An incomplete field-spotters guide to the jungle beasts of the social media enterprise

Herewith in a half-dozen crisp pen-portraits, a description of some of the characters you are sure to meet as a missionary for social media in the curious jungle of social media in the enterprise:

Macaques are fun and infuriating. They love to experiment, grabbing something and leaping away to play with it. They’re sociable types too, but defend their own space. You’ll wonder where that thing of yours went, only to find a cheeky macacque making a rude gesture with it, and then throwing it at you when you turn your back.

Camels are generally miserable, unyielding and obstructive where possible. They do Real Work, have always done it a certain way, and won’t be persuaded that any other way exists. They cast you a look of disdain through their long eyelashes, and give you a sneaky kick if you get too close.

Puppies are endearing (I told you it was a strange old jungle). They crave attention and have seemingly boundless energy. Never too busy to play with a new toy, they gnaw things to shreds, unleash loo rolls throughout the house and run up expectantly for the pat on the head they know they’ll get.

Crocodiles lurk in the shallows and appear at first to be a helpful log to cross the stream. Big mistake: they’ll cost you an arm.

Owls watch and learn. You hardly notice they’re there, as they tentatively edge along the twig towards you. They aren’t afraid of new ideas and do things thoroughly and deliberately. In fact, because they take time to learn and practice, they often end up as the experts.

Bison are herd animals. They do things when others do them, and don’t want to be the first to explore a new domain. They worry that striking off in a new direction will leave them exposed. And they know, rightly, that lions come and go like the seasons, but the herd will always remain.

Photo credits (Flickr): Creativity+ Timothy K Hamilton, chotda, Tambako the Jaguar, meantux, Dom Dada and me

The power of unconference

I think it was clear it was going to be a good day during the introductions. Around fifty youth workers, technologists and others with an interest in youth participation from as far away as Lancashire, Devon, Norfolk and Wiltshire had gathered at DIUS on a Saturday morning for UKYouthOnline, organised by Tim Davies. With that much enthusiasm and experience in the room, Tim’s gamble on the open space conference methodology was sure to pay off - even if only about a third of the participants had ever attended an unconference before.

Tim’s a phenomenal facilitator, motivator and organiser, and I think that’s what really made the unconference model work: having just enough structure and infrastructure to enable the interesting, serendipitous conversations, demonstrations and one-to-one meetings to take place.

It was also the first time I’d played the infamous social media game, in a great session run by Dave Briggs (taking time out from tending to the needy and applying creams and lotions in his Social Media clinic). If you have a group of people interested in using social media tools for engagement but not sure which ones to choose or where to start, it’s a good way of thinking through some of the strategic choices involved.

I learnt a whole bunch of things:

• Examples of how the Facebook MyOffice application is being used as a collaboration platform between youth workers and young people: a great example of going to where the audience is, rather than building a new and unfamiliar platform for them to use
• Sprout, a widget-building application. Probably best for prototyping since there are some question marks over accessibility
• The fascinating work being done in organisations with different but parallel challenges to my own: Oxfam GB, The National Trust and the British Youth Council, amongst others
• The sophistication of youth work on social networking services: for example, the subtle enhancements to privacy in user profiles introduced by the new Facebook
• Ultimately, the value of truly co-designed online projects, especially when it comes to services designed to be used by young people. I’m still too inclined to go it alone, when I think the lesson of youth work generally is to find appropriate ways to put the power to develop solutions in the hands of young people themselves. I wonder what a co-designed online consultation might look like if we were to bring in the stakeholders, scientists, employers, learners and front-line staff that we want to hear from?

It was also really encouraging to see the enthusiasm and help I got from facilities colleagues and others in DIUS transforming a run-of-the-mill government building into a really good unconference venue with wifi, pizza and the works in terms of AV equipment, registration desk etc - all on a shoestring budget. I’d really encourage others in government to think about what their central London buildings could help to make possible on a weekend. Thanks are due to DIUS colleagues or alumni Justin Kerr-Stevens (for wifi), Michelle Lyons (for social reporting), Jo Simmons and Kim Worts (my boss and a senior civil servant, hopefully now a convert to unconferences).

I presented some analysis we commissioned from Forrester on how young people are using the internet, social media and social networking services - it led to an interesting discussion about issues of gender, and how we design for the social aspect of using the internet with friends (as opposed to a solitary experience) and recognise the challenge of media fragmentation and continuous partial attention. More to come on that one in a future post, I’m sure. For now, here are the slides:

Thanks again to Tim and everyone who came along for their inspiration and ideas.

Welcome to the machine

I spent an interesting hour in the company of a long-serving colleague today, as part of a project we’re doing to look at the baseline skills and awareness of social media in the organisation. Peter (not his real name) first worked in the Department for Education in the late 1960s, and painted me a picture of what life was like:

“A letter would come in, and would go to the Registry. There were three sets of files: Policy, Premises and Correspondence. The Registry folk would work out which set of files the letter belonged with, and file it. Then I’d receive the file, together with a note about the letter. All the information about the matter would be kept in the file. Sometimes, if the file related to a school that had been established for decades, the file would be enormous. So they would send me a form asking which portion of the file I needed, and I’d send that back to them in the docket, and then back would come the file. I’d read the letter, maybe telephone a colleague to check something if I needed to - bearing in mind the cost of telephone calls - and then I’d write my response in longhand and give it to the typing pool. It would come back within 24 hours, and I’d check it. If corrections were needed, I’d send it back and have it redone. And then the letter would go out.”

I’m sure in some ways the basic process of civil service work is much the same today - I remember the manila registry files myself from when I started, just five years ago. But it made me stop and think about the scale and pace of change. Twenty years ago, few civil servants would have regularly worked with a computer. Ten years ago, email would have been a novelty for most. Now, we’re wondering why it’s seeming so tough to embed a blogging culture amongst a workforce of whom over 30% (PDF) started work in the 1970s and 64% of whom were filing their first dockets before Tim Berners-Lee’s vague but exciting idea was even conceived.

Douglas Adams was right:

1) everything that’s already in the world when you’re born is just normal;

2) anything that gets invented between then and before you turn 35 is incredibly exciting and creative and, given opportunity, you can make a career out of it;

3) anything that gets invented after you’re 35 is against the natural order of things and the beginning of the end of civilization as we know it until it’s been around for about ten years when it gradually turns out to be alright really

Later in the day, between spells of digital docket-filing, I stumbled across the Civil Service values, namely integrity, honesty, objectivity and impartiality. We live in a performance-driven world, where it seems everyone is judged on results and targets achieved, deadlines and service agreements delivered. The what, not the how. And yet those values describe a different type of organisation: one in which the credibility and trust of the public rest at least as much in the processes it follows as in the results it produces. Rigour, transparency, independence. Curiously, I think social media, with its potential to expose organisations to scrutiny from passionate outsiders can help deliver as much on these process objectives as on the delivery ones. So maybe we shouldn’t just make the case for the adoption of social media by government from the perspective of quicker/faster/cheaper but also argue the potential for greater transparency, scrutiny, reflection and independence.

I think that’s one for the registry file.

Social media is poop scoop, not turd polish

One day, when I can retire from all this social media stuff and become comfortably rich on the conference circuit, I’ll pepper my sell-out keynote speeches with colourful metaphors like the following:

Social media is poop scoop, not turd polish.

Accept that sh*t happens
So much communication today - from the public and private sectors - is predicated on the belief that silence, rebuttal or defensive lines will be enough. It won’t, not these days. Even if it makes the issue die down for a bit in the mainstream media, in the long run it will blow up again or gnaw away at your brand corrosively to make you look foolish, dishonest or even mildly unhinged. Similarly, social media quickly exposes fabrication and humiliates those responsible, so if you have skeletons in the closet then you’re best off coming clean. Try using the tools of social media to polish turds at your peril.

Lesson #1: expect sh*t, and go equipped with the tools to deal with it.

