Social Media Training

Why Your Business Needs a Social Media Policy

This is a reprint of an article written for Orange County Local News Network

On LinkedIn, the online business social network, there’s a lively debate raging with more than 800 comments. Someone posted the question “when hiring, is it ethical to check out a person’s social network activity?”

With that many opinions, it appears the rules of this road are murky.  The truth is that prowling around a job candidate’s social media activity may place your company at risk.

Social media is everywhere. Recruiters are tapping sites like LinkedIn to locate the next business superstar. Marketers are pulling out the stops to ignite a viral buzz. Customers are publicly exchanging love stories and horror stories about products and services.

But these forms of “conversational media” like blogs, Twitter, Facebook and YouTube introduce new risks every businessperson must have on the radar.

An innocent misstep could cost real dollars in the form of brand reputation, regulatory fines or even a dreaded lawsuit.

Let’s circle back to that LinkedIn discussion. If your employee is checking out a job candidate’s social network activity and hiring based on the information found there, your company could be violating privacy laws, or laws governing background checks, such as the Fair Credit and Reporting Act, or perhaps the Equal Employment Opportunity Act. And, if the employee happens to go home and post something about the hiring on Facebook or Twitter, well, that could spell “discoverable” trouble—it could later be used as evidence.

Avoiding social media risk, like most other business risk, means crafting a sensible policy and educating your employees. A social media policy is simply good management.

There is no one-size-fits-all social media policy, but a few key things to consider in a policy are:

Respectful Workplace

Update your existing policies. Your company likely has policies that cover appropriate workplace conduct. Update them to encompass social media conduct and connections.  Online interactions can trigger harassment or discrimination charges, or privacy violations.  In once instance, a manager fired an employee by commenting on the employee’s Facebook profile because she disliked something the employee posted.   Make sure employees receive updated training about appropriate behavior extending into social networking with colleagues, and most importantly, subordinates.

Brand Reputation

Employees should understand that the line between personal and professional identity is blurring online. Our inter-connected web means that personal profiles, opinions or social content likely will wind up in Google, or on other social networks and can easily be tracked to a professional affiliation. Sometimes people don’t consider the distributed “network effect” of comments made online to friends. Outsiders may view remarks and construe them to be the company’s, potentially impacting your brand’s reputation.

Marketing

Marketers and agencies that work on behalf of your company should adhere to all social media website terms and conditions, including identity disclosures, age restrictions and rules regarding contests. Equally important, when they engage bloggers and others for word-of-mouth endorsements, they must follow new FTC rulings mandating endorsers to reveal any relationship with your company.

Workplace Safety

Employees should not use private contact information or private social network profiles for company-sponsored online activity. Revealing private information may place the employee’s safety at risk, and tying a company activity into an employee’s personal profile means the employee “owns” it, not the company.  Also, geo-location networking, where users publicly share their GPS locations, may jeopardize an employee’s privacy or safety. Be sure to review and address this increasingly popular tool.

Compensation

Specifically address whether after-hours company-sponsored social media activity is compensated or considered volunteer time.

Don’t be tempted to simply adopt another company’s social media policy. But to get you thinking, Social Media Governance, a website by an author on the subject, has a database of more than 100 social media policies. Institute a policy that addresses your specific business culture and regulatory environment. Consult a digitally knowledgeable attorney, and if needed, bring your social media specialist into the conversation.

Book Review: The Chaos Scenario by Bob Garfield

If you are looking for an overview of what has happened in media in the last five years, give The Chaos Scenario by Bob Garfield a read.

Garfield is funny, has a breezy writing style, is a good storyteller, and is often self-deprecating and irreverent.  If you like his work as co-host of NPR’s On the Media or as a columnist at Advertising Age, you'll get along easily with his book.

Compiled over four years, the book reads like a collection of Garfield’s engaging radio and print stories.  He gives us a primer on the evolution of the media landscape of recent years.  He does it through loads of stories, many of them are now classic “power of the consumer voice" case studies.

Garfield first guides us through a timeline of seminal events between 2005 and mid-2009 that nicely illustrate the evolving disruption in media.  He then zooms in on the revenue models of post-advertising media, the dawn of the widget, the rise of crowdsourcing and influencers, and the flaws of consumer generated ads.  You will find a discussion of Garfield’s top ten word-of-mouth principles. One whole chapter is dedicated to the digital fall and rise of Comcast.
 
I caution you not to get too excited about Garfield's promise to deliver the solution for institutions navigating the disruptions brought on by our digital culture.  His solution doesn't go beyond his admonition of, "listen or perish." 

Organizations are struggling with massive challenges brought on by digital disruption such as serious gaps in skills, culture, process, distribution, business and revenue models, compensation, policy and a host of others. In the face of these challenges, Garfield's "Listenomics" offers little toward a solution.

Garfield gets low marks in my opinion for pulling it all together, delivering relevant insight or providing direction.

But, The Chaos Scenario is worth the read for its orientation to Web 2.0 culture and its collection of media and brand stories.  For anyone fairly familiar with today’s social media environment, there won’t be anything new here.

At the book web site, TheChaosScenario.net, Garfield offers a daily email for thirty days which include chapter synopses and pointers to some good articles and blog posts from around the ‘Net. I don't see much productive organizational value in the discussion questions bundled in with the emails. 

Who should read this book?

• Anyone who is curious about or just getting up to speed on the modern media landscape.
• Highly recommend for media educators for use at secondary or post-secondary levels as a modern media primer. 
• Media specialists looking to bolster presentation material, or for a client leave-behind.

Myopia a Job Hazard for Leaders?

On a scale of 1 to 10, the challenge of convincing management of the need to integrate the social web into organizational strategies is often up there at a 12. 

A study just released by the Kellogg School of Management suggests why convincing the boss is difficult.  Their research suggests that with power, leaders assume that others' perspectives are the same as their own, and that their power inhibits empathy.

The study does underscores the paradox of leadership in this era of the individual, as sociologist Zygunt Bauman calls our modern times.  Individuals expect leaders to be actively integrating the individual's views and needs, not "delivering on a vision." 

In our times, people are willing to follow, but only in as much as the activities of "the leader" support the formation of their own lives.  This "individual" orientation extends to the company, the product, the service, civic life and the education a person chooses to engage with.

In other words, people operate in a "catch and release" mode today. Ties are very loose.  Bauman calls us all "liquid."

Superimpose this very real societal shift onto leaders who operate as if their perspective is the landscape, and well, let's just say there is a very big disconnect.

To be modern leaders - in anything - this individualist expectation ought to be a driving factor in our leadership strategies.  The social web just happens to be a very effective tool to help leaders get individual insight and to manage us liquid beings.

Convincing the boss isn't any easier just because you know the survey says they can't help it. Perhaps the secret lies in getting them to see that they can't see...?

Photo credit: jonny2love

What is Social Media Literacy in the Workforce?

“Social media literacy” in the workforce is something I devote a healthy amount of time to.  Okay, I admit it is something almost no one would spend a weekend afternoon pursuing.  But, it is a passion of mine as I experience how much social media is affecting the demands of the work environment – and the growing disconnect between the skills employers need versus those employees have.  Plus, if I am training professionals in social media management, I just darn well better have a deep understanding of exactly what skills professionals need. 

Enterprises are also getting serious about the idea that social media is presenting pressing work place demands.  New skills are needed, no denying that– social media is changing our culture after all. I thought I’d share what skills we train toward as important to operating effectively in today’s “social media” – or more accurately, “participatory culture.”  I’d love your input.

Let’s define social media literacy first.  It is the skills you need to operate effectively in modern digital environments.  In other words, it is meeting your needs and getting stuff done in virtual places.  Being literate in “social media” means having a core set of skills that transcend the “media” itself.

Concretely, it means you are able to adapt your current job skills to encompass the demands of current 21st century communication channels.

That definition actually encompasses a lot of “stuff,” so articulating exactly what those individual skills are takes a lot of work.
 
Thankfully, the continuing and brilliant work and research of people like the MacArthur Foundation, Henry Jenkins (USC/MIT), Danah Boyd (Microsoft), The GoodWork Project, and a whole lot of others are providing an emerging road map as they are helping define the new media literacies landscape in education.

