Tag: social media

Placing VALUE in personal networks

Time of the Social Bloom

As a social weaver, I think often about my networks.  I do invest 10% of my time daily into reading, sharing and reaching out via the post office, phone, email, Word Press, Twitter, LinkedIn, Facebook, Pinterest and other networks to cultivate and nurture them.  Certainly this has become a bit more challenging over the years with the complexity of tools, interfaces and compatibility that makes it more challenging.  So what I try to do is the following:

1.)   Create a system and back it up for you to capture all your key and/or tier one connections in your network.

2.)   Flex your documentation muscles as details matter.  Take time to document key information around your networks preferred interaction styles, preferences and likes so that you can remember names of family members, businesses, awards, alma mater, etc.

3.)   Be authentic.  Take the time to send hand written thank you notes, send flowers, books and/or hand deliver a meal.  All of the personal time investment is going away with the speed the internet has given us, so now is the time to re-invest this savings into things that really matter.

4.)   Give a Hoot.  Personally I’ve found that by allowing the twitter application to connect with LI, FB and vice versa, my social networks get these updates and can customize their personal view as needed.  I currently use Hootsuite to aggregate my twitter streams as it has an easy to use platform and a community based approach to support.

5.)   Invest in your purpose per network.  Take the time invest in yourself, your brand or simply hire a social media advisor to partner on your purpose and plan.

Someone recently asked me about the ‘size of my current network’?  I wasn’t sure how to answer this question at first since it really depends, right?  Immediately, I then started to analyze how social has changed the dialogue, the language and currency we use.

This notion of a social net worth is an akin to a financial portfolio.

In the future, perhaps we will be asked when applying for either a loan, credit card or job what the range of a ‘social value’ score that not only help them determine risk, but perhaps what someone views as a social investment.  Truly fascinating how these social analytics are becoming game changers.  As with anything, the public verus private ‘number’ will be something people yearn to acquire.

Social Leadership Retreat

I’m looking forward to the facilitating an exclusive Social Leadership Retreat.  We will be meeting at a private villa nestled in the Sierra Madre Mountains in the Baja peninsula in Mexico.  It is located 80 minutes north of Cabo San Lucas on the Pacific Ocean where the ocean views are spectacular, vegetation supreme and proximate to the sublime culture and art that Todos Santos has to offer, where we will discuss and harness our passion in social artistry and leadership for this two day workshop.

We will share next practices in community moderation and social artistry.  This private villa will serve as our retreat for this focused group of professionals to discuss in great depth both professional and personal challenges and opportunities in our fields.

Saturday, 28 July 2012

8:00 Beach walk and yoga stretches on private Pacific Ocean beach

9:00 Mexican coffee will awaken our senses as we our facilitator leads us through a discovery of what is working and making a difference in our industry, what are opportunities and what we can shed

11:00 Key behaviors in social leadership

12:30 Lunch

14:00 Peer coaching on roof top terrace

15:00 Break- Margaritas, chips and salsa

16:00 Activating diversity and mobile in healthcare communities

17:00 Adjourn drive back to Todos Santos

Sunday 29 July 2012

8:00 Beach walk and yoga stretches on private Pacific Ocean beach

9:00 Role of a community convener, weaver and social artist

10:00 Recap Day 1

10:15 Artist’s Perspective: Keys to unlock social artistry, creation and human connection

11:30 Social artist competencies

12:30 Lunch

14:00 Peer coaching on roof top terrace

15:30 Break- Baja Wine Sampling and literature reading

16:00 Reflections

17:00 Adjourn drive back to Todos Santos

We will be using hash tag #SocialLeadership

Small Business Owners Give a Hoot

Hootsuite Fans!

Small business has yet to fully embrace Twitter for fear of losing control, concerns over taxing resources or simply put, lack adequate training.  I started to comprehend their concerns while hosting a #HootupReno.  Despite their earnest interest in new media marketing, these small business owners were keen to learn something fresh and new, while focusing on driving business results. As female leaders, they openly shared stories about protecting their overtaxed workforce, staying on top of cultural trends and the competitive marketplace.  Yet, what I was surprised to discuss at great length, was the brand protection strategies each business leader employed for their industry, for investing in marketing and also managing on twitter the unknown social followers.  Fear of detracting from the brand through a few ‘bad’ followers, was the most spirited conversation.

After demonstrating the value of using social productivity tools, like Hootsuite, and through sharing stories, we equipped them with new tools for their boxes and in some cases strengthened their ability to steer their ships while navigating difficult economic conditions.  In fact, several business owners left port to embark upon a journey with new friends in their crew after this meet up.  They are now venturing in uncharted waters while staying connecting through social media to share their sailing ventures with one another.

Active Listening, a Core Competency for Social Business Leaders, featuring: Nick Howe

If you haven’t followed Nick Howe on Twitter, it’s time.  He is a social business champion and hero who just happens to be a genius.   This superhero by day has a key role at Hitachi Data Systems , Vice President of the HDS Academy, yet by night is probably the most humble, coolest, geekiest and happiest guy you will ever meet.  He embodies networked learning in every sense of the word.  He engages his industry through storytelling, like at Jive World.  He is foremost a business leader who challenges himself to think about the disruptive nature of social business through active listening.  LISTENING you say?  How many times has a senior leader in one of your organizations taken the time to really listen and not ‘pander’ to you?  Recall and value your thoughts and ideas, synthesize quickly and give proper attribution?  Well, I certainly hope the answer is yes, but if you are like many people, those rare and inspirational leaders are unusual, which is why it’s noteworthy to celebrate when we find the attenuate.  In fact, his personal philosophy is simple:  “make learning a priority, trust that people will step up to a challenge and acknowledge weakness as an opportunity to learn, versus a threat.”

As a business leader he is constantly validating or examining what he believes his and his organizations’ roles are to achieve company goals as a continuous process. Not just a board room exercise once a year.  Yeah, that’s right – the infinite Loop.  Just like great leaders before him have, he is in constant examination of himself and his impact on the organization, his colleagues and his customers.

Merci, for chocolate, active listening and leadership

What I found the most profound in interviewing him for this blog post was his deep personal commitment to being a collaborative leader, who builds alignment, invites people into possibilities and empowers them.  He engages in detailed community conversations with great detail and critical attention to drive business results, yet humble in his overall approach and demeanor that is exceptional.   To use my food metaphors, like a scarce chocolate with intense and subtle characteristics, rich in flavor and depth.  This type of leadership is commendable, addictive and perhaps will become a contagion that spreads the learning fever.  Active listening and reflection are paramount for social business leadership; in fact I would argue these should be key core competencies for leadership.

Nurturing diversity of thought within communities is an art

Nurturing diversity of thought within communities is an art.  The working title for this blog post occurred to me after reading the article and comments from “Firms Hail New Chiefs (of Diversity)”

If you are reading this article, it’s likely because you have interest in the subject of diversity, right?  Ask yourself this question, do you know where your employee or consumer resource groups are today? What topics are being discussed?  What are the key patterns?  Who is discussing with whom about what?  They are a great source of thought and inspiration, so why not engage them?  It’s highly likely you have either been a member or are involved with either formal or informal E2E, B2B or B2C communities online and/or  groups and teams that meet in person, right?  Now think about your diversity of people (membership) and thoughts or outcomes.  Do you seek change or are you wondering how to get more diverse

Just because you now have a social community channel, it doesn’t mean your community is diverse.  Nurturing diversity of thought within communities is an art.  It requires a team of  community weavers with valor, flexibility, inspirational leadership and courage.  These individuals link the unlinkable which isn’t something picked up in a certification class. It’s like an fine aged cheese, it requires an artisan and maturity.  Some of the best weavers that I’ve had the honor to work with build trust, foster diversity, invite dissention and are comfortable with the uncomfortable.  Many of these weavers have the competencies, characteristics or learning plans to:

  1. Risk takers.  I think this is a number one rule – don’t be afraid to go where other community leaders haven’t gone before, because that is exactly where we often find the most satisfaction, by blazing new trails to find new possibilities.  So, go on now, get started, and take a small risk, then a bigger one and so on…
  2. Think like entrepreneurs.  According to Wikipedia, “an Entrepreneur in English is a term applied to a person who is willing to help launch a new venture or enterprise and accept full responsibility for the outcome.”
  3. Can work with a shoe string budget.  It’s important to be scrappy and just figure it out versus going the distance to try to get funding.  I often find that if you cherry pick and take that low hanging fruit, get video testimonials, quotes and in expensive feedback that you incorporate into your on-going conversation or proposal, it is faster.  What I mean is that you can ultimately get funding by using a quickly capturing the story along the way that you are recruiting and identifying community members.  It not only creates a social memory and story – but also becomes the basis for a longer term funding pitch.
  4. Creative.  Use new media to bring people into the conversation; do consider a twitter meet up, a new free hang out tool or even bringing someone into a formal meeting via Skype. Whether they are uncreative to you – they may be creative to others.  I recently learned this through using the www.meet-meme.com cards.  It’s colorful, vintage like and fun.  Think about new ways to bring imagery and tactical into your conversations.
  5. Leverage resources.  Check in with all community managers to see if they have a few people they would propose that join your committee, core team or program.  Check in with your social networks as to whom within their companies could come as a guest presenter to bring outside though into your company.  Consider sharing with a competitor during a conference during an industry event.  Read and read more.  There is so much to find on twitter by just searching hash tags, that you will be lost for days trying to make sense of it all.  Make sure to scan the on-line blogs, tweets and industry magazines to tap into some thought leaders, bloggers or commenter’s to get a sense of others to invite into helping solve your problem.
  6. Know thy problems – speaking of the problem. You must know how to clearly define what your problem is and how this community of diverse thinkers can help solve it.  Aka – community charter – but one common way to get people to rally around a conversation is by starting with a problem.  People instinctively want to help, they enjoy competition, sharing and solving – so why not really understand the problem that exists and share it.  Hard to do if it’s a B2C community or even B2B because it can show your warts – but that is what these tools are made for right now
  7. Politically map – ensure you are asking everyone in your social journey along the way that is nodes they would recommend to talk to within the market, geo, function or ERG.  Through this process you will start to uncover diamonds in the rough.  Linda Linfield taught me this years ago, build relationships with those that you want to influence and leverage the relationship you have with them to influence their thinking.  It’s simple and effective.
  8. Walk the talk – it’s a requirement that along the journey, you embody the collaborative principles– it’s contagious.
  9. Engage SMEs – make sure that you are talking to people that face customers and are experts in their subject matter – they will often have direct contact with customers, suppliers or employees that they rely on for their day job. Often times these people are hard to reach whether they are in the Amazon working on heavy equipment or just really busy loving their day job.  But  the people that are doing the day to day work are resources we must leverage – but be mindful they are highly respected and require kit gloves in handling as they are often hard to reach
  10. Encourage inclusion – make your community a safe and welcoming place for members. Do practice being authentic, warm and embodying the community guiding principles!

Community Engagment Tips

Make time to look in the mirror!

Resources – do you have a community manager assigned to ensure you have focus?  Important to ensure that they have a cultivation plan, charter and are working to perform health checks with members to modify and drive accordingly.

Relevancy – are the content assets relevant to the members?  Do they have click thru’s, links and/or are the appropriate length that will drive user engagement?

Feedback – ensure that you are constantly engaging your members to request insight when engaging to ensure that you are incorporating changes and ideas that are member driven as you evolve the community.

Connectedness – critical factors are living and breathing collaborative approaches whenever you approach social learning – so do make sure that you are warm and offer connectedness in your approach as a leader.

Walking the Talk – make sure that you embody the collaborative principles as you operate – it’s contagious

SMEs – thought leaders, subject matter experts or external guests are important to cycle into your community event planning to switch up the cadence and infuse new perspective into the community.

Games and Fun – make sure that you think about approaching your events with some exercises, games or other fun activities to make it more engaging for participants.

Learning – build social learning principles into all that you do relative to your communities.

Leadership – walk the talk in everything you do as it relates to your community.  Drive the desired outcomes to completion, facilitate conversations on behalf of your members and advocate!

Warmth – make your community a safe and welcoming place for members.  Do practice being authentic, warm and embodying the community bill of rights!

