Watching this recap video of the Dell Storage Forum in Orlando made me a little nostalgic. So, Just like I did for the inaugural Dell Storage Forum in Orlando last year, I thought I’d write a post with helpful hints for those of you coming to the Dell Storage Forum in London next week (as well as some tips for those of you playing from home).

Social Media

Facebook

The fabulous @AlisonAtDell will be posting all of the blog posts, videos, pictures, etc she finds to the Dell Storage Facebook Page. But don’t be shy – if you write something or take an awesome video, please feel free to post it to the wall! Also – you have “liked” us haven’t you?

Storify

Alison will also be creating a Storify page for the event, in case you just want to see the highlights of each day.

Twitter

We’ll be tweeting from the @DellSF account. If you have questions, or need info, please give us a shout! The official hashtag is #DellSF. We have a list of blogger and podcasters who will be at the event, as well as a list of event attendees. Please tweet us if we need to add you to either list.

If you are following the event remotely, try using an application like Twazzup or Tweetchat. Just remember to log in to Twitter to interact.

Bloggers

In addition to Dell Storage bloggers (including myself, Jason Boche, and Lance Boley), we have invited some of the best known bloggers in the storage world to join us at the first European Dell Storage Forum. We’ll have Martin Glassborow, Chris Evans, Nigel Poulton, Bruno Sousa, Hans Deleenheer, Barry Coombs, Greg Knierieman, Ed Saipetch, and Stephen Foskett. This crew should make for some excellent storage conversations!

Flickr

We’ll be adding pictures from the event to this set on the official Dell Flickr page. If you upload pic to Flickr (or any place else), please tag them with DellSF12 so we can find them!

Mobile-enabled site

If you are coming to the show, the mobile enabled site can be accessed via your mobile phone via http://www.eventmobi.com/dsflondon . You’ll need to log in with the email address you used to register for the event.

If you are going over from the US, you probably want to turn OFF data roaming and access this site (and all your mobile apps) via WiFi at the conference site.

Day-by-Day plan

#storagebeers + NekkidTech live recording!

Martin Glassborrow called a #storagebeers during the time folks are in town for the Dell Storage Forum. It will be Tuesday 1/10 at ‘Ye Olde Chesire Cheese’ on Fleet Street in London. Things will get started around 8 pm, and lots of us are planning to head over to visit.

Greg Knierieman and Ed Saipetch will bring the NekkidTech podcast to #storagebeers – they will be recording live from the pub. It will be good to see these guys in action!

I probably should call out that this is NOT a Dell-sponsored event. So please treat it like any other #storagebeers. It should be a great time – hope you can come round if you are in town!

Live #SANChat

January’s #SANChat will be live from #Dellsf12. It will be Wednesday, 1/11 at 5pm GMT (12 PM EST, 11 AM CST). If you are in London, we’ll gather at the Fluid Data Lounge. We’ll continue the conversation we started with Mike Davis about dedupe and compression. Remember, #SANchat is all about the technology, so its vendor neutral. Please join us! We suggest using TweetChat to keep up the conversation.

Tower of London

The Fluid Foundation celebration is Wednesday evening right after #SANchat. I’ve never been to the Tower of London, looking forward to wrapping up the week at such a cool venue.

Ok, in full disclosure, the title of this blog post is misleading. If you know me, you know I protest vigorously any time someone calls me a marketer. Hell, I did it during my yearly review. If you really know me you know that the reason I protest goes much, much deeper than the age-old techies vs. marketers holy war.

What I do for a living is not marketing.

Marketing by definition

Here is the definition for marketing by the American Marketing Association (via wikipedia):

‘Marketing is the process which creates, communicates, delivers the value to the customer, and maintains the relationship with customers. It generates the strategy that underlies sales techniques, business communication, and business developments. It is an integrated process through which companies build strong customer relationships and create value for their customers and for themselves.”

Marketing in practice

In practice, I’ve mostly seen marketing process that create, communicate (message), and deliver content to customers. You know, tell customers about our beautiful babies. Talk at them. Social media provides so many easy to use platforms with which to message at people, and since its web based it super easy to grab numbers on how effective a tweet or a Facebook post has been at reaching an audience.