We’re adding our own research to theirs and continually adapting it to get at the heart of the specific workforce skills professionals and organizations need to have.  Below is our list of those skills.  And, no it doesn't include things like "blogging," "podcasting," or "Twitter."  The tools will constantly be changing.  To be literate is to be able adapt -  no matter what tools may come along.

The list may look daunting because we’ve been working at finely “dissecting” what goes into social media literacy so we can effectively train to it. But, like basic literacy or any social skill, social media literacy is made up of lots of different “competencies” that we as humans – and trainers – learn and interweave into a seamless whole by living it:

Basic Digital Literacy
What is it?  Technical abilities for creating, manipulating, locating and mixing digital content.

• Creating, accessing, organizing digital media
• Manipulating, reproducing and mixing digital media
• Searching, locating and navigating digital media

Identity Construction and Personal Agency
What is it?  Skills to convey one’s “self” through media, and the ability to influence and manage reputation for the purpose of achieving and improving personal or business circumstances through digital activities.

• Using media to “write self into being” (Danah Boyd, Jenny Suden):
• Impression management
• Personal agency:  achieving and influencing personal and business outcomes through online activities
• Status: Understanding, influencing and managing status in connected spaces
• Reputation management

Building Social Capital – “Interpersonal Agency”
What is it? Abilities to build collective connections and relationships in virtual spaces for providing and receiving economic and personal value by fostering and leveraging genuine trust, understanding, shared interests, values, and behaviors.

• Understanding and leveraging individual digital “ecosystems” (how individuals create and use personal communications ecosystems)
• Understanding networks as information “places”
• Networked community participation
• Deriving value from networked communities
• Networking
• • Connecting
  • Learning to be heard
  • Accessing and negotiating virtual group norms
  • Influencing others
• Community building and management
• Differentiating, leveraging and managing participation, fame and celebrity

Transmedia Navigation / Multimedia Modality
What is it?  Ability to express ideas (tell a “story”), consume, follow and synthesize them across different media types.
 

• Create content / express ideas across multiple types of media
• Choose appropriate media types for expression of specific content / ideas
• Consume, identify and interpret content that flows across multiple media
• Fair use and remixing of media

Evaluation and Authentication
What is it?  Ability to create and identify credible information and to think critically about information.

• Evaluate credibility of information sources
• Identify fake vs. real in digital media
• Evaluating credibility context, and motivation (critical analysis)

Information Flow Management
What is it?  Skills for effectively maximizing and gaining relevant value from vast amounts of information.

• Aggregation of media and content
• Filtering
• Managing real-time information streams
• Prioritizing information
• Staying focused
• Multitasking management

Sensemaking 
What is it?  Deriving and creating value from multiple information sources; critical thinking and analysis.

• Visualization: Presenting and combining data in effective visual formats / media
• Mashup: Mixing data and media types to express ideas or create new data / contexts
• Recognize new patterns / trends
• Interpretation and analysis (critical thinking)
• Metrics and Measurement: Choosing / applying appropriate evidence of success

Distributed Intelligence and Collaboration
What is it?  Contributing to, navigating and deriving value from distributed content systems and devices.

• Sharing knowledge toward a common goal
• Team problem-solving
• Tapping remote experts and information resources
• Building, collaborating in, and managing knowledge networks and communities

Ethics
What is it?  Meaningful and responsible behavior within virtual space and communities.

• Identity

            Ethical considerations:  identity construction, deception, role-playing

•   Privacy

            Ethical considerations: appropriate openness, over-sharing, searchability, and invisible audiences

• Ownership & Authorship

            Ethical considerations: digital entitlement, collaborative authorship, fair use, mashups

• Credibility

            Ethical considerations: transparency, truthfulness, motivation

• Participation

                Ethical considerations: conduct, respect, accountability,

Yep – social media literacy isn’t a list of tools to be mastered.  It is a list of modern social skills!

An upcoming MMLI whitepaper delves deeper into what organizations and individuals can be doing to achieve “the new literacies.”

Social Media Training Schedule for 2010

The social media training schedule for 2010 is now available!  We hope to see you at one or more of our workshop courses.

