ‘should I’ or ‘how could I’ use digital and social web resources – professionally to build my academic research identity?

If you talk with me, you will note that I support a situated or participatory approach to digital media learning, and thus encourage individuals interested in  researching about digital media to not just read or talk about it, but also to use it for deep rich learning. We discussed briefly not just the functional technical aspects of one or two technologies (e.g., tweetdeck for twitter), but also the more strategic questions of ‘why’ and ‘what approach’ to take.

I’ve summarised some of my advice and thoughts I gave the students today in the remainder of this blog post.

Step 1. Devise a professional brand strategy
Building a professional online identity is about building ‘meaning’ about who you are and your research interests. This will evolve over time, should start small, but to ensure there is consistency in your digital footprint consider devising a strategy for the development of your professional brand. Consider the following:

1. What do you want ‘people’ in your professional networks and wider professional community to associate with you in a digital social space.
2. Compile a list of keywords from your research interests and/or focus to guide this.
3. Use ppl.com or google.com, search your name (and/or username) to see your current digital identity as ‘others see you’. Consider also a twitter search for your name (and/or username).
4. Write a 100 word bio inclusive of a) research keywords; b) location of graduate; and c) link to web page on your schools website. This should be used on all social web channels/platforms within which you decide to participate.

Step 2. Devise a professional network strategy
Building a professional online identity is also importantly about the networks within which you reside and co-evolve. You have the means to control and influence this coevolution based on who you add, follow, friend or tag in your social web space and thus: connect with, listen to and engage with through the digital social web. It is wihtin this social network that you will coevolve your professional identity with. Consider the following:

1. With whom do you want to connect with, listen to and share your digital social web space with. Consider organisations, academics and/or industry representatives who ‘fit’ with your professional brand strategy.
2. What is their digital social web profile like? In what digital social spaces are they? These are the spaces you want to be participating in.
3. Devise your personal ‘network’ policy for who your will connect with, won’t connect with, and in what spaces. Consider strong-tie and/or weak-tie, and social-bonds (trust). Much of what you will do professionally will be a public space, but what about your private spaces – who will you ‘let’ in to your inner circle of ‘personal friends’ and ‘personal digital spaces’. See my blog post about Friends, Friendship and Friendliness’ on Facebook, they are not the same.This is very important when considering professional spaces.

Step 3. Devise a digital social web channel strategy
So now we consider channels and/or platforms – or as some say, specific media through which to converse, listen and engage. As noted here, the technology/channel decisions are not the first decision, it’s first important to think about a) what do you want to converse/listen about (step 1); and b) with whom do you want to converse/listen to/with (step 2), before select the space to converse in (Step 3).

Be selective and strategic in your choices to be effective (not fragmented, and sustainable) and efficient in your adoption and usage. Consider the following:

1. In what digital social web spaces do you want to (or should be) in. You don’t have to be in every space, it’s about ‘being effective and efficient in learning, sharing and conversing’. Too many digital spaces can result in fragmented digital identity if you don’t have the resources (i.e., time) to manage the spaces.
2. Think about what would ‘compliment’ what you currently do, as opposed to ‘add more’ work. A blog for example, doesn’t have to be public (can be private), and can be used as a ‘diary’ to help you reflect on class readings, or your doctoral journey as you build confidence in the field, it also gets/keeps you in the habit or ‘wtiting (albeit in a journalist style/tone). Or your twitter feed can be updated from your ‘professional’ facebook updates automatically and thus won’t add additional burden to you time.
3. Consider how the discourse around these channels for the networks you want to participate in when selecting them (e.g., LinkedIn = professional network; FB = personal networks; However for an artist Flickr = professional network, but for others it’s for personal photos).
4. Select the channels/platforms and learn about how to use them relative to both their technical functionality and the social expectations of participation within them.

Step 4. Develop your dialogue strategy
This step, comprises thinking about ‘How’ and ‘About What’ will you converse in the selected channels. Everyone one is different and unique in how, where and why they participate and engage. It’s about finding your own professional and personal style with how you do this – no two blogs are the same. Some people just post lists of links in their blogs, others its a picture-blog. Some people send tweets out about ‘anything’ and ‘everything’ all day, others are selective and only tweet and re-tweet occasionally. However in this  consider the following in establishing your dialogue strategy:

1. Your time is scarce: Blogging, tweeting and connecting with other academics or doctoral candidates through these channels is useful, especially given what a researcher in digital media is researching. However it takes a lot of time. As a doctoral candidate, writing, reading and reflecting is more important! You need to consider when, where, what time, and how often is ‘realistic’ for you ‘converse’ (i.e., write a blog post, tweet, check updates). BUT be ruthless with your time as this is NOT your core job or role. It will become part of it.
2. Make social media a habit not a chore: Develop habits around your social web activity. For example, occasionally schedule your tweets so you only write them once a day; tweet when on the bus/train; blog at least once a month when you have something to say OR when at a conference, but it is okay NOT to blog everyday. As an academic/student – reading and writing is critical to what we do, so sometimes you may need the space to do this, so consider turning off all ‘social web notifications’ to your email inbox, when you don’t need/want to be distracted. But find your own time stamp for your social web activity.
3. Mind casting: Use social media to build your social capital relative to your area of professional interest (mindcasting), not about what you had for lunch (lifecasting). That said, invest some of yourself so people get to know you and your personality (i.e., people connect to people) and so it pays to be authentic.
4. It’s about sharing: Social web is not just about ‘you’, it’s about your social graph, so share with others, about others and for other’s interest. For example, if you are still learning about twitter, just listen and ‘retweet’ what others say if you think it is interesting or of interest to your followers. If you attend a talk, seminar, class or read a paper that is interesting, write a blog post about it, but send the speaker the link when it’s live (it’s polite) and ask someone permission to ‘tweet’ about their talk (especially if it is not ‘expected’ like in the class room).I often get asked, but what if I blog about a paper I’m working on and someone steals it? The thing to remember about blog posts, as they are ‘different’ to academic writing in both length and style and as such, chances are this ‘theft of your ideas’ is minimal.
5. Think conversation: It’s not about ‘shouting out’ its about having conversations, and engaging with people. So comment on others blog posts, retweet, thank people, comment when people comment on your posts/updates … use the same manners in a digital space as you would if the person was stood in front of you or ALL your friends where in the room.
6. Start small and slowly: Do what is comfortable for YOU, not what is expected. You don’t have to be all over the social web, but if researching it, it’s important to learn about it first-hand, and develop some profile on it, otherwise it’s consistent to ‘inventing a car but not having a drivers license.’
7. Raising your profile: Use the keywords devised earlier in your ‘professional brand strategy’ in your tweets, blog posts, tags, profile descriptions, so the keywords are strongly associated with your name (e.g., this will increase your google rankings overtime).
8. Engage don’t defend: People have opinions and chances are they might be different to yours. If you experience a situation in which a ‘negative’ comment post or response occurs and is linked to your social web profile, engage with … it is better to part of the conversation – in which your participation can influence it’s evolution, than to stand outside it, jumping up and down and disappointed. Most people in a social web space are honest, hardworking and respectful individuals, but yes, some will not agree with what you write or tweet. The core difference is that unlike the blind-review process we are conditioned to in academic publishing, in the social web space, the feedback is immediate, public and often reactionary. Learning the personal skills in how to manage and engage with this type of feedback is also important for aspiring academics.
9. With meaning: Write, tweet, update your status about what is meaningful to you in your academic work, as chances are it is meaningful to other people, also … if you love something it is easier to write about it, talk about and engage with it. So it won’t be a chore, but part of your everyday academic social activity.

Now that I’ve distilled my thoughts from today’s conversation, I’m going to get back to my academic writing. However, I did come across a paper published in the Harvard Business Review, by Soumitra Dutta, Professor of Business and Technology, INSEAD, France entitled: “Managing Yourself: What is your personal social media strategy?” It is an interesting popular read about ‘professionals’ managing their identity on the social web.

Smiles
Kelly

Share and Enjoy

Increasingly I am being asked to deliver talks within organisations, usually to marketing, communications or media teams about the evolution we are experiencing in digital and social web media. These talks are often used to open the dialogue within teams at the beginning of a workshop or as part of a ‘training week’ about how the ‘media space’ has changed considerably and how the host organisation can best approach, use and/or learn about social media.

I use these talks as an opportunity to encourage personnel in marketing, media or communications to consider the need to ‘unlearn’ and explore ‘new mindsets’ with which to approach their communications activities. To step outside the box from what is traditionally termed ‘marketing’, ‘PR’ or ‘media management’, and consider that their role in communications has fundamentally changed within society, within their organisation, within their own lives. With this has come the need to learn new skills, new ways of looking at the world, and new ways of behaving within it. Why is this important? To be sustainable, ethical, and effective in communications activities in a digital and social web space. When the world moves on, you have to move with it, it is the nature of evolution. It’s not easy, it’s not cheap, but it’s most certainly the fundamental principle of evolution – change.

In this talk I use a number of case insights to explore my position on this, comparing campaign-led communications initiatives by Skittles.com (2009) and Rage Against the X-Factor (2009)  to more sustainable community-led activities of Compare the Meer-Kat (Ongoing), Patients Like Me (Ongoing), Wiggly Wigglers (Ongoing) and National Theatre Wales (Ongoing).

The core message of this talk is that the “social web is about people, conversations, dialogue, listening, and being ‘a part’ of a community, not apart from it or promoting or communicating to it!” Something required by personnel in business, marketing and media management to learn following the unlearning of traditional ‘communications’ mindsets.

In September 2010, I delivered this talk for Community Housing Wales, and VerseOne, a major provider of CMS to the public sector. The slides from the talk are embedded below, and can be found on drkellypage on slideshare.

Share and Enjoy