Customers really want to be involved with the brands they buy from. That’s why if you have the resources, it’s not that hard to get tens of thousands of followers on Facebook or Twitter. But if all you do is market at these new followers, you end up with thousands of followers who ignore you because you are not giving them what they wanted – a real relationship with you.

Followers want to interact with you. On a personal basis. They can read the content of your perfectly crafted and approved tweets and Facebook posts on your website, in the emails you send them, or in the letters they get in their mailboxes from you. They don’t want another vehicle to be messaged TO, they want to communicate WITH you.

The costs of real engagement

Providing this personal engagement isn’t fast, and it involves lots of planning.  To do this right, you have to allocate budget for actual humans to do the work. You need to let these “social workers” engage with your followers. They need to build friendships.

You need to architect a plan for when your new friends are comfortable enough to tell you what they *really* think about your stuff, when they ask you why your competitor’s new thing seems better and even less expensive than the new thing you just announced, or when they reach out to you when they have issues with the stuff they bought from you. This plan will involve tapping into existing support structures, and it will involve collaborating with other departments in your organization. It may also mean training the other department about social media tools and persuading them to take on additional tasks that they may not have budgeted for.

Its about building real relationships

If you do social media correctly, you are building real relationships. With people, not with metrics. That’s what I do. I  build relationships between the storage industry and the talented people that work at Dell in the Enterprise space. I collaborate internally to build a support structure that allows internal policies to bridge and accommodate the personal relationships that are being forged.

It’s not much different than the work I did as an instructional designer and technical trainer. I had to take the technical info from engineering, compare it to what was being messaged to customers by marketing, and mix the two into something helpful for customers. People pay for training because they want someone to give them the real deal about the products they bought. What I do now isn’t much different – except the content and relationships don’t need to be funneled through training any more.

Back to my identity crisis

I know I’m not a marketer, and I know the fact that I’m not a marketer is one of the strengths I bring to whatever we are going to call what I do. My experience as an enterprise educator has prepared me for the job I’m doing now. The fact that I’m a techie helps too – I speak the language of our audience fluently. My educational background has helped too – I learned the whys and hows of the ways people fill needs for information, and have a strong background in systems evaluation and management.

So, what am I? A community builder? An architect….a manager? A new world educator? Its frustrating not to have a word to describe what I do. Its frustrating to be grouped into a profession that doesn’t really represent my profession.

It doesn’t really matter I suppose, I really like what I do and I think I’m pretty good at it. So I’ll just keep working at it. I can’t be the only person that “does” social media for a living having this crises. Anyone else out there? Any advice on how you deal with it?

Last Friday I presented at the ASTD New England Area 2011 Conference. ASTD is the American Society for Training and Development for my storage friends. The conference had an underlying theme of getting everyone comfortable and participating with social media. This was the brainchild of Jean Marrapodi. (Brilliant idea I must say!!)

All of the speakers have posted their presentations in the ASTDL20 Facebook Fan page, and follow-up blog posts have been posted there as well. My presentation is embedded below. My presentation was about how to deal with naysayers. There was a great discussion in the room – special thanks to Jim Storer of The Community Roundtable for all the great contributions!

Things have changed since I started giving this presentation – people are now coming to conferences with concrete objections they encounter when they propose social media initiatives. It’s obvious people are moving past fear of social media, and that they are starting to think about how to systematically, strategically implement social media applications to facilitate social learning in their orgs.

The thread of every presentation I attended was that learning professionals are in a position where we can help organizations tame the overwhelming amount of information being created in the digital era. It’s interesting, because as storage professionals we’re working on ways to help our customers deal with the sheer amount of data being created – the actual 1′s and 0′s. Learning professionals are best positioned to help organizations make sense of all the information contained in that data. Kinda cool to be at the intersection of those two disciplines.

I’ve been an information junkie my entire life. I will read anything I can get my hands on. When I was a little girl I read almost all of the books in my school library, but during the summers there was a problem. We lived pretty far away from the public library. Luckily there was a bookmobile that came around, and read almost everything on that too.

I was an expert at researching the Reader’s Guide to Periodic Guide Literature (kids that’s what we used before Google). I’ve always loved to tap into whatever it took to get the scoop on a story, and to find out how something worked. I’m sure this inner librarian bug I have is why I love social media.