We are adding a new class this year - Managing Information Overload.  This is a growing problem for individuals and for productivity in organizations.  Our hope is this class will help you develop tools and techniques for handling the vast amounts of information we are expected to follow, consume and respond to every day.  We're finalizing the course description and will be posing it in the next day or so.

Full details on all will be coming soon but we wanted to share this now for the many of you who have requested it so you could plan your training budgets and calendars.

If you happen to be in Southern California in November, we will be piloting the Managing Information Overload course for the low, low cost of feedback.  If you are interested in attending, please contact us and we'll be in touch with details.  Like all our classes, attendance is limited to 15 participants.

What if Social Media were Modern Culture?

What would happen if we stopped using the term “social media” and instead used "modern culture”?

Attitudes would change.  Leadership would take a broader view.  Priorities would shift.

What would happen?

• “Social media” would cease to be a practice.
• “New media” would be a universal social skill.
• Leaders would capitalize on the pressing upheaval in the marketplace.
•  “Digital native” would cease to be a dismissive of the young.
• Every person would expand their “sociological imagination” through the loose ties of global social networks.
• Governments would prioritize digital infrastructure and make the digital divide a pressing social issue.
• Education would be preparing teachers and our youth for the environments in which they will be operating.
• Educators would build participation and collaboration into curricula as important to social grooming.
• Institutions would stop blocking access and address modern IT and security issues.
• Organizations would operate under missions that value more the “sense-making” that comes from the connections formed than the information flowing through networks.
• Interpretation would trump measurement.
• We would understand the difference between participation and celebrity.

The language we use shapes our thinking.

The Future Called. I Told Them You Were Busy

That’s just one of the snippets of wisdom for us adults  - and professionals - from this video, written and performed by the kids at Suffern Middle School when asked about their future.  It was created as the Keynote for the Net Generation Education Project.

Listen.

No Future Left Behind

Are you ready?

Digital Literacy: A Key Job Skill

During one of those lunches when the conversation is animated and the topics roam freely, we settled in on the state of digital literacy in the workplace for a bit. 

We agreed…surprisingly still amazingly poor. Yet at the same time, digital literacy is critical in life and in every kind of job and organization. 

Just to be clear, digital literacy is not "knowing" MS Word and Excel or how to “do” social media.  It is a set of skills that allows people to operate effectively in digital environments.  This includes, among other things:

•    accessing, organizing and interpreting digital media;
•    reproducing and manipulating digital media and data;
•    evaluating and synthesizing information and knowledge across digital media and platforms.

We need these skills to do basic things in our lives today, like shop, sell and get news.

So onward. Bright the next morning my news reader brings me a story titled “Literacy level of recruits now a major concern for media, report finds” from the U.K.'s Guardian.

The upshot:  employers are finding it harder and harder to find enough digitally literate employees - largely because those that are digitally literate are immediately snatched up by the creative media and computer gaming industries.

Gail Rebuck, CEO of Random House Group, is quoted in the story:   “The industry needs a workforce capable of combining traditional skills with a new digital and technical capability underpinned by a renewed emphasis on creativity.”

Do not think for one moment, the need of which she speaks is limited to the publishing industry.

The gap between the skills industry needs to remain competitive and those that individuals actually have is just scary.  As a trainer and consultant, I live it everyday.

So, what do we do about it?

I’ve got all the “must dos” and “must knows” right here in my “save the world” bookmarks  – but they feel a bit like chest pounding, so let’s talk concrete.  

Stop waiting and take the initiative to get digitally literate.  Do not wait until the educational system catches up – and your employer isn’t going to train you. No one is going to demand you do it. They’ll simply lay you off, or find someone else, or sideline you or ignore you.

Here are three things you can do now.  These will not turn you into any kind of digital media geek, guru or virtuoso, but they do encompass three basic skills the digitally literate posses.

 1.Devote a little time each week to exploring the Web – discover at least three new sites a week.

Why? 

This helps you learn to learn in digital environments.  There is no skill more important than honing your curiosity and learning how to learn. Things change too way fast to rely on formal education structures, so you are going to be required to learn by exploring.

