The Wayward Celt

Last Thursday I hosted my last Knowledge Champion Consortium session, an internal group of passionate individuals focused on knowledge sharing and content curation.

After 3 years of running this 20-40 person bi-weekly conference call, I can’t help but to have learned a few things about what I believe makes conference calls work, and what helps them fail… as I was working on an email to my cohort, to give her some of the best practices I’ve learned and implemented, I realized this was more of a blog post than a single email… so I blogged about it over on the Notes from Rational Support blog:

https://www.ibm.com/developerworks/mydeveloperworks/blogs/nfrsblog/entry/meeting_lessons_learned 

I’d be honoured if you’d take a moment and check it out… then let me know what you find works best on the calls you host or attend (if you’ve attended any I led, I’d especially love your feedback!). As I noted in the post, I’m likely not done hosting calls in my career with IBM and I’d love to be able to learn and grow even more through your tips and tricks picked up over the years!

Slainte’

(and yes, that IS a vintage 1960′s operator’s headset reworked with wireless Plantronics innards.)

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While I continue to work on being less negative, I’ll spare you with words and instead ply you with images during this past Sunday’s dusting of snow:

This time around I opted to play some more with texture, pattern, and chaos. This series lacks the rhythm, clean lines, and simplicity in the shots from the Chinese Garden previously posted, but seems to make up for the chaotic nature by capturing some of the drama in wintertime.  The sun came out about halfway through shooting, so you can see a shift in contrast and reflection. Seeing as the weather was very monochromatic, black and white imagery stood out as most suitable when I was post processing these, though you will see tiny hints of colour in some.

The last shot above, of course, being a “special” extra: a bad self portrait. You’re welcome.

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In lieu of more interesting topics which require proper words, I thought this week would be a good time to show a few images which I captured over the holidays; specifically when we visited the Lan Su Chinese Gardens in downtown Portland:

These were all taken with my Canon EOS 60d using the 18-135mm kit lens. All images have undergone some relatively heavy post-processing using Snapseed on an iPad2. I’m actually quite pleased with Snapseed as an image editing tool, as it is fairly intuitive and easy to learn. The only downside is no way to add a watermark directly, so I have had to import into Google Picasa, and then export with the appropriate watermark set.

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Admittedly, this is an odd topic for me to be posting about.

This isn’t about overt negativity (though that is a problem as well, just not one I wish to tackle here and now), rather, this is about the passive, subtle, invasive, and far more difficult to accurately identify negativity. Negativity which manifests itself in such common ways as to be virtually unnoticed let alone identified as negative.

I’ve been working on the concept for this post in my head over the past three months now. But today it came to me from such a different perspective, that I’ve had to stop and re-evaluate how I put this out there. So let me be clear here: everything in this post stems from bits I don’t like about myself, things I see as a reflection of me elsewhere in the world both on-line and off.

I’ve noticed in the past 37+ years of my life, what I will call a personality trait geared towards negativity. Some may call it pessimism, and at times it is (lord knows no one has ever mistaken me for an optimist). At other times, I’d go as far as to call it a sense of entitlement or selfishness. But, most often, it is just a subtlety of verbiage which casts a grey pall upon the mundane; a way of simply missing the positive in a situation and instead focusing on a down-side, problem, or general dislike.

With the abundance of over-sharing on the social web, this negativity is highlighted and brought into greater focus. Complaints, or simply negatively tinged updates run rampant and, by my guesstimation, likely make up as much as 65% of all posts on social sites. Obviously I am shooting from the hip here, with no real data to back this up, just observation over the past few years, but regardless of actual numbers the sentiment stands: there is constant negativity around us all. And it is getting worse. (See what I did there?)

Something as simple as lamenting what that doughnut your boss brought in for the team at work is going to do to your diet seems innocuous enough as single status update. But, when combined with all the other updates coming across your wall/feed/dash, and in such numbers from the same people, you can’t help but be affected by it all… sooner or later that negativity will get to you, even when (or perhaps especially if) you are one of the worst offenders of it all.

Because I am as much of a perpetrator of this problem as I also observe it, I’d like to challenge you to take a moment with me and look at our own posts/status/updates over the past week and try to see them from a different perspective: are those posts tinged with a negative slant? Are the positive ones actually born of a negative perspective? Is there a way to shift the complaint to a win? Join me and let’s work to shift our perspective to the positive and see what happens!

I figure if I try and change the small stuff, the Tweets/ Facebook statuses/ G+ updates/ Blog posts, those things which I have editorial review over before clicking the share or publish button, perhaps it will become habit and bleed into other areas in my life. Perhaps, just perhaps, a slight adjustment here or there will have more dramatic ripple effects and the people around me will soon find me to be more pleasant to interact with and not as negative a person as I’ve been for the past few decades.

I’ll tell you, tough as it is for me, I feel better already.

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… but…

I WILL be back to blogging once per week in 2012. The latter three months in 2011 became a bit hectic for me which resulted in an emotional depletion of energy, which in turn meant I had no energy left to write. This became overly evident to me in my vain failed attempt to do NaNoWriMo this year. I’d thought that forcing myself to write would jump start me back into the habit, but alas, it just proved too much this time round and I ran out of gas by day 15 without hopes of completion, nor inspiration to continue.

Odd, though, since I HAVE been inspired to blog and write… the muse has been working in my head, just the time and energy seem to have found other venues. Wouldn’t it be nice for the muse to bring her own energy reserves along for the ride, so that when inspiration hits you also have the energy to put the words to paper? Ah, to be so lucky.

That all said, my 2011 goal was to blog once per week, and in general I almost accomplished that… here… If you add in the 3 Drunken Celts blog, and my work blog (in which I posted on average about 3.75 times per week), then I think I actually blew my goal out of the water. But I can’t, in good conscience, claim my work blog as part of the goal since the spirit of it was to blog personally and flex a more creative muscle than I am able to at work. So, I’m maintaining that goal for 2012 as well: one personal blog of some substance, per week, all year, no exceptions, no excuses. If 2012 shapes out to be as interesting as it seems from my present viewpoint, I shouldn’t be worrying about a lack of topics to discuss or experiences to relay.

I am hoping that with some added focus I can make this coming year the year of “Very BIG THINGS” for me, see some of my efforts start to pay off, and possibly become one of those few critical pivotal years in my life…. we shall see.

I’ll leave you with this: one of my recent photographs taken from within my home office on a rather chilly day, the ice had built up a bit overnight on the roof below my window, and then the sun peaked out… perhaps this will also be the year in which I take my photography to a new level as well…

A study in texture:

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 For those who may be asking what this all is, here’s a link to explain it all:  http://nanowrimo.org/en/about/whatisnano

National Novel Writing Month starts today and ends Nov.30th with a goal of a 50k word novel by the end. You can follow my word count updates over at http://nanowrimo.org/en/participants/acdntlpoet

I’ve updated my profile over on NaNoWriMo.org in the hopes that taking baby steps now will give me enough motivation to really dig in and give this another go. I DID participate back in 2007, and even pulled out a ‘win’ by producing over 50k words in under a month, but what I produced wasn’t even worth trying to edit in order to salvage anything….

I’m hopeful that this time around, even if I don’t ‘win’, that I’ll at least produce something a bit more workable. At the very least, I’ll consider this month a win if it gets me writing again. This year I think I am going to take a dramatically different approach and not focus on an overarching novella plot, rather take a decidedly “Joyce-ean” approach ala “Dubliners” and work on vignettes, or simply short stories to string together with a larger concept later on.

I found, after 2007′s attempt, that I don’t do well with larger fiction works. That single lesson is what will be driving this year’s attempt. Not to say it will be non-fiction, but rather I will only be working with short pieces and will see how, or even if, they can be strung together into a novella of sorts during the editing period in December and beyond. For now, however, the focus is JUST on producing the words not ensuring the quality.

Are you participating too? If so, add me as a buddy on the site so we can keep each other honest and motivated Of course, I’ll also likely be blogging here about it too, as I learned I tend to blog more when I am busy writing already. Sometimes writing for different purposes helps drive the creativity even more.