Me perusing the Reader's Periodic Guide to Literature

In this post, I’m going to explain how I curate social information using Twitter and my RSS Reader. I may update this in a few weeks once I obtain my Dell SMaC certification. From what I understand,there are some pretty cool tools to tame the social data deluge that are available once you get that certification – I’ll report on that later.

Twitter

In addition to using clients that allow you to separate tweets into streams, I use lists and favorites to capture interesting nuggets of info.

Here are the Twitter directions for making lists. You only get 20 lists, and you can have up to 500 Twitter accounts on each list. I have some huge generic buckets for my lists (edupeeps, emcpeeps, storage). I have a list for my family, because their tweets get lost (and they get mad at me when I miss something). You can also follow lists that other people have created. I love following conference lists, because it gives you an organized list of people who are in the same industry, but don’t necessarily tweet about the same topics. Also, most Twitter clients allow you to access lists you have created on Twitter.

I use Twitter favorites to bookmark tweets. Most of the time I’m on my Android when I do this. I’ll see a tweet with an interesting-looking link but I don’t have time to really read the link. I’ll bookmark it, and then several times a week I go through the bookmarked tweets.

My biggest Twitter advice: don’t try to read every single tweet. You will just make yourself crazy. Create lists to organize the folks you follow. If you are new, follow lists other folks have created, you will probably make some new Twitter friends that way.

RSS Reader

RSS stands for Really Simple Syndication. Most social content will allow you to pull the RSS feed of their content into an RSS reader. I tried to find a nice list of RSS readers, but there doesn’t seem to be one, maybe that will be a future blog post. If you want a more detailed explanation of RSS, check out this video.

I use Google Reader. I am subscribed to 276 RSS feeds. I have those organized into 29 folders. I always have more than 1000 unread blog posts. I like to browse through the reader at least once a week. I follow all sorts of feeds on topics ranging from storage, technology, our competitors, online comics, women in technology, food, autism, and general geeky goodness.

You won’t be able to keep up

Maybe the key is to managing the deluge of social information is to understand that you won’t be able to keep up. Do your best to organize the information you pull from social sources. If you are doing social for work, pay the most attention your work filters (ignore the geeky goodness if you start getting overwhelmed!). If you start pulling lots of information, be sure to set a filter for your family. And remember to leave time to be social, share some of the info you find with others and interact with the people who have shared the information with you.

I’ve been at Dell a whole two weeks. I spent those first two weeks in Austin, and the entire time was jammed full of meeting people, figuring out the Dell corporate systems, and figuring out who I should be meeting.

I was thrown right into work – think hit the ground running times 10. There is a lot going on in the storage space at Dell. For example, last week we announced that the Compellent acquisition had been completed, and introduced the Dell Storage Forum 2011 details.

That’s the big visible stuff. I’m also working on getting social media activities into the normal workflow of my team. I work in the product group, with the marketers that tell the world about Dell’s storage products. We work closely with other groups such as the Dell TechCenter and the corporate social media team to communicate to our customers. Right now I’m trying to figure all of that out…but I can tell you there are lots of smart folks working on storage in Austin, Nashua, and now EdenPrarie MN. I hope to bring you some video footage of these folks very soon!

So what’s it like at Dell? FAST. OMG it’s so fast here. I think I’m lucky that I’ve been using social media! Because of my social media connections I already knew some of the people on my team, people at the Dell TechCenter, and folks at Compellent. I just want to say how much I love the guys at the TechCenter….they have offered me a safe techie zone and made me feel very welcome. They rock!!!

People are also very anxious to connect and collaborate. I have to keep reminding people that I am on day n (15 on Monday!), but everyone seems to want to work together. I’m guessing it is the fast pace – you can’t go fast if you are unwilling to reach out and collaborate.

And the corporate social media infrastructure is amazing. It is probably one of the main things that drew me to Dell – you have seen the Command Center haven’t you?? They have a full-fledged education system for those participating in social media at Dell. Their listening center is amazing…. they use Radian 6 to listen, but they rely on the business units to improve the profiles they are using to listen to Dell’s customers. I’m very excited about participating here!

