The Wayward Celt

You all know I am active in the social media world, both personally and professionally. You also know I have opinions and I am not shy about them. I’d like to take some time here to discuss a few missteps I often see in the various social networks which may cause you more harm than good if you are trying to build or maintain relationships in these spaces:

1. Don’t shout… converse! Social networks are not your personal advertising stream, they are ways to connect with others of similar interest and build relationships which you may not have otherwise had the opportunity for. This means engaging in conversations with your network; listening AND speaking. Twitter is not a bullhorn, Facebook is not a one way street. If you are looking to use these sites to their advantage, you MUST stop shouting your message and take the time to listen to your audience; begin engaging in conversations around your space, and soon you will find that perfect cadence which your audience is looking for.

What does this mean in more concrete terms?
For Twitter, it means you need to watch your follow list and absorb what is being talked about. It means putting out your opinion and ideas about other’s updates. It means taking a look at your own feed and not seeing one way posts just pushing out your message, but rather seeing @replies and discussions occurring.

For Facebook, it means replying to comments left on your updates. It means commenting on other’s updates. I am sure you can extrapolate this all for other networks as well… the key is to engage in dialog; after all, networking is a two way street.

2. Provide context to your updates! Without any context, many updates lose all their value. Imagine an update that only says “Wow, what a busy day!”, where’s the value there? Ok, I can surmise that you are having a busy day and may not have time to talk to me about something trivial. But imagine how much more value that update would have carried had some context been applied like “BUSY DAY! Working on new social media strategies”. Now I can see that you are indeed busy, but more importantly your project may be something I can help with or would be interested in seeing the results from, even reusing it if appropriate; so I may tweet back “@you Hey! I’d love to help or see what you come up with, let’s collaborate!”… and bingo, now we’ve got a conversation and possibly even lightened our collective workloads by collaborating.

Too many times have I seen Facebook status updates similar to: “worst day EVER!” or “Not sure I can handle this”, with no further context. Not surprisingly, there are often somewhere between 5 and 20 comments on that status, all effectually asking the same question back: “What’s going on?”. Rarely, however, do I see the original poster reply back with any explanation of the context surrounding the first update. This leaves all their friends in the lurch, so to speak, reaching out to try and help, but without context there is no way to know what anyone could do. Now imagine that same update as”Not sure I can handle changing my tire on the freeway”. Immediately friends can identify something tangible to assist with, and the poster may even see a comment come back like “tell us where you are and we’ll pick you up” or “I have AAA, and will call a truck for you”.

Context, my friends, is important. It can mean the difference between radio silence from your followers, and an overwhelming flow of support helping you do things you never knew you could accomplish. Really, the line between the two is so small, it may just be the difference of a single word in your update that opens the floodgates of conversation or assistance.

3. When someone asks a question; reply. I hit on this in number two, but it bears repeating and being called out on its own. If someone comments on your update or @replies to one of your tweets, do the courtesy of replying. Even if the reply is “I don’t know”, at least you will be engaging in conversation and showing that you are listening to your friends and followers. This also goes back to number one as well, where if you aren’t replying, you are in that paradigm of shouting your message and telling your followers that you’re not listening to them. By not replying, your followers will begin to think that you aren’t interested in conversation, that you’re only interested in pushing out your message. If your followers get to that point, you’ve just lost any benefit you may see from playing in the social media spaces, and even worse, will likely begin losing followers to the point where the audience for your message has dwindled to completely ineffectual levels.
The net result of this: if you ignore your followers, they’ll ignore you.

How about neither?

This week has been fairly busy in the Social Media world when it comes to shakeups. First it was the news that Forrester (an independent market research firm) began telling its analyst employees to either take down or redirect their personal blogs to the Forrester main site (as referenced in the article here: http://thesocialcustomer.com/Home/15561). The idea Forrester was going with here is that market analysis is intellectual property owned by Forrester and that should be under the control of the company. We’ve seen this corporate behaviour before when ESPN cracked down on its employees in the same fashion, stating that “Personal websites and blogs that contain sports content are not permitted” (reference the BrandBuilder blog for more details).