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  … to do the same.

Last March I published this blog post over on the NFRS blog I contribute to for work. Today I am going to reprise that same content here in an effort to raise awareness via new venues, and in grandiose yet dire hopes of helping shift corporate culture towards respect for people’s time and efforts.

I’ve tried  leading by example, running my own meetings in the same fashion as I’ve outlined below (sometimes failing to abide 100%, but still, improving each time). Unfortunately that doesn’t seem to be catching on; likely because the meetings I host are for audiences who don’t typically host meetings of their own. So while I may be a good example, I don’t think I’m reaching the right audiences. Perhaps blogging and sharing via social sites will help me improve that reach and perhaps, just perhaps effect some change in how we schedule and run meetings for the benefit of all.

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Problem: Ineffectual meetings. Meetings that take longer than they should. Meetings that don’t start on time. Meetings that go over the allotted time. Too many meetings. Meetings that consistently sound like this five-minute video… “The Conference Call“ by David Grady.

Solution(s):   

1. Don’t go. No, really… hear me out on this. If meetings are ineffectual, then no one will look at you poorly for bowing out. I can assure you, if you think the meeting is ineffectual, your colleagues likely do too. Now, I don’t mean “just don’t go” (this isn’t “Office Space” after all), I mean respectfully decline the invitation noting your inability to attend and make yourself available to the host to discuss why. Don’t make excuses, be clear about why you’ve declined, but choose the right setting for that discussion; a meeting invite decline with comments is not the right venue.
2. Speak up and help drive the meeting focus. Don’t let the meeting get bogged down in the minutiae of “solutioning” when discussing a high level problem. Only solution issues when that is the specific purpose of gathering together. If you sense that the meeting is taking a turn for the worse, speak up and refocus the group. If you’re becoming annoyed with the spiraling, more than likely the other people on the call are as well.
3. Having too many meetings on your calendar will likely take care of itself if you effectively implement the first two suggestions… divesting yourself from the ineffectual meetings, and more effectively participating in the ones you do attend will magically see your time slots open up to a point where you can easily and effectively manage your meeting AND work time. Imagine that!
4. Only call meetings when it is critical to have all individuals present, or when a quick solution is critical to success. Don’t call meetings to ‘keep people informed’. Share results, but demand participation from the attendees in the form of calls to action or direct unfettered discussion.

But what about those meetings you HAVE to attend just in case something comes up, or to stay informed about developments and progress on projects or programs? Easy. That is what wikis, discussion forums, blogs, and RSS feeds are for; staying informed when it matters!

Collaboration does not mean scheduling a one hour meeting. Collaboration can be done at any time of the day, regardless of your colleagues’ availability. Using internal wikis, blogs, and discussion forums, you can not only collaborate more effectively and have written record of your progress, but you can do so across time zones and geographic boundaries. Using RSS feeds, you can keep an eye on any updates from a single location across communities and functional groups.

(Ooooooh, here comes the work plug! In the interest of transparency, yes, I work for IBM, and yes IBM owns Lotus. That said, I honestly do think the tooling I am about to discuss is effective and worthwhile, and I don’t say that about much!)

Using Lotus Connections, you can build communities to support collaboration and reduce the number of “essential” meetings you attend. Because Lotus Connections has wiki, blogging, discussion, bookmarks, file storage, and many other capabilities, the online collaboration can take place at your discretion. Priority management can now be more effectively accomplished as you no longer need to balance those silly meetings with getting actual work done. And because Connections is built with RSS features, you can set up your feeds in the tool of your choice to stay up to date with all the items YOU care about and participate on your own terms.

While I use Lotus Connections for a wealth of reasons in IBM, I find the most beneficial part of it all is the RSS capabilities. The RSS feeds I watch for the various communities I participate in allow me to quickly glance at updates and determine if the information is something I need to focus on now, if it can wait, or if I need to pay attention to it at all. Information triage, as it were, in milliseconds. This has truly been the single most effective tool to combat information overload I have used to date.

