Twitter Is Mission Critical

Gabe & I collaborated with our AT&L editor Carol on a fun little article titled Twitter Is Mission Critical. It'll be in the Oct issue of Signal magazine, and you can read a short preview here. We'll let you know when the full version is up.

Twitter Is Mission Critical

I've been pushing for greater adaption of social media (and other Web 2.0 stuff) for a while now. I recently came across the CogBlog, which had this great comment on the US military's current approach to computer network security and operations.

To fight kinetic wars, the military gives its soldiers armor and modern weapons and trains them to exploit the native battlefield infrastructure and terrain. In contrast, to fight information wars, the military attempts to encase its soldiers in impenetrable bubbles that insulate them from the “information battlefield.” The analogy in kinetic space would be to encase our soldiers their vehicles and equipment in giant “hamster balls” and have them roll as best they can across the native infrastructure and terrain.

Exactly! When we decide to block off the most important and interesting parts of the internet, not allowing military types to use them to accomplish the mission, we're basically putting people in hamster balls, which doesn't exactly help.

It Really Is Important

We've been talking a lot about social media here = it's important! If you are leading or directing people in any way, you should definitely understand why the use of social media is important to your team.

In my book, these "social" engines facilitate transparency; a critical attribute for organizations who want to accomplish anything. One of the best descriptions I've come across to explain why this is comes from the Standish group:

...transparency can be painful, but transparency reduces barriers to communication, builds trust, and accelerates consensus building and decision making.

It's important. Yeah Buddy!

Best Practices - NOT

At the Social Media conference last week, several people mentioned they were looking for "best practices." These were inevitably the same people who also insisted on the importance of "thinking strategically" when it comes to social media.

It seems to me that both sentiments have the same root. Namely, both are expressions of a modernist worldview, in which rationality can supply all our needs and activities can be optimized. I'm just not sure this worldview stands up to reality. It makes sense logically, but experience tends to disprove it. When that happens, we can't blame the world for not living up to our theory (but Strategic Best Practice advocates often seem primed to do just that).

Best practices are someone else's best practices. We should use them for illumination, not imitation. We should reflect on them, not just copy them. And strategic thinking is all fine and good if we mean intentional, thoughtful consideration of our eventual objectives... but not if it means locking down those objectives before we even begin.

Social Media Conference

I just spent two days at a "Social Media In Government" conference, sponsored by the Advanced Learning Institute. It was definitely an interesting time, but some presenters were much better than others.

Hillary Hartley, of NIC Inc definitely deserves a shout-out. Her presentation was fantastic and a real highlight of the two days. She demonstrated a most profound and comprehensive understanding of Web 2.0, Government 2.0 and social media, and did so in a language that everyone could easily understood. Plus, her slides rocked!

Which makes me wonder - for a group of professional communicators (and most of the presenters fit in that category), why oh why were so many of the slide presentations so crappy? I mean, in more than a few cases the person was a good speaker, the content was top-notch, and the actual slides were h-o-r-r-i-b-l-e (i.e. word-dense, bullet points, bland, etc).

And there was one presentation in particular, who shall remain nameless, who didn't belong at the conference at all. He was a fantastic storyteller with a gripping yarn to spin. I really enjoyed his bit. However, I cringed every time he said "social media" because he clearly doesn't know what that phrase means. What he meant was "online media," which isn't the same thing. Just because you post a podcast doesn't mean you're doing SM.