What we are seeing here are corporations overly worried about governance, and looking for the easy way to control perceived property. Rather than embracing the employees who are displaying a passion for the industries they represent, allowing them to flourish, and drive forward as thought leaders in their space, these employees are now being constrained and stifled by corporate mandates; driven through the funnel of their governance into a single space where the company has its security blanket of control in full force.

It won’t take a genius to figure out how I feel about that. But that doesn’t mean I want the pendulum swinging to the other end either.

Take today’s news of the new BBC Director -mandating- that all journalists employed by the BBC begin using social media. See Mashable’s coverage here for the story and links to sources: http://mashable.com/2010/02/10/bbc-social-media/

While I appreciate that Mr. Horrocks believes in at least using the content with attribution, I can’t imagine how his staff feel about being mandated to use social media now. Yes, I believe there IS a place for social media in the newsroom. Yes, I think journalists should be paying attention here and not ignoring the information trending through Twitter, Facebook, Youtube, etcetera. But I don’t believe that should warrant a mandate either.

Any policies which demand action on any side of the spectrum here are destined for failure; either you will fail at controlling your employees with a tight enough reign, or you will fail to ensure they are engaged in the spaces you want them to be paying attention.

I have said this before about other things (like tattoos, TV shows, or even working from home), but Social Media isn’t for everyone. That doesn’t mean Social Media is the devil either. People all learn differently, work differently, and consume information differently. When corporations adopt policies allowing their employees the freedom to engage in the venues and areas in which they as individuals find passion, THAT is when you will see great successes. Not everyone will be excited by social media outlets, just like others are not excited by more traditional avenues of content consumption. But when you allow those people with the passion to find their niche, your company will grow as the thought leaders in your industry, and as the communities grow and each individual you employ becomes those respected subject matter experts in their related fields… soon, your clients will see your brand as the knowledge experts.

THAT is something you can not force through policy or mandates. That is only something that can come from the social communities in a purely organic fashion, and only with proper care and cultivation over time. Stifling your employees on EITHER end of the spectrum will not empower them to excel in your controlled space or adopt new methods of working. Empowering your employees happens when you allow them to follow their passions and work in their own ways.

Of course, I would be remiss if I didn’t call out my own company’s brilliant policies surrounding social media involvement. Yes, I work for IBM Rational Client Support as a knowledge manager with a focal role in social media/web2.0 initiatives, and yes IBM has what I consider to be one of the best social media guidelines around: http://www.ibm.com/blogs/zz/en/guidelines.html

And others seem to share my respect for IBM’s progressive policies, like Olivier Blanchard from his BrandBuilder blog article referenced above, and Casey Hibbard in her article on the SocialMedia Examiner here.

I figure, if a company as large and diverse as IBM can successfully implement such open policies surrounding social media, why can’t yours?

And lastly, a disclaimer as is appropriate: The postings on this site are my own and don’t necessarily represent IBM’s positions, strategies or opinions. The words I write are mine and mine alone, please don’t attribute them to any person or company other than me.

Some call it vanity, but  a little self promotion can’t hurt, right?

Today, I was honoured to have been the first in what will become a regular series of interviews with various people involved with my employer, IBM Rational Client Support. You can read the full text of my interview here: https://www.ibm.com/developerworks/mydeveloperworks/blogs/nfrsblog/entry/meet_jason_o_donnell4?lang=en

On a purely selfish note, I would love to hear your feedback about this interview:

• Did you like the questions asked? The answers?
• Is there something you thought may have been missing?
• Do you see any value in learning more about people within a company which you may be a client of?
• Does this help de-mystify the company and bring in a more personal feel to the face of an organization?
• Are there ways you think this could have been done better?

I’ll explain further why answer to these questions are important to me….

In the interest of full disclosure and transparency: I am a content contributor as well as directly involved with the just-launched interviews initiative on the Notes from Rational Support Blog. Additionally, I will likely be taking over driving these interviews and posting to the blog, hence my interest in your feedback about the structure, etc. My interview being the first to run was kind of a bit of a cheat since Kelly Smith (@kellypuffs) and I are collaborating on the initiative. In my defense, I tried to get someone else first, but work cycles just weren’t available to do so, as such Kelly fell back on me as an easy standby so we could start the weekly cadence of interviews sooner rather than later. That said, I am still proud to have been spotlighted!

What REALLY gets me excited about this series though? Not the fact that I was spotlighted, but rather the anticipation of how all the future respondents will answer the interview questions (we have about twice as many questions than what I answered, none being ‘required’). I am absolutely looking forward to the variety of insights into both the organization as well as the individuals presented. Being so new to the organization myself, I find amazing value in the stories presented by the old-hats as well as the new ones. Seeing the organization and experiences from so many different points of view has always helped me shape my own understanding of the business and learn from both past mistakes and successes. I see this series as another way to learn even more personally, while also helping our clients see the more personal side to what can often be a faceless organization.

Of course, being one who likes instant gratification, this is going to be a hard one for me to keep to only a weekly cadence, and I am hoping the demand from the readership tells me the same thing. But that is the key to good blogging: keep a steady cadence with content your readership wants, and will keep coming back looking for more!

At my day job, I am a knowledge manager for IBM Rational Support. In this position I am helping to drive a concept known as “KCS”, or Knowledge Centered Support.  I like KCS, because it allows me to do what I have been doing all my life when it comes to information: reuse.

I’ve always found my patience tried when pushed to repeat myself, so I would fall back into a pattern of reusing information I previously provided. Oddly enough, however, it took me YEARS before I began actually reusing content for one of the questions I am most commonly asked: “What whiskies do you recommend?”

So, two years ago, I answered that question in the form of a blog post on my whiskies tasting group site: www.3DrunkenCelts.com

Since it was around the Christmas holiday, I framed the original post in the context of gifting whiskies to someone else, but the concepts and recommendations are still solid if you are just buying for yourself.

This year, I am going to fall back on the best practices I’ve learned over the years and simply reuse my old content, as it still holds up today:

• 3DC: Need help buying a whisky lover a Christmas gift?

So, jump on over to my tasting group’s site at the link above and read through my post on buying whiskies as gifts… and maybe even take a look at Raz’ recommendations for non-whiskey whiskey gifts too. Who knows, you may just find that perfect something for the perfect someone, or just for yourself

Gasp! Yup, that is me coming up for air…. So what HAS Jason been doing all these months you ask? Let me tell you, from a very highlevel, generic perspective (so as not to totally bore you, I even included pictures!):

Cut for dull explanatory work stuff.

So, yeah… double jeopardy for me today because I get to be a disappointment AND disappointed all in the same go.

I have been worrying about how I would be able to meet my project deadline at work, and realized this week that October is going to be a month FULL of long days and probably weekend work in order to do so. With my trip to Irvine next week taking me out of the office for 5 days, and my major project portion in a stop-work scenario until I can get funding approval, I am finding my time to be very constrained.

This all means that I will not be making it down to Great Western War as I had previously planned. To take another (essentially 5) few days off from any ability to work in October, would put me behind my deadline in a way that I couldn’t recover.

Sadly, I had the feeling all along that this would happen, but up until last week I thought I’d be able to pull it all off. Obviously that isn’t the case anymore and something had to give. Since I can’t cancel my Irvine trip (required for my job), I have to adjust my schedule with regards to the things I can control… of course GWW isn’t the only item on the chopping block, but my personal time at home is going to be devastated as well. At least until Nov. 1, after which I’ll have a bit more breathing room until Feb. 2nd ‘09 when my next deadline looms….

The only saving grace here is that I can see some friends during my Irvine trip, and that both Jean and I will be down in OC over Thanksgiving weekend as well. So at least there is SOME light at the tunnel’s end.

I’d still be up to my eyeballs in work. Blech.

It seems today has spewed as much work as possible upon me, and blocked even more work from being done, making the next month a likely living hell. Oddly, none of this could have been avoided by me actually working last week, so I don’t feel too badly about taking it off. However, it all COULD have been avoided as last minute items if procrastination wasn’t king.

Instead, I have until November 1st to complete 9/10ths of my work which has been on my plate since last April. Somehow, even way back then, I KNEW this would happen. Sigh… Oh, and I’ll be traveling all next week for 3 days of training, which means all combined I’ll have a total of 1 complete day, MAYBE, in the office next week to deal with ’stuff’. Fun. Then the week after I’ll be traveling to GWW, which means another 3 days lost.

So now I get to trudge through our support site and wash it to ensure it complies with legal, along with my 3200+ knowledge base articles. Not to mention the work needed for importing it all into the new systems, along with all the other integration items on my plate.

So, for the next month plus, my stress levels will be rising; I’ll be working even longer hours; and I’ll continue to pretend like I know what I’m doing.

Ok, I started this last Friday, so stick with me on this…

Here I sit at Boston’s Logan International waiting for my flight back home. As I recover from the weeks activities, I am slowly becoming aware of how much my life has changed in the past year…

This will be a protected entry as I recap the past weekend in Boise and talk about some work feelings which I don’t necessarily need my new teams to be reading quite yet. Not that anything is bad, I just want to be able to speak openly and candidly about things.

So, let’s start with Friday Sept 5th… I started the day tired due to not enough sleep from the night prior. When I woke Friday morning, I knew that for the next week I’d be running off the same amount of deprivation and just resigned myself to being tired. It is actually a bit amazing at how, once you stop worrying about getting sleep, that sleep doesn’t really matter. I think that was the key for me over the weekend and well into this week; I just didn’t care how little sleep I got and powered through my days on a surprisingly small amount of coffee.

Once Jean got home from work, we tossed our bags into the car and headed out to PDX for our 7:40 flight to Boise. As typical, we sat down at Capers Café for dinner and drinks… and amazingly enough, Don the bartender recognized me and asked where I’d been the past few months. I was amused, and it tickled Jean that the bartender remembers me.

The flight itself was short and uneventful, which is just how I like it. I think we were only at cruising altitudes for about 10 minutes. Before I continue I should probably explain who we were going to visit… our friends Jason and Stacy live in Boise with their 4 year old boy Tiernan. I know Stacy from back in Jr.High when we were a couple for a brief summer. Yup, Jean and I went to Boise to spend the weekend drinking it up with an ex-girlfriend and her husband… it sounds so salacious when I say it like that though.

We had connected with Jason and Stacy when they were out in PDX a month or two ago, and found we really got a long well. So, when they invited us to stay with them in Boise for a visit, we jumped at the chance; after all, they drink nice wine and enjoy good food just like us so we KNEW it would be a fun trip. I’ll say it right now, they couldn’t have been more gracious hosts.

We arrived in Boise around 10pm and Jason met us at baggage claim. By 10:30pm we were in their backyard feasting on all sorts of Hors D’oeuvres and going through glass after glass of some outstanding local wines.

It was truly one of those nights where everything just settled in to complimentary synchronicity; the conversation was stimulating and honest, as was the wine. It was a perfect start to the weekend, even if it did spill over into the next day ( I think we were up until around 2am).

Saturday found us in downtown Boise at Art in the Park, a Taste of Boise, and an additional tasting at a local wine Co-op. While the “Taste” was fun, it was a bit disappointing, especially having done a Taste of Oregon just three weeks prior.

Dinner was at John Mortimer’s restaurant, the name of which escapes me presently. I had an excellent lamb shank that was braised to perfection, though I think Stacy’s dish stole the show as the sous chef’s presentation of the trout was just gorgeous. As with the night before, the conversation flowed with ease.

Later that evening we retired to the living room at Jason and Stacy’s and ended up sitting around drinking wine and singing songs as Jason played the guitar. It was like reliving some of my highschool and college days… I don’t think any of us had done that in AGES. Needless to say, it was another late night.

Sunday was more wine tasting, but this time we ended up out at the vineyards. I’ll admit, I was pleasantly surprised to find that Idaho is actually producing some decent Syrahs. The last vineyard we stopped at, Hell’s Canyon, we were greeted by the winemaker and treated to more rousing conversation. As I was warned, he is a friend and client of Jason’s landscaping business and is fairly comfortable with Jason and Stacy… and I was able to reap the fruits of that relationship, literally: the winemaker treated us all to some barrel tastings of his reds. Unbelievable is about the only word I can find to describe his 2004 Syrah that had some very intriguing complexities and a story to match.