Focusing on the Patient

Increasing patient care – this is what it’s all about.  Through my work with physicians over the last few years, I’ve come to really experience how this is  in fact their main focus.  Contrary to what you may read, they do really care about their patients.  Good to hear right?  So, what brings me to share my experience, well I’ve just returned from a weeklong conference which inspired me to write this post.

With the on-set of patients utilizing social media to connect and collaborate, many physicians are looking at these tools as a way to connect bridge and assist in efforts to increase patient care.   It’s exciting to see them embrace a new approach to engage with patients.  We patients, we are hungry for information about healthcare, about the best care, who to use, who has experience, how we  can share our stories and experiences as well as receive information on other experiences.

I was so impressed with Herbert Wolfsen, M.D. at the Mayo Clinic, I  co-authored a medical abstract on his experience in developing a Facebook group to support Esophageal cancer patients.  Why you ask?  Well, it was a wonderful opportunity for me to learn and provide insight into the work Dr. Wolfsen has done in supporting this important group.  Because patients in this group face distinctive issues, it is important for them to connect with each other to share experiences.  The Facebook group is fostering the member’s needs to not only connect with the doctor himself, but with other patients with interest in this area.  This could allow them to have social learning beyond any F2F discussion’s they may have had in the past and continue the dialogue, but through an online venue even richer since it was a larger group.  Overall, I find it encouraging to see such physicians branching out of the hospital and utilizing online tools to enable connections in modern means that engage, support and educate patients.

By Michelle Groff Burling

The Naked Community Manager

I’ve been building teams of community managers for years.  One consistent theme that is required is to ensure that we provide them with the tools, the structure, support and empowerment they need to flourish.  Much of my leadership in communities is spent ensuring that they aren’t left as, ‘naked community managers’.  I’m constantly advocating that they aren’t tethered to the phone so that their brains aren’t oatmeal, am expression that Melyssa Nelson, a colleague of mine uses in community management  to describe a treadmill of being tethered in community life to something that isn’t allowing the deeper time to think, to pause, to reflect and evolve in our community management roles. 

A few insights that I’ve gained over the years is that we need to ensure that we challenge organizational structures and cultures that limit community managers abilities to be transparent in their conversations.  Cultures that restrict community managers desire to advocate community member’s feedback, innovations and ideas.  This is a critical part of our eco-system and should be embraced as foundational in the central activities of what we do as community managers. . 

Our nature as social community managers is to translate what we hear, see and experience through the eyes of our members.  In doing this critical activity, we have a deep sense of what our sponsoring organization could do to thrive and realize a mission or business imperative.  David Brooks calls this “MindSight” our ability to download what members are seeking.   This is why I’m an advocate for empowering, training and supporting this critical part of the fiber of networks, communities or groups.  Listen to this great conversation with David Brooks around ‘The Social Animal’. 

We as culture and community advocates need to continue to advocate for valuing these skills within organizations.  Ensure that we leave for errors in our employees, groups, networks, communities and ourselves.  We need to continue to make room for space and flow and most importantly, we must create a culture that recognizes and values everyone.   These social artists are some of the most gifted people that I’ve met in my career and I’m honored to create an environment that provides them with warmth, support, encouragement and apparel.

Networking Coaching

 

I facilitated a virtual fireside chat with Sally Helgesen, author of the Female Vision and spoke afterwards about my role as a community weaver at Executive Networks.   I shared with Sally that the majority of the time I spend performing networking coaching with community managers and weavers around approaches and techniques they can consider using as the foundation of building relationships for the purpose of networking. 

What we talk about is how individuals can within the construct of networks build relationships.  I’m not talking about teaching people about selling a brand or building a personal brand.   Rather, as a networking coach, how we spend time understanding individuals and their understanding of themselves, their goals and archetypes.

Do they understand their strengths and weaknesses?  Do they have development areas clearly articulated?  Where have they or do they plan to explore, etc? 

What matters to them in the lens of this network experience?  How have they networked in the past, what are they most comfortable offering and giving to the network?  What do they desire in return?  How much time do they have to spend on these activities?    Only then can we have authentic conversations that are tailored to be high value for time around what is most important to them, their gift areas and new contacts or knowledge they would like to develop.

The role of a networking coach tends to often involve the archetype of a detective, adventurer and revolutionary.