A few things have changed with me. I changed the title of this blog. I’ll be talking about social media still, and probably education – but more from a marketing view. The blog will begin to take on much more of a storage flavor going foward…one of the main reasons I took this job is that I’m now able to return to my technical roots AND do social media at the same time. I think I’ll have lots to share about social media process, especially how to incorporate social into the workflow, as I get settled in.

I promise to give more video insight into the amazing storage and social media teams here at Dell very soon. As much as I can, I’ll share some of the lessons I learn from integrating social into the work flow. And look forward to more technical information about Dell’s storage offerings!

I’ve seen lots of posts, and been in lots of discussions recently from this thing Cammy Bean has pegged as SoMeFat- or social media fatigue. Cammy describes it as the burnout from constantly being in the public eye.

@SANPenguin posted a link to an article about the dichotomy between sharing information and actually building someone else’s application. The post talks about Quora, which is another “free” app that relies on the contributions of experts to build content.”

I have to agree – constantly being “on stage” is exhausting – and we have to find ways to carve out time and space for reflection and being alone.

One thing that strikes me about these posts is that they are primarily focused on the personal side of things – what if you are leading a team at your business that is goaled on social media activities?

My colleague Nada Wheelock and I have been discussing this…if you are leading a corporate team that is engaging in social media, where do you have them focus? The tools, applications, etc change from day to day. What is the most important thing for them to focus on – especially if social media is but one of many job requirements? And how do you choose a tool that will be long lasting – in other words that will exist next year? How do you protect the individual privacy of that team?

To take that to an even further extreme — is it possible to chose a tool for the enterprise where we can be sure that the data generated by our resources stays with and benefits the enterprise? If you read this article on big data by @acrolll, I’m not sure that is something we can do with any certainty. We may be past the era where we can be sure we own the data generated by our resources.

This post is not really explaining things, it is more asking things. How do you make sure the time spent by resources you manage ends up benefiting your company as much as (if not more than) the owner of a social media application?

Since I do social media in an Enterprise company, many times my friends, family, and owners of the small businesses I frequent ask me for help getting started in social media. Most times I don’t have the time to really help them out. Once I win the lottery maybe I will spend all of my time helping smaller businesses harness the power of the network…..but for now I still have to do my day job.

I thought I’d put together a quick primer so my friends and families could have a place to start when it comes to social media. Comments with more helpful links and advice are most welcome!

Before we get started – you need to have a plan

If you want to use social media for your biz, you need to incorporate it into your business plan. You can most likely adopt a very broad strategy other companies use, and customize it for your product or service.

In my organization, our broad strategy is listen –> message –> engage.

• You have to listen to find your audiences, understand trends, understand terminology, scope out the competitive landscape. We use a combination of RSS feeds fed into Google Reader, Hootsuite, and an eRoom database I built, but there are tons of other tools. Check out the comments in this thread for lots of other advice on listening tools.
• Next is messaging. The content you add to social media spaces should be crafted in line with your other marketing efforts. You may be able to attract people to your social spaces based on name recognition, but they won’t stay long if you don’t provide them with current, compelling, interesting content that is useful and interesting to THEM.
  Our strategy is to post the majority of our content in our Proven Professional community on the EMC Community network. We want to have all of our really in-depth conversations there, so we post content there and make sure to link to it from other social media locations.
• The last step is to engage. This is the part people find scary, because you actually have to talk with your audience in a open, unpredictable arena. Will they be nice to you? Will they mock you? Will they drag out some flaw in your product so everyone knows about it? OMG SCARY! You have to be ready for this. But this is where the goodness of social media comes from…actually being real and talking to people.
  You may want to check out the social media engagement report from the Altimeter group to get an idea of how enterprises are using social media to engage with their customers.
• OK I lied, that is not the last step. Now you go back to listening – this time adding listening for how people are interacting with your messaging. It’s like the circle of social media life!!

The Social Applications

I’m going to go over three applications I get asked about the most. The best way to learn more is to try these apps out in your personal space, and determine from there if they will fit into your business plan.