So, now that you’ve divested your self from those ineffectual meetings… are driving the meetings you do attend with a new vigor and granular focus based on specific agenda items posted to your wiki (and updated later with details of the discussions)… and are globally collaborating with colleagues across time zones, what more can you do to reduce meetings and influence people? The answer: Work on your meeting etiquette.

Here are a few tips I’ve picked up along the way…  and I’ll say right up front, I have broken every single one of these at one time or another, so don’t think I am throwing stones in a glass house here:

1. Mute. Use it.  As a participant, use it immediately after you dial in (*6 on our system). Stay on mute unless you are speaking. When you’re done speaking, go back on mute. As a host, use “mute all” (*78 on our system) and use it often. There really is nothing worse than a great meeting being derailed or sidetracked by an accidental un-muted interruption.
2. For larger meetings/conference calls, turn off the dial-in beep notifications (*33 on our system) when callers join or hang up. These beeps are the downfall of almost every conference call. A late party will invariably interrupt the speaker (who likely has already started late waiting for people to join) resulting in a five to ten minute loss of productivity over the start of the meeting.
3. Get to the meeting on time. Seriously. Showing up late is disrespectful to everyone else on the call who arrived on time. When you show up late, you’ve wasted their time. Once or twice are forgivable, but when it happens consistently, those three or four minutes start adding up quickly. Imagine if everyone showed up on time, a meeting could start when scheduled, and END when scheduled, or gasp, maybe even early! Show respect for everyone else, show up on time.
4. Know your audience. When speaking, whether hosting a call or just talking during someone else’s meeting, know when it is ok to joke around and when you need to stay focused on the task/topic at hand. There is a fine line between joking around but staying professional (call it casual professionalism) and wasting time joking when there are better things to discuss. Don’t make a long meeting longer by joking around. Laugh, and move on; we all have better places to be and better things we could be doing.
5. Don’t multi-task. Actually this could have gone above as well as an indicator of an inefficient meeting: are you multitasking during it? Then you can probably divest yourself from it. If a meeting doesn’t require your full attention, it is a meeting you shouldn’t be attending. Conversely, any meeting you attend should be given your full attention, and by virtue, your participation as well.

But don’t take my word for it all… check out “The 22 minute meeting“ a six-minute iGNiTe video presentation by Nicole Steinbok. Here’s the link to the instructional poster too. Nicole makes some stellar points via some very amusing fashions.

I truly hope this has given you some good tips, tricks, or tools to use to make your day-to-day job more effective and efficient. If for nothing else, I hope it gave you pause to think about what you can do as an individual to help make sure your meetings are run as crisp and concisely as possible, with few distractions, clear goals, and shorter run times.

After all, if you can make a small difference, imagine what we can accomplish if we ALL make those small differences….

image credit: (cc) flickr user Ha-Wee

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  Following is the start of a conversation between me and my dear friend and published author, Mr. Anthony Cardno. I encourage you all to read through my comments to Anthony below and jump in the conversation with your own suggestions, insights, and experiences. This is, of course, a discussion, not the end all be all of twitter etiquette. In fact Anthony is even running the same post over on his blog here to garner other insights as well!

Getting right to it then… Anthony pondered on Twitter: “Wondering what I’m doing wrong that even when I ask for a RT, very few of them happen. Am I missing something RT-etiquette-wise?”

Not surprisingly, I have some very particular ideas about this specific behaviour (based on my experiences working in social business) and quickly replied with the following:

Jason to @talekyn Yes. Don’t ask. If your content is compelling, RTs will happen. Asking is seen as intrusive.

Anthony to @acdntlpoet Makes sense. And you know I very rarely ask. Which means apparently most of what I tweet is not compelling.

Jason to @talekyn kind of. Also depends on your audience, reach, etc… We can take this to a much more in-depth conversation

Obviously, that’s nowhere near the end of the discussion. Simply said, there is no single answer to this question. People are making their living as consultants telling you how to do just this. Not one of them has the right answer in a an easy to distribute formula; because the answer isn’t really formulaic.

As I noted above in my initial reply, the key to seeing your content re-shared is to put forward compelling contents. Oh, but if only the answer were so easy! While I can tell you at a high level what will get your content shared out, it all falls apart in the details and subtleties and actual implementation/ practical application; because not all content is created equal.

