Category: Opinions & Reflections

How to prevent the community manager from exploding

tug

<vent on>

To all organizations who think they’ve got it all sorted out so nicely because they have a community manager MANAGE it all…

Calling them ‘manager’ doesn’t mean they can control everything their community does or say unless you actually:

  • give them managerial rights over their community members (which you can’t if the community is comprised of customers or external parties);
  • inform them of the things you are doing BEFORE you are doing them instead of just dropping a bombshell and expecting them to manage the fallout;
  • understand that their role requires them to build a personal relation with their community which means that they are VULNERABLE when you take decisions that affect those community members without communicating them properly.

 

And to community members out there that seem to think the community manager is there just to help them….

Loving your community manager is great but that doesn’t exempt you from the responsibility to understand that:

  • your community manager is no philanthropist and needs that pay check their employer sends them every month just as much as you do. It’s not a case of loyalty, it’s a case of simple economics so don’t expect them to take impossible stands against their own employer;
  • the fact that they are called a ‘manager’ doesn’t mean they actually have any real managerial power or influence within their organization. In fact a community manager is by far the most powerless manager in any organizational tree. Don’t expect them to change the world, just ask them to help you find the right tree to bark up;
  • you think you are frustrated by how things go…?!? think again and start realizing they are probably too. Work together and don’t just vent. That’ll get a lot more done.

 

And to all… give them a bit of respect and TLC and realize they are in general doing a really good job of doing the impossible!

<vent off>

In dedication to some pretty awesome community managers out
there and a few in particular.

You know who you are ;)

From describing to applying – user training taken seriously

It still is one of the most common mistakes made ever… Implementing new or updated software without providing user training as the reasoning is: “Oh, we don’t need to train our users. They have been using this (or similar) software for years, surely they know by now how to use it“.

Well, do they really? I’ve recently been involved in several adoption projects where we trained both new users as well as users who had been using collaboration tools for years on how common features in everyday tools like mail, calendar, task lists and contact books can help them become more effective. One of the comments we got back a lot was: “I was aware of most of it but never really applied it to how I could use it in my own job, now I see how it can help me I wish we had gotten this training years ago!“.

The thing is that to those implementing the software it often all seems so straight forward. “It’s mail? How hard can it be?” or… “Come on, everyone knows how to autosum a column in Excel!“. Reality is though – users often don’t.

“I didn’t even know it could do that!”

Often users simply don’t know all the functionalities that the software they get offers because nobody ever showed them. Most times they use only a small percentage of it’s capabilities, not because they don’t want to use more of it but because nobody took the time to set them down and show it.

“I know it can do that, I just don’t have a clue how ‘I’ can get it to do that…”

Without training most users simply won’t know how to use half of what they have.  “Well they can use the Help can’t they? Or ask?“. Yes they can. But asking often implies inadequate knowledge of something and a lot of users don’t feel comfortable admitting to their coworkers not knowing something that others seem to think is such implied knowledge. And Help files? Well,… Ever tried using MS Excel Help to figure out how to create a pivot table?…

The most important one though in my opinion, and one that is often the biggest culprit of failed user adoption is:

“I don’t see how it can help me do my job better”

The mistake made here is that often implementers and trainers focus on showing users HOW to do things without explaining to them WHY this could be beneficial to them. Expecting users to be able to make the leap from seeing a ‘feature’ into applying it to their daily job without helping them to do so is often one step too far for a lot of them. Especially with the wide variety of software and functionalities we have nowadays.

For instance: If you talk to users about the ‘awareness’ functionality in instant messaging software like Lync or IBM Sