For the most part I’ve been MIA for about a week. This is because my bigmama – my grandmother – passed away last week.

I went to the Georgia mountains for her service, and to be with my mom and other family. Bigmama had late stage Alzheimer’s, so this wasn’t totally unexpected. But it still sucks. A lot.

Here’s her official obituary. Here’s what I remember. My bigmama could cook better than anyone I know. She taught me to cook my first thing: scrambled eggs. She taught me the technique for cooking greens when she taught me how to make poke salat. My biggest regret is I didn’t learn how to can from her, and especially her pickles.

It was interesting hearing about how she was the one who ran around organizing things when people were sick, or needed help. She even had her funeral planned to the last detail so no on would have to do anything. I learned so much from her that I’m not sure how much I learned and how much is DNA.

I am going to miss her so much. Its nice to know that part of who she is will live on in me.

Jane Hart posted a satirical video – 10 reasons to ban social media the other day. Shortly thereafter, she challenged everyone to come up with 10 reasons NOT to ban social media. Of course I can never just follow the rules, so here is my contribution with a twist.

I am doing social media full-time as my job with Education Services at EMC. None of my peers ever believed I would do it, and I’m surprised that I’m doing this myself sometimes. I heard many of the objections on the tongue-in-cheek 10 reasons to ban social media video. My son taught me a new term (he’s wrapping up a summer business class) – I acted as a tempered radical to try and start change. Sometimes social media “experts” made that job harder.

So I give you my twist on the meme:

How you can understand and counteract the 10 reasons to ban social media

10. Social media is a fad.

This excuse for not using social media is based fully on fear. Here’s what management is thinking: we’ll pour resources into this, we’ll spend a bunch of  time and money on it, and people won’t even use it. They’ll go back to what they always do, and 3 years from now we’ll do this whole dance again to different music.

Here’s where you have to be prepared to counter-act the impact social media “experts” may have had on your decision makers. Pick one initiative that is important to your management. Explain how using social media can impact the bottom line, and show how easy & inexpensive it will be to implement your plan. Give them something easy that they don’t have to be married to – maybe a listening program.

If they really think social media a fad, give them something lightweight and low-risk so they can try it out. But make sure you measure everything you can, and show them some fantastic results.

9. It’s about controlling the message.

This one is about fear as well. And its pretty easy to overcome – just start showing them examples of how people are talking about your products and company. Good things if you can find them, bad if you have to. People are already talking about you. The question is – do you want to be involved when and where your customers decide to share. Do your stakeholders want to counteract the negative, and reinforce the positive? Or do they want to pretend that no one is talking at all?

If they decide to put their toe in the water and try social media, record any outstanding interactions that take place between you and your customers. Show them how their efforts are paying off!

8. Employees will goof off.

Employees already goof off, we’ve never needed social media for that (wall and what ever the comparable windows command was – anyone?)

Plus now most people can now access social media on their phones. Why not set expectations for how you want your employees to use social sites, and let them connect?

7. Social Media is a time waster.

I think this excuse is thrown up when some over-zealous social media expert does not tie social media to business processes. I don’t know about the rest of you, but we’re busy where I work. I could have a clone, and still not get to everything I need to do. This one was easy to get around though. When I started doing social media, I was doing course development for EMC’s Ionix products. This is a space that is very fast-moving, and the way I kept up on things was RSS feeds.

I explained that although it took time to set it up, once I had all my feeds I could scan for what was important to what I was working on. But even more important than the information were the contacts I made. I’d leave comments on blogs, send people emails, etc to connect to people. When I’d get stuck on a project, I knew where  to go for information (and who to go to). When they needed training information, I was their “in” to our dept.

Social media ended up saving me time, and this was an easy, practical thing to explain.

6. Social media has no business purpose.

Again, I think so many of the early adopters came through using buzz-words and dreamy scenarios that people with mature business processes were spooked. You can tie this back to reason number 10 (social media is a fad).

The reason to use social media has to be tied to what a business does to make money. This means social media is not going to look the same for everyone. If you want to lose your audience when pitching social media, don’t tie it to any important projects. Don’t explain how it can save or earn money. If you can’t say specifically how social media can be used to impact the business, you’re just asking to get this excuse thrown at you.

5. Employees can’t be trusted.

This one is silly. I work in a training organization for a vendor company, and our instructors and developers understand and know the company’s positioning on the products with which they work. We also know our support policies and what we can and can’t say to our audiences. Our organization trusts us to be alone in a room with customers, sometimes at the customer’s own site!

Pointing this out usually helps. But then figuring out how to make sure social media fits into existing processes also helps. If you set the expectation that social media is just another way to share information, and all the same rules about sharing information apply, people will understand what to do.

4. Don’t cave into the demands of the millennials.

This is a direct result of the digital immigrant (blah blah blah) brainwashing that social media experts tried. Millennials aren’t demanding anything  – at least not the ones I work with. The ones I’ve interacted with are interested in learning how current processes work, and then finding ways to improve those processes.

The thing that really makes me nuts about this is that I work with folks who have used social technology since it was invented, heck most of us have deployed the systems on which social platforms run. Some people I know have used instant messaging, online communities, etc for 20 years! If you try to tell them that social media is something new that only 20 year-olds can do, they will tune you right out. The only thing that is new is the technology – but people (like me) have been using these tools for a long, long time.

3. Your teams already share knowledge effectively.

Maybe leaders actually believe this is true. If you know your organization, you know where the gaps are. Would people have more free time to work on higher-order issues if some knowledge sharing were moved to a social platform instead of email? What ways can social media be used to make knowledge sharing even more effective?

2. You’ll get viruses.

Ok – this one is sorta true. One of my least favorite sysadmin moments was the aftermath of the sasser virus. This virus was spread by clicking links in IMs – usually from one of your (infected) buddies. The IM would say something like “hey look at the pics you are in”. Worst memory: chatting with a QA friend, in his cube. I had *just* told him not to click on links in IM. He got an IM from another QA person, and clicked on the link as I said “nooooooooooooooooooooooooooooo”.

For the record, this is one reason companies started blocking IM. The virus was so nasty, we couldn’t get servers on the network and get them updated faster than the virus would mutate and infect the new server. This impacted customer projects. Not good for the bottom line

I bet I’m not the only person who remembers this. I don’t have a good idea how to counter-act this reason, because I think its a reasonable fear. Sorry everyone!!

1. Your competition isn’t using it, so why should you?

I think this one just proves the whole video was a joke.

And its easy to prove wrong. Do a Twitter search, do a search for a Facebook presence. Take screenshots, put them in a PowerPoint presentation. Point out how many people are following your competition, and perhaps point out some conversations the competition is having that could impact your bottom line. Send it to your stakeholders.

Its possible to encounter these objections to social media, work as a tempered radical in your organization to bring about change that will benefit everyone. Just anchor your reasoning in the things that will impact your organization’s business initiatives. This means lots of homework on your part!

I’m working on podcasts for my Multimedia class and my internship, and the topic is microsharing. I thought I’d define it here for a couple of reasons. First of all, blogging always helps me reflect on what I know, and putting this in words will help me write my scripts.

Secondly I’m going to have ask people to help me, so a nice post will make it easier for me to convince them that they SHOULD help me.

Lets start with the wikipedia definiton of microshare:

To microshare is to offer access to a select piece or set of digital content by a specific group of invited or otherwise privileged guests in a controlled and secure manner. In contrast to public sharing of content, microsharing enables a more private or intimate level of making content accessible by others. Microsharing access can be secured via uniquely encoded urls or by password protection.

A better definition is given in a paper written by Pistachio Consulting:

- social networking tools and systems that enable listening, awareness, communication and
collaboration between people, through short bursts of text, links, and multimedia content.
- surprisingly powerful way to connect people to one another for corporate benefit.

Tools used to accomplish microsharing include Twitter and Yammer.

In case you missed the drama over the weekend, SouthWest Air was embroiled in a social media and customer service nightmare with director Kevin Smith.

Here’s how the story was reported:

Smith was thrown off an SWA flight for being fat. He started tweeting right away. He was offered a voucher, which he refused. He finally got home (on another SWA flight). He tweeted and made a podcast. SWA put a post on their blog defending their actions. The media (and social media fanboys & girls) sided with SWA, and painted Smith as an angry fat guy.