Unfortunately our flight out was 7pm that night, so we were set to a specific timeframe and still had dinner to grab, so we headed on our way to Barbacoa for a dinner of appetizers and cocktails. It was a fabulous way to end the weekend as we sat out on the patio at Barbacoa, overlooking the lake as the sun dropped in the sky, and made very vague plans to do it all again…

On the flight home I realized that I’d only have about 6.5 hours in Oregon before I was back on the road to Boston for some business meetings. Just thinking about the lack of sleep was making me tired… or maybe it was that gimlet I had earlier… who’s to say?

(as I write this, the first class steward has just refilled my syrah for a 4th time and taken away my plats and flatware as I have finished my chicken dinner (with an artichoke cream sauce) I love first class!).

So, back to my tale… at 4.20 on Monday morning my car arrived to take me back to PDX for my 7am flight out to Boston. As much as it sucked to get up that early with so little sleep, I was indeed excited to get out to see my new team, but more importantly, Steph.

You see, Stephanie is one friend whom I have known even longer than Jean. She and I were in elementary school together and have been close ever since. When she moved to Boston around 1995, I assured her we would visit… 13 years later, and I still hadn’t made it out. For shame, really. My only excuse is that other financial priorities too precedence. Not a good excuse mind you, but the only one I have. So you can imagine how happy I was to find my new team was based only 15 miles outside of Steph’s city…

I got into Boston around 3.30pm on Monday which gave me just enough time to get my car, get to the hotel, and freshen up a bit for dinner. I was able to meet up with Steph at her place, since I was smart enough to pack my gps (there’s no way in hell I could have done this trip without my handy sidekick!). We made our way back to South Boston to grab dinner at an Ethopian joint called Addis (if memory serves), and had an outstanding dinner together. The food was fabulous too

Tuesday, however, was the day of penultimate work. Ok, that may be exaggerating a bit, however this was the single day which I had been preparing for over the past two weeks. I was given the task of making a presentation to a group of directors and VPs with regards to my goup’s requirements for a particular project. Now, that in and of its self wouldn’t have been so bad except for the fact that I despise speaking in front of groups no matter how small, and for the fact that I was very heavily protected from this type of thing prior to joining IBM.

In either case, I have a great team I am leading who helped devise an outstanding presentation which made my job of delivery a piece of cake. Yes I was still unbelievably stressed prior to standing up, however with the backing of my team, that stress was unbelievably diminished and no where near the panic I had been experiencing the two weeks prior. I count myself lucky to have been able to walk in to that meeting head held high knowing I was completely prepared.

So, yes, the meeting was a success and we were able to make some large amounts of progress because of the face to face environment which may not have happened otherwise. Because of that I absolutely count Tuesday as a rousing success for me and my team. Additionally, it would seem I have become a blip on other people’s radar now, so I guess I need to step up and really drive this one home. While I have never been intimidated by executives, I AM starting to understand why having that visibility in such a large corporation is important.

Tuesday night, I headed out to Temple Bar in Cambridge to meet up with Steph and meet her best friend Jamie, whom I have heard so much about. The three of us had a fabulous dinner, replete with a chocolate fondue dessert, and then called it an earlier night due to exhaustion all around.

Wednesday morning greeted me far too early, but with the knowledge that this day would only be a ¾ day at best AND I wasn’t presenting anymore. I just had to answer questions and work towards resolutions, which really is what I am best at; I am a problem solver so this day’s workshops were right up my alley in terms of finding solutions.

Amazingly, we actually ended early, at which point I joined a few people from the meeting for lunch, returned back to the board room to continue a bit of work, then headed back to my hotel to finish up some other work and meet up with Steph for another dinner, this time with her boy-friend Izzy.