Facebook

• You want to be on Facebook because more than 500 million people are on Facebook, so there is a good chance your audience is there. Facebook is also easy to use, so that is a plus.
• You want a Fan page. This is important – don’t make a Facebook user for your business. Create a Fan page. This allows your users to connect with you, and depending on their privacy settings your updates will be posted to your fans’ timeline. This means your fans’ friends will potentially see your updates, and connect with you.
  Here’s an older Mashable article about the 5 things a successful fan page will have.
  Check out our fan pages (Proven Professional and Academic Alliance). We’ve connected our fan pages with our Twitter, YouTube, and Flickr accounts as well. We’re using apps from a company called Involver for that (and they are free!). We use Facebook to connect to our audiences, and to invite them to our community (where we do the bulk of our messaging/content creation). But if you don’t have the resources to maintain both, maybe a Facebook fan page is enough for you!

Twitter

• Twitter is a micro messaging tool. Users have 140 characters to get their message across. With Twitter, your customers can have a direct line to you! You can access Twitter using a web browser, a client you install on your computer or your smart phone, and even by using text messaging on your phone.
• If you are new to Twitter, you may want to use it to listen first. Do searches for your competition, set up a tool like Hootsuite or Tweetdeck to continually search for mentions of your business or important industry terms.
• Looking for help? I’ve written two Twitter cheat sheets. One of the best places to look for help is Pistachio Consulting’s oneforty web site.
• Just remember – Twitter is very “in the stream”. Its a powerful way to connect with influencers, but it should just be one of many tools in your social media infrastructure.

FourSquare

• You may remember it as an enjoyable playground game, but in social media terms Foursquare is a geo-location mobile application. You install it on a smart phone, and then if you have your GPS enabled you can “check-in” to the businesses you frequent. You get points for checking in, and you also are awarded badges. If you check-in to a locale more than anyone else, you become the mayor!
• Why use it? First of all your customers may be using it. They check in when they get to your shop, and they can also leave tips for others who visit. This morning I left a tip about the diner where we had breakfast. If you are eating at a popular place, sometimes the tips have good advice on what to order.
• Whether you use FourSquare or not, your customers are using it, and they are advising prospective customers if your place of business is a good place to spend money. Or if your place sucks. Because of this, at the very least Foursquare is probably someplace you want to monitor.
• You can also use FourSquare to reward your customers for using FourSquare to advertise your business. Recently I checked into a Marriott and got extra Marriott rewards points for showing the check-in to the front desk staff. That was cool and made me happy to be there!
• Foursquare can also be tied to Twitter and Facebook. This will give your business more visibility every time one of your customers checks-in.

That’s my overview of social media for business – the short version. I hope it is helpful. The most important thing to remember – talk to your audiences. If you are into just controlling your image, you probably want to stay away from social media. Because once you go social, you have to commit to be real.

I really like this presentation from Janet Clarey about facilitating learning through the social web. Her ideas on curating and wayfinding are really similar to my ideas about a learning GPS.

She’s right, tech + social has fundamentally changed how we can be together… the question is will we allow ourselves to take advantage of this shift?

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!

Last night I was the speaker at the Mass ISPI (International Society for Performance Improvement) meeting. I talked about how we convinced our executives to use social media. I deconstructed the actual presentation we used. Many thanks to Jean Marrapodi for live tweeting and creating the backchannel.

At first I was nervous because no one was asking questions. I hate that – I love things to be interactive when I present or teach. Brian told me later it was because people were taking notes. But once the questions started coming, wow did we have a great conversation!

Someone got us on a kick about noise vs signal. When I started talking about affinity he said “If you have high affinity you probably have high signal, but if you have high reach you probably have a greater chance of having higher noise”. Very true, and something I’ll probably be blogging about more. Because that I think that statement is more profound that it seems at first glance.

Someone asked about measuring performance. I was able to talk about my favorite learnarchists, Harold Jarche and Jay Cross. If I measure learning – or attendance at a learning event – is that the same as measuring performanace? So can I measure informal learning – or do I even care about trying to measure that as long as the learning gets done so that performance is high?

I also loved that someone asked “how do you get people to lurk?”. That is what got us into the affinity/reach discussion.

Here are my slides from last night. It was wonderful meeting and talking with all of you, I really appreciated the conversation. It was great to come talk about something I really love with a bunch of very smart people. I can’t wait to come to another meeting in the fall.