Posts Tagged ‘Social Media’

“Open Leadership”
by: Charlene Li
ISBN: 978-0-470-59726-2

Every once in a while you come across a new book that just knocks the ball out of the park.  And, so it is with Charlene Li’s Open Leadership.  As an active proponent of social media I’ve read a number of books on the topic.  Yet Open Leadership is the first that has a presented a practical, pragmatic, and far-reaching discussion about how to integrate it into the fabric of existing companies.  Not only how, but why, and why now!

Someone looking to do a ‘power-reading’ of the book might tend to dismiss it as a social media ‘how-to’ manual after the first couple chapters.  There’s much more to it though.

Social media is the book’s consistent thread and is pervasive throughout. Yet it’s not about social media itself.  Social media is the contemporary reference to a broad sea change involving how we communicate.  This communication has made it as easy for the CEO to interact directly with customers as it is for the individual employee, and that employee with the CEO his or herself.  When it seems everyone can communicate with everyone else, how can you effectively lead anything? This is the crux of Open Leadership.

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What do you do if a competitor starting slinging mud at you, making outright false claims, or excessively stretching the truth about you?  Should you descend to their level and start slinging mud back?

A company’s president recently faced this basic question. The topic made for perhaps one of the most interesting, fresh topic, posts I’ve read in a while. So, do you sling mud too, or, ignore it, push forward, and take the high road?

Here’s something to think consider

Personally, I agree with the sentiment to avoid slinging mud. But there’s a difference between participating in the same behavior and standing up for yourself. In today’s social media world of broad transparency, you cannot afford to ‘not’ say anything.

Borrowing from a Harvard Business Review post yesterday, a happy coincidence:

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If you’re aspiring to move beyond your current role, you’re likely looking for ways to be seen as innovative, progressive, and ‘fresh.’  Which means, odds are, if you’re a business leader, event planner, meeting facilitator, or similar, you’re always watching for new ways to make them better.

If your life revolves around using PowerPoint or Keynote, how can you do better? Yes, you can add snazzy graphics, spinning tops, and whiz-bang animation.  And if you do, you’ll likely just come across as someone using distracting, confusing, dizzying images.  One way to avoid this latter problem, is to take a look at Garr Reynold’s book, Presentation Zen.

You’ve likely heard of this thing called social media.  You’ve also likely noticed it’s just about ‘everywhere.’  Even if the majority of the country still doesn’t understand it (Fast Company found, ’…69% of U.S. adults still have no idea what it is.’), they’ve likely been exposed.

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Someone asked me this question, last week.  How do you learn?  Struck me as not only a genuine question, but one I hadn’t thought about in some time.

How do you learn?

Prior to the advent of the internet, digital media, and ubiquitous connectivity (for most), we were largely constrained to three methods.  Social (talk with people), reading, and video.  There just weren’t too many ‘other’ options.  Now, there’re so many it really is worth thinking about.

Digital mediums have dramatically changed all three of the traditional mediums. Social learning was largely limited to in-person face-to-face activity.  These might be local business events, service club gatherings, or simply talking with a mentor or friend over coffee.  Now, we have the ability to ‘talk’ continuously to folks through instant messaging, social networks, telephony (e.g. Skype) and more.  We can ‘talk’ until our minds go numb.  My view is that face-to-face cannot be beat—but it isn’t always possible.

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Today’s a quick post sharing some of my first impressions after having picked up a new Kodak Zi8 camcorder.  A number of you are in marketing, use Flip cameras already, or are just considering one of these new devices.

Chris Brogan, over at www.chrisbrogan.com, was one of the first folks to create any sort of ‘spark’ for me with this new class of device.  Sure, by now we’ve probably all been to events with Flip cams.

They’re neat, cool, but the ‘value’ wasn’t quite there.  Part of that I attribute to having a ‘good’ digital tape camcorder and being put off by the overall process hassles (record an hour, take an hour to download, then process, then encode, then…).  Odds are, if you’re not a video aficionado you’ve had the same dying desire to repeat the experience. Not.

It wasn’t until I started paying attention to Chris’ vlogs and some of his various experiences (Flip, Zx1, Zx6…) that I really appreciated their value.

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Earlier this week, Israel García wrote an engaging post, Social Media With Ease.  He also reframed the title as a question, which I found particularly intriguing.

It is an interesting question and something I have previously thought about as well.  Why is it, so many people feel uncomfortable discussing social media?

Discomfort discussing Social Media stems from two basic issues.

First, most folks still do not have even a rudimentary grasp as to what ‘social media’ is. Gaining an understanding is made more difficult by those ‘in the know’ professing ‘everyone is using’ a particular item.  For instance, I’ve been to a number of social media presentations, or presentations having a related segment, where the presenter boldly states, ‘Everyone’s using Twitter…’ or the like. Fast Company’s November ‘09 issue Read the rest of this entry »

Simple, short post today.  I’ve spent a modest amount of time with Google Wave in recent days, since finally receiving my very own personal invitation granting access to the service.  You see, if you weren’t aware, you can only use ‘Wave if Google grants you access.

Unfortunately, as they take care not to unwittingly overwhelm their new system, it means very few people actually have been let in the front door.  Some of the early developers, such as O’Reilly have already released the first books on this new platform.

But, for most, the experience is like mine.  Of 2,900 contacts, only -4- have access to the ‘Wave.  Hard to test collaboration, explore, experiment, or take it for a spin quite yet.

It shows potential.  For the moment, simply need to be patient.

“presentationzen”
by Garr Reynolds
ISBN-13: 978-0-321-52565-9
ISBN-10: 0-321-52565-5

Can you relate to this? You’re attending a meeting, having spent a half-day getting there, its mid-to-late afternoon, and the presentation starts. The first slide features a blue background, too-small black font, and a slide counter in the corner promising you 143 slides. You groan. 5 slides into the presentation, you’re enjoying a slide with two columns of bullets, corporate logo(s), and you’re magically at slide 14/143.

Unfortunately, I’ve encountered this scenario more times than once. One time, my own boss was the offender. Doing my best to be kind, I pointed out his colors and font selection were terrible, I was simply met with, ‘…what’s wrong? I think it looks great!’ Read the rest of this entry »

Perhaps a good place to start is to use a baseline definition for Open Education. Wikipedia defines open education as a collective term referring to forms of education in which knowledge, ideas, or important aspects of teaching methodology or infrastructure, are freely shared over the internet. From my perspective we need to clear up a misnomer or two. All too often when we see open, we think free. And when we see freely share, we’re thinking free for all.

With open education, the key focus needs to be improved accessibility (i.e. freely share) at a significantly lower cost (i.e. compared to conventional places of higher education). Employing contemporary technologies along with a new way of thinking, we might also see improved flexibility in education. Read the rest of this entry »

Last week, Seth Godin wrote an interesting post, “Two ways to build trust.” It’ll take you about 90 seconds to read and is worth the short trip over to read. The notion is simple: The people (or businesses) he chose to work with are straight-forward in their business, and their web sites reflect the same. In some ways, one might think these are also businesses that are hedgehog-like in their approach: we know our business (and keep it simple); we’re focused on our business (and not fox-like, busy trying umpteen ‘intriguing’ strategies); and we are (or can be) the best at it.

Developing your trust is a large part of why my blog exists. My business is helping yours with effective application of technology; I’m not all-over-the-map; and, as my recommendations on LinkedIn (for instance) attest, I’m good at it. I’ll prefer to let others decide whether I’m the best or not…let me just say working toward being ‘the best’ is a never-ending journey from my perspective.

So, if you have thoughts on my approach, comments on the site design (I’m considering refacing it sometime), feel free to leave a comment.