Because I had some extra time, Steph was able to pick me up a bit earlier than expected and we headed downtown to take care of some business at City Hall, and then found ourselves at the Green Dragon. For those history buffs in my readership, that would indeed be the same Green Dragon Pub which played host to the “Sons of the Revolution”. Coming from the west coast, having historical buildings/businesses with such deep relevance to the birth of our nation is a daunting thing. It really took a good amount of intentional concentration to not be distracted by all the structures and architecture and not get hit by a car as I just gazed at everything which surrounded me.

Sadly, it was while sitting in the Green Dragon when I realized, in a moment of embarrassing clarity, that Samuel Adams IS a local brew. See, whenever I travel, I always enjoy tasting the local flavours. Typically, if at a bar, I will glance over the taps to see if there is anything interesting… and ALWAYS skip the Buds, Coors, Millers, and Sam Adams pulls since those are nearly always present and never local… Oops, my mistake this time. So I obviously had to go for another round once I realized my faux pas. Needless to say, the Sam Adams I had at the Green Dragon did indeed taste of Freedom

Moving on, Steph and I made our way out to meet up with Izzy at a local Tibetan restaurant in Cambridge called Rangzen. A small little place which seated us as the first customers of the night around 5pm. I couldn’t tell you what I had, but in my estimation, Tibetan cuisine is akin to a mix of Indian flavours and varying cooking styles of Chinese (Szechuan and Cantonese stand out in my mind). Absolutely wonderful food, and accompanied by great conversation once again. Sometimes I really do feel spoiled by my friends.

Sadly, Izzy was on a time crunch due to band practice, so we only had about an hour or less to kill at his favourite bar called River Gods. This is a small bar within walking distance of the Tibetan place, with a VERY funky neo-retro-Romanesque-pagan vibe, which oddly enough was very comfortable and had a great soundtrack spinning from the DJ booth. We did manage to stay out later Wednesday night, but still made it back before it became tomorrow morning, so all was good. Sadly, this was the last night I’d be seeing Steph as my new team had plans to take me out and play Thursday night.

Thursday found me braving the morning commute traffic out of Cambridge and into Lexington to find my team’s building at the IBM campus. I was lucky enough to run into my new boss as I walked through the front door, so she was able to promptly show me where I needed to go and as such got me settled far earlier than I had anticipated… Oh and she brought doughnuts in my honour too, how can THAT be bad?

Thursday DAY was pretty much a wash. One conference call that took up most of my time, and then we called it quits early to get to ‘happy hour’ more quickly.

My new team ended up taking me to the Harpoon Brewery for a tasting, and then it was off to Prezza in North End Boston for dinner. Excellent!! Apparently we were dining with the owner of the Red Sox the same evening as well (John Henry is the name that was bandied about, though I wouldn’t know him from Adam….). From dinner, we hit a small bakery for canoles and whatever else everyone felt like indulging in (none for me thanks, tooo sweet). Then it was off to a roof-top bar for more drinks and stimulating conversations. In the mix I was treated to a very nice cigar courtesy of my team lead. What a guy! After to rooftop bar, we dropped one or two compatriots and made our way over to the Black Rose to finish off the evening.

And finish off we did…. We sat in the upper for an inordinate amount of time. Drinking and talking up a storm. It was one of those nights that had the perfect cap to it. I was able to bond with my new team mates and settle into a comfortable relationship to help build on in the days/weeks/months/years to come while working with them. Honestly, it was nice to just relax into an evening and not worry any longer about how I would be perceived. I was able to let go a bit and be myself… and that seems to have made all the difference. I was comfortable, and so were my team mates. What more could you ask for?

Of course Friday morning came far too early, and in fact I barely made it out of my room before checkout time. Luckily I was able to make it to Logan Int’l airport early enough to checkin and score an upgrade to first class for my flight home; which for a 6.5 hour flight was SOOOOO worth it!

I finally made it home around 10pm Friday night, which made for a long day, but thankfully Jean was able to stay awake to greet me when I got in. That made for a very nice homecoming after a week on the road…. Now, I get to do it all over again when I go down to Irvine later this month for another week of work, this time for 3 days of training rather than presenting, so much less stress all around. Then of course it is back down to Bakersfield for GWW a week after my Irvine trip… So much travel so little time!