But let me step back for a moment and address etiquette before moving on into some best practices: Asking via Twitter for others to retweet you is seen as bad manners, neediness, and laziness. More to the point, it is a bit more indicative of immaturity in the space, or evidence of the size of your network (add totally inappropriate size queen joke at will). By immaturity in the space, I mean that coming from an individual I will see these requests in the same light as I see forwarded emails asking me to “keep the chain going”, or Facebook status updates asking to “post this to your status if you agree / just for one hour”, etc. From a corporate account, it just comes off as poor marketing strategy.

Exposing the size of your network isn’t really a big deal in and of itself (I can see your numbers in any space I play). Rather, asking for RTs presents the impression of a smaller and/or less engaged network, minimal confidence in your message, and generally short selling yourself. Now, I am not saying that asking for a RT is going to leave people with the impression that you are just a speck in the world, but I AM saying that it is one small action which builds how people perceive you when combined with other small actions and methods of presenting yourself.

Yes, I am talking from a more marketing centric approach, with a few assumptions in terms of how you use social media to connect with your audience and spread your message. The assumption is that you are a different type of user, one who is building a personal brand and using social avenues to build up your name and digital eminence. Obviously, if you are just using social media to stay in contact with friends and family, then the concern over perception won’t really apply. But, perception is big for driving and motivating others to share your content.

Rather than continuing to focus on the negatives of asking for RTs, let’s rather focus on what you CAN do to get people to share your content. There’s a great presentation here (http://nytmarketing.whsites.net/mediakit/pos/ ) on the psychology of sharing. From this presentation we can see that one of the biggest factors is determining how the information we are sharing will be useful to the recipient. Take this the next step and you can translate this into your own content by providing that clarity to the person you’re sharing with, so they can in turn re-share easily.

Let me take an example:

@talekyn: Two medical causes are important to me: Cancer and Juvenile Diabetes. Read my diabetes interview with 9yo Frank John:anthonycardno.com/?p=276

Good content here, and likely worthy of a retweet, but I have two problems:

1. It is passive… ok, so these are important to you. They are indeed important issues, but I am not compelled to RT immediately because there isn’t a real message here.
2. I have to click and read to determine if I want to RT. That is going to take some time, and I may lose the originating tweet before I am done with the interview.

Presuming the interview is compelling enough for me to want to RT it, I now need to go back to find the tweet to pass it on (or, one better, tweet/retweet from within the blog post itself). Most people won’t go back to twitter to retweet unless the content is REALLY moving. A well composed tweet that will compel a stranger to read your content will also be compelling enough to garner retweets without specifically asking for them. Compelling content which resonates with others to the point where they want to share with their own network is what you’re looking for here; adding social sharing buttons in your blog will also help enable users to easily share out your content to the spaces and networks where they play.

Let me see if I can “re-swizzle” (yep, I said it) your tweet above to something which I may be compelled to click into and retweet:

@talekyn: How Frank John, a 9yo living with Juvenile Diabetes and fund raising for JDRF, is putting me to shame: anthonycardno.com/?p=276

Forgive the forced self-deprecation, but I think this will work in your favour here: I switched it up a bit, made the reader curious as to what a 9 year old is doing better than you. Because if they can do it better than you, they can do it better than me too, so now I am intrigued and want to read more. It is a more active voice, but not demanding; compelling me to look further. Plus, the tweet provides me with the key points before reading more into the blog: this 9 year old is doing good work for diabetes awareness/cure. I am both compelled to read AND pass it on now, because there is a story here beyond the normal “please send money” charity call. It is interesting, much like your earlier tweet:

@talekyn #LifeWouldBeBetter if my 9 year old cousin didn’t have Juvenile Diabetes. Meet him on my site: anthonycardno.com/?p=276

The tweet above also has that hook, but unfortunately Tweeting this out at 11:30pmEDT on a Friday night means very few people in your particular audience will be seeing it, and you need visibility in order to glean retweets. So, now that you have the compelling content, let’s look at targeting the right audience…