Here’s the timeline, according to Smith’s podcast(s):

• Smith had purchased 2 seats, he does this because the tickets are cheap and he likes a barrier (probably from fans.  I know I’d talk his ear off and probably embarrass my son to death! Come on, we all know how geeks are and sitting next to a captive Smith would be like nerd nirvana. I get why he buys a barrier seat!)
• He had a chance to catch an earlier flight. He actually chatted with the gate agent about how sure he’s a bit overweight, but he can buckle up and lower the armrests. She put him on the plane.
• When he was called to board, he asked about getting his money back for the unused seat, which seemed to aggravate the new gate agent.
• When he got up to the plane, some guy asked another SWA employee if Smith was “revenue”. They wanted to be sure he had paid for his ticket, and wasn’t traveling on vouchers. I guess they were close to some ratio they had to meet.
• He sits down, and buckles in, and the original gate agent comes to escort him off. He shows her that the arm rests could go down, but it doesn’t matter. He gets booted for the “safety” policy.
• He waits for over 10 minutes for the gate agent to come deal with him. From the sounds of it, the conversation got heated. And remember, Smith is a storyteller by trade. His tweets about not throwing a fellow fatty under the plane were priceless.
• Smith is tweeting the entire time. SWA tweets back, and it sounds like they were able to get someone on the ground to go apologize to Smith. (He admits he wasn’t really reading tweets, he was writing them).  But it was too late, the damage was done.
• Smith gets on another SWA to go home, using both seats. Another plus-size lady gets in the third seat on the row (that’s right, there was now a fat buffer seat for two passengers).
• The lady gets pulled off the plane by an attendant, but she comes back. Smith learns later that the lady was told she should be more considerate of other passengers, and purchase two seats when she flies. Even though there was a fat seat purchased in the row in which she chose to sit. For the record, this seems to be what really set Smith off. He said all he could think of was his daughter – what if someone did this to her?

So lets look at the performance problems here:

• Is the policy the problem?
  Many posts have been written about how the enforcement of this policy is at the mercy of the gate and flight attendants. Should there be a weight or girth size stipulated that kicks off the buy 2 seats safety policy? Is going by the handrests going down enough? Is it possible to enforce the policy in a fair manner to customers?
• Is execution of the policy the problem?
  Was Smith kicked off for a safety reason, or would returning his ticket have made that flight below the percentages set for revenue? Was there any reason to pull the woman on Smith’s second flight aside and shame her, since there was a paid for “safety” barrier seat? Is this a training issue, or a hiring issue (don’t hire mean people!)?
• Was the social media reaction adequate?
• Is responding to an irate customer who is tweeting his/her frustration with standard corporate-speak really engaging? Should you always engage? This is customer service 101, you let the irate customer get it all out until they are calm enough to reason with. Then you follow up on whatever you promise to do for them.
• Did SWA have a contingency plan for when one of its highly controversial policies?
  All they had to do was google (or search on Metafilter) for posts of how horribly this policy has been implemented in the past, were they ready for this?

Wrapping it up…

I’m thinking of this from the engagement piece. We have this powerful, powerful tool that we can use to connect and engage with our customers. Guess what, sometimes customers get pissed off. Sometimes for very good reason. Do you know what is going to make them go all Kevin Smith? Do you know how to react when they do? Do you know how to use the feedback from negative experiences to improve the experience of ALL of your customers?

For the record, I like Smith’s work. Most of it (most of it – come on a DONKEY!! WTF!!). And he is my son’s idol (again – a donkey?? come on help the moms out a little here Kevin!). I think my appreciation of his work is what connected me to his network, but his passion for seeing things set right really makes me helped me connect his problem to problems I am sure to face in the future.

Janet Clarey has a great post about the topic of determining authenticity in social media. She gives a great example of how messages (in particular tweets) can be taken out of context by folks applying traditional methods to interpreting dialogue to conversations going on in social media spaces.

The fact that someone tweeting about whack-a-mole, or going over some arbitrary number number of tweets, really is meaningless without understanding the social network context in which the tweets are occurring.

(I just have to stop and laugh at that sentence. It just sounds funny!)
Janet linked to this video Jay Cross took at the eLearning Guild’s DevLearn09 conference. Jay took a video of the panel as he participated. Mark Oehlert led the conversation, in this video Michelle Lentz and Aaron Silvers comment on the topic of reputation, authenticity, and credibility.

Big takeaways for me:

• The way to prove your reputation, authenticity, and credibility is to share. To be active on your network, so if someone tries to speak on your behalf your network will be able to recognize the fraud
• Recognizing credibility is no longer about the degrees we have, but what we have shared with our networks to build trust. This can be successes and failures (which is scary for Enterprises!)
• I have to speak up for the SMEs, I think SMEs would be happy to have a chance to be actually recognized as the real experts. (Or not – maybe they don’t want anyone to know so they aren’t overwhelmed with requests for help – but this is a totally different topic.)
• How do we teach people how to understand and interpret social media conversations, so that they can recognize expertise in a network? Do we create systems to help people (example given was rating Amazon raters).
• Be authentic. That is actually my goal – hopefully if we ever meet face to face you’ll see I’m the same way in person that I am online.

Check out this list of competencies for an HPT professional as listed in the HPI Essentials book (by ASTD press):

• Analysis Skill
• Business Knowledge
• Change Management Skill
• Facilitation Skill
• HPI Understanding
• Influencing Skill
• Project Management Skill
• Questioning Skill
• Relationship-Building Skill
• Systematic Thinking Skill

It also lists these attributes:

• Behavioral Flexibility
• Comfort with Ambiguity
• Objectivity
• Self-Confidence

That sounds like what people want social media managers to have! If you are looking for someone like that, I know lots of people graduating with this sort of degree in the next six months….

Gartner recently released its hype report about social media. It is interesting to see that some of the tools we are advocating for Learning actvities are slipping into the “trough of disillusionment“. This is the time in a technology lifecycle when a product fails to meet the hype, and people stop talking about it as the “next big thing”.

Some friends and I have been discussing this lately – what will be social media’s downfall in the Enterprise? Some people think it will be the lack of measurements, some people think it will be a company disaster because of a slip-up attributed to a social networking site.

I don’t think it will be either of those things. I think it will be viruses planted by hackers and phishers that turn corporate laptops and desktops into zombies. Just this week came report that hackers are using twitter as a way to control botnets, so I don’t think my theory is too far-fetched.

Here’s my attempt at a relatively non-technical description of how I think the zombie infestation could play out:

1. You get fooled into clicking on a link that installs a virus onto your machine.

   Most of the time, this is the result of a phishing scheme. The most recongnized example is you get an email from your bank saying they need you confirm some personal details. The email has all of the images and wording an email from your bank would normally have. But when you click on the link, it does not take you to the bank website. Instead, you have clicked a link that will download a little program to your machine. The program may do something really nasty like gather passwords to all the sites you use (banking, credit card, etc). Or, it may turn your machine into one of the virus creator’s zombie minions.

   

   zomg!!!

2. Your computer is now a node in a botnet

   A botnet is simply a collection of processes running on lots of computers. The compromised computers (or zombies) can be controlled by one master computer. Many times the zombies are used to send spam and cheat the pay for click sites. Maybe the worst use of zombie botnets is executing distributed denial of service (DDoS) attacks. DDoS attacks flood web servers with so much traffic that they are not able to operate. Twitter was brought down a couple of weeks ago by a DDoS attack. If you are able to trick enough people into downloading the virus that will turn their computer into a zombie, you can control your minions to do all sorts of very nasty things.
   This is actually how Twitter is being used by the zombie overlords. They set up twitter accounts for the sole purpose of sending updates that are used to direct the zombies.

3. The zombie-making viruses can be very tricky

   Lots of times, you won’t even notice you have turned into a zombie. The virus hides itself. It may prevent you from getting to anti-virus sites or the Microsoft Updates site. So even if there is a fix, you won’t be able to apply it.  You may notice that your computer is running very, very slowly. This could be a sign that you have been turned into a zombie.