How? 

• Stumbleupon.com or StumbleVideo – these sites do the work for you by showing you all kinds of sites or video based on your interests - without feeling overwhelming.
• Neat New Stuff I Found on the Web This Week.  This list is compiled by Marylaine Block, former librarian, present-day writer and speaker. A vast array of interest areas.
• Springwise – all kinds of new business ideas – many of them “real world” but it almost always links to an interesting website or resource.

What?

Besides the information the site overtly presents – answer these three questions about the site:

• Who is behind it?
• Why did they choose to put up this site (how is it benefiting them)?
• What about it connects visitors to the content?

2. Take a basic class on creating, manipulating, uploading and tagging digital media.

Why? 

You need to know how to create and manipulate all kinds of content.  Even if you aren’t going to be doing it for a living, you will be hiring, working with or managing people who do. The work of the organization requires this kind of content.  Oh, and your customers, employees, partners all expect you to be offering this kind of content.

How? 

• Your local university extension or community college is a logical first stop to find a class. 
• Knight Digital Media Center at Berkeley has some GREAT and free online tutorials.  Even though their aim is teaching journalists, these are simple, perfect tutorials for general knowledge about creating and handling digital media.
• Check out Lynda.com for short, targeted online classes on all kinds of software and applications.
• Apple Retail Stores free workshops.  Even if you aren’t a “mac person” just sitting in will teach you wonderful things about digital media.

What?

Just extend what you are doing in life, play or work to include these new skills.  Trust me, once you know how to manipulate digital media you’ll find many useful ways to digitize lots of things in your life.

3.  Join an online social network – log in at least twice a week and just explore what people are doing with it.

Why? 

What’s happening in social networks is changing the way we approach work tasks and knowledge sharing.  Understand the dynamics of connecting, “following” people and sharing, and you’ve got a basic handle on Web 2.0 and what’s coming from it.

How? 

Choose a social network that suits a particular interest of yours.  Because Facebook and LinkedIn are so large, these are good choices as they have a lot of diversity in content and people  - but, a social shopping site, a photo-sharing site or a niche network for travelers or grandparents is equally as important.  Find one by using Google or Bing, type in your interest and add the words “social network” to it.

What? 

Watch what people are doing there – understanding their behaviors is what you are after.   As you are exploring – answer:

• What is the common theme or thing that everyone here shares? Look beyond the obvious – yes people share photos on photo-sharing sites, but what are they really sharing: travel, experiences, parenting or jobs or ?
• How do people find each other – or the thing they are sharing?
• How is the sharing accomplished?

Feel free to count this as one of your digital literacy lessons this week, but off with you now!

Image credits:
Cristobal Cobo Romaini
Mrsjwd9
Devon In Regress
Matt Hamm

Newport Beach Social Media Training Series Now Open

Registration is now open for the Social Media Management Training Series in Newport Beach, CA, October 5-9, 2009.  This is the last time in 2009 that the entire series is being offered.

Take the whole series or mix and match the individual classes to suit your needs. 

We are delighted that Illinois State University has accepted our non-profit fellowship, the Gerard Seat, for this five-course series in Newport Beach. 

Public Media Collaborative Offering Free “Social Media for Social Action” Workshops.

Susan Mernit, social web and journalism goddess, is heading up this first teaching event for the Public Media Collaborative on May 1 at the University of San Francisco.   It is free to people affiliated with a “mission-driven” organization.  The workshops are in collaboration with the Journalism Innovations II conference.

I’m just learning about the Public Media Collaborative and  have joined the wiki and the Facebook group to explore deeper.   In the meantime, this event not only looks like fun, but is heading in a direction I strongly believe in – social media literacy for all.

The three free sessions are:

• Social Media 101: Getting started with Facebook and other social networking tools
• Building your brand with social media
• Twitter: A User’s Guide for individuals, non-profits, bloggers & writers.

There will be a Spanish language track as well. 

More information is at Susan blog here.   Pre-registration is required and you can register here.

Public Media Collaborative is planning another event in July for non-profits, community organizations and community activists.  Join in if you'd like to contribute or learn. Then share!