Take responsibility for it, and for clearing it up
Scoopers accept that it’s up to them to clear up the mess, even if there’s nobody looking and even if it’s not easy. It’s not that you couldn’t just leave it - you might get away with that a few times - but eventually it will catch up with you, or you’ll find yourself in a community which is overrun with the stuff. In practical terms, that means it’s your responsibility - as customer service agent, a press officer, a policy official, whatever - to engage in the process of helping put the screw-ups right when you find them. That doesn’t necessarily mean whistleblowing (but there’s a role for that too), but it does mean being prepared to muck in yourself and recognise that you can help to fix it.

I’d love to see more public sector organisations using services like GetSatisfaction to help identify and address problems in service, harnessing the passion and ideas of our customers to help us solve the problem. Social media helps big organisations to turn frustration into solutions, and to spot the holes in customer service or policy more effectively than mystery shopping, market research or even [sharp intake of breath] classic consultation. But it means being seen to stoop and scoop, which we’re often not ready to do.

Lesson #2: own up to mistakes, and use some of the tools out there to help people help you put things right.

Do what people do in civilised society
Nobody wants to live in a world of polished turds - it makes for a more cynical, frustrated, insular community. Social media can restore some of the sense of community where we give and take, praise and criticise, and earn a reputation based on the contribution we make, not the image we try to manufacture. The civilised organisation, the collaborative state, behaves honestly in the social media ecosystem, whether that’s introducing yourself, crediting the work of others, admitting mistakes or being up front about what you’re doing and why.

Lesson #3: be nice.

I’m so gonna regret writing this when someone picks me up me in the future for polishing a turd of my own. But for now, wish me luck next week as I work with some colleagues to broach one of the hardest topics in social media: scoop, don’t polish.

Image credits (from top): Minor Prophet, Johannal, Robertotostes

Blessed are the developers

This week, I took a trip down memory lane and revisited a (non-government) project I last worked on nearly five years ago. The ‘temporary‘ system I built back then is still going – amazingly – but the team wanted some changes made. Various people had dabbled in the code since 2003, most recently the organisation’s team of Romanian programmers.  The problem was, my former colleague complained, though cheap those guys didn’t really understand the project, moved onto other stuff and ended up delivering a half-upgraded system which was worse than what was there before.

Today, I had lunch with some proper government techies. This social media stuff is all very well, they said, but what about accessibility, and security, and data protection, and support? To paraphrase their argument, the dabblings of people like me trigger an avalanche of expectation which people like them are then commanded to deliver on. Frustratingly, it’s not that those guys aren’t innovating – just that the incredible stuff they’ve been developing hasn’t managed to see the light of day.

So I’m starting to think this means two things:

• If we want to be creative in how we apply technology to the problems of government, then we need to draw a line under the extent to which we outsource IT. Though they’d beat you to a pulp with one of their white papers for saying it, you’ll never get real innovation in web communication from the big outsourcers. For that, you need a guy in the corner who does this stuff out of pride, not for money and doesn’t need a spec to tell you how it should be built. It comes from leaving just enough breathing space in the day job for the in-house techies to build the stuff they think is cool, and ensuring it gets in front of the right people. It comes from the developers still working on the project their boss told them to stop working on six months ago. Like Spolsky says, we need to treat our good in-house developers like the superstars they are and recognise just how much talent we have sitting within government if only we could - dare I say - unlock it.
• Social media tools lower the barrier to entry, but only so far. Wordpress.com, TypePad, Ning and SurveyMonkey are great. They let people like me take our meagre knowledge a long way. But we have a responsibility to stop others who understand less about these tools than we do from running away with the idea that this means government webbery has fundamentally changed: it hasn’t. More than ever in a converged, transformed, empowered world, we need the enterprise CMSes, the resilient hosting and the focus on making stuff that’s accessible to everyone. A swiss army knife might save you on a camping trip, but it’s not exactly the tool of choice when you’re refitting a kitchen, and quite right too. We need to understand which of our projects are camping trips, and which are kitchen refits, and choose our tools and teams accordingly – making sure the senior decisionmakers understand the distinction too.

To a non-techie, it can feel like your grumpy developers are just being obstructive when they tell you that they can’t just deploy that blog site you wanted overnight when that guy at the conference said that you could do it yourself on Wordpress.com in half an hour. But chances are – if your techies are any good - it’s not obstructiveness at all: it’s professionalism.