Who are your followers? Are they cast amongst disparate time zones, or predominantly in one? What ages? Nine-to-fivers or in school? By example, I am at my computer from 8amEDT until 8pmEDT M-F, because of that, I am more likely to retweet something posted in that time frame than I am other times since my usage of twitter is heaviest during work. Weekends and other times when I am outside the house, I’m far more likely to miss content because I tend to turn off most social channels when not at work. Conversely, my fictitious high school aged neighbor may be more likely to see and subsequently retweet late on school nights when s/he is finally back home from school, extracurricular activities, and is “wasting time” on the internet.  Not to mention that demographic has a much different usage style of social channels as direct, near-real-time communication and may not be as inclined to retweet blog content outside of some of the more viral types of content.

Having a sense of your follower’s schedules / behaviours / demographics will help guide you towards those ‘sweet spot’ times to post for the greatest impact and visibility. If you use bit.ly or some other URL shortener, or use google analytics on your site (WordPress makes this stuff very easy), you can track some basic metrics and see when your audience is most active and more likely to marketing out your links. Also, keep promoting your content (with appropriate pauses in between duplication) until you see a drop off in click-throughs. Duplicating content isn’t a bad thing on Twitter as most people don’t see everything unless the spend time going back in their timelines up to the last time they logged in. Unless your users are all like me with a stake in the social business game, they are most likely missing a ton of stuff posted when they aren’t watching. Heck, I even miss stuff, and I am watching like a hawk and make a point to go back in all my timelines to ensure I don’t miss things!

Here ends the first round answer as to why you aren’t seeing a good amount of retweets, even when (or because) you request them. With your following of 490 users on Twitter, I’d predict you’d garner maybe around 10 retweets for some good content if you market it more than once. Until you are a celebrity and people hang on your every word, I’d not expect more than that…. unless of course you happen to stumble on that next bit of viral content and it spins out of your control… but we can only hope for that

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Yes, this was a rather lengthy post, and not intended as the end all be all to explaining social behaviours. I am sure many of my own readers have their own ideas and experiences to share, which I fully encourage! Please feel free to comment here, on Anthony’s blog where he is running the same post, or in any of the other channels which you may have found this post shared out… the key to being social on the internet is, of course, engaging in good discussion! So whether you agree or disagree, please let me know

image credit:  Some rights reserved by Ford Buchanan      

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I’ve noticed a great and very intentional practice boiling up over on G+ when it comes to re-sharing, and have adopted the same principle of behaviour to help promote it: “A good social steward acknowledges the person from whom they shared”. This is a great practice because, by default, G+ only notes the *originating poster’s* name, not whom you shared from.

But why is this important? Three reasons: the first, and most simple is that it provides direct feedback to the person who reshared that you find the content engaging enough to share it to your circles as well. Secondarily, this also allow extended networks to have visibility to other people around G+ whom you may find interesting. (I’ve personally found a number of very cool people to circle and follow using this method, as they are already up a rung of trust as an extended connection, plus they MUST be cool if they are sharing content which I also find useful and interesting!)

The third, and more global reason, however, is the sense of social stewardship. In this ever increasing global community where we’re all more connected, we’ve also become more striated, more detached, and more insular in our networks. A simple “hat tip” to the person you reshared from builds a deeper bond across the social web. Call it a form of social currency, if you will: where a link noting “Thanks to +Joe for the share/re-share” acts as payment for being able to reshare it yourself… which of course makes an unacknowledged reshare a bit like taking a cookie from the break room but not leaving your fifty cents in the honour jar; not quite stealing, but not exactly in the spirit of things either.

I’ve seen both behaviours in the extreme on G+, as well as Twitter and Facebook (admittedly Twitter can be rough to retain the amount of info in just 140 characters). You don’t have to go overboard and thank the entire chain of people who reshared before it got to you, but it IS good for to at least acknowledge the person you shared from, and if possible the original poster too. Who knows, leading by example may just pay off in a larger, more connected social network able to help you succeed beyond your wildest dreams… or maybe good karma is enough to make it worth your while.

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