   Or maybe your Instant Message, email, Twitter or Facebook starts posting lots of messages to everyone in your friends list. A message with a link that says “hey I wanted to share this with you!!” (or something like that). Your friend thinks, oh cool wonder what this link is all about? They click the link and BAM now they are a zombie too!

4. You need more than a boomstick to clean up a zombie infestation

   Cleaning up zombie machines is very labor intensive. If the IT folks can’t clean the machine completely, they may need to just reinstall the Operating System, which could mean a loss of data. And it takes a good bit of time. The entire time the IT person is working on your machine, you can’t work. And the IT person isn’t working on anything else either. If there is a zombie outbreak, and you have a project that has dependecies on IT, forget about making your dates.

   And we’re not just talking about the desktop IT support folks. If multiple machines on a corporate network have become zombies, they could also clog up the internal network with spam or DDoS traffic. Your network team goes into overdrive to shut this traffic down. Depending on how the virus that created the zombies is written, servers can also become infected.

   So zombies cost time and money, two things that are scarce right now in most Enterprises. If a company gets infested with zombies caused or controlled by a social media site, you can be sure they will shut down access to these sites.

5. What you can do to ward off the zombie infiltration

   First of all, make sure your anti-virus software is up to date. You may also want to run something like SpyBot Search and Destroy. I like this program because it will immunize your browsers against evil zombie-making programs.

   Secondly, stop trusting everything you see in social media sites! Yes, I know this is contrary to the “everything is open” mantra of social media. But come on, even in real life you aren’t supposed to trust everyone the first time you see them. Stop clicking on links without checking them out first! Hover over an embedded hyperlink and look in the bottom of your browser for where the link will send you. Use a Twitter client like Mixero that will preview the real URL behind a tiny URL. Consider blocking spammers who try to follow your stream (this is a controversial subject, so use your own judgement).

   Remember, sometimes you can’t tell someone else has been turned into a zombie until its too late. So always protect yourself!

To wrap this up, if we don’t want IT blocking access to these tools, people have to start thinking more about how we are using these tools. We can’t blame IT, the only way to prevent a zombie outbreak is to quarantine those who aren’t infected. If we don’t want it to get to that point, we have to be a little smarter as we use the tools. Because zombies are out there – waiting to turn you too.

This video is great. It talks about how putting things out on the Internet causes context collapse – we know ANYONE can see it, and we may even have to see it.

So one way we know ourselves is by our relationship to others. Now that there are new ways to connect with others, we have new ways to know others. Does this mean we are finding new ways to know ourselves?

What do you think this means for education?

I’m finishing off our presentation for the eLearning Guild’s Instructional Design Symposium. One thing I’m doing is explaining what EMC does, since I’m presenting to ID folks and not technical folks. Thankfully Polly Pearson (fellow EMC blogger) got some slides to me that are turning out to be very helpful!

As I’m adding the slides in, I can’t help but think about the Analysis part of ID. We write training for a very wide range of audiences. My team usually seperates this into three big audiences:

• Internal
• Partners
• Customers

We usually break those big audiences down by role: support folks, implementers, pre-sales, etc. But when I think about *how* the products we’re producing training for are used, we really have a diverse audience. Our products are used by pharma companies, banks, financial services companies, hospitals and other healthcare, and government agencies just to name a few. How in the world can we do analysis for customers if our products are all about storing, optimizing, managing, and securing information? Its pretty daunting.

How can we make our training relevant to each of these audiences? Right now I think we depend heavily on our instructors for that. They are CTT+ certified, and they know how to poll the class to see what everyone is looking to get from the training. I’m still wondering if that’s enough.

I starting thinking about this because I came across an interesting pharma blog. I used to work for a pharma company, its where I learned all about change control and compliance (nothing like having to fill out 6 change control documents to replace an ailing server…). The blog is called The Pharma Marketing Blog. The author, John Mack, gives an insider view of how tricky social media is for the pharma industry. He talks about FDA influence into what can and cannot be tweeted, and how Adverse Events are keeping the pharma industry from embracing social media.

Lots of stuff you may not have considered if you’re a “social media expert”.

It really is all about your audience….

I first wrote this post on EMC’s internal social media site. I want to share it publicly (especially with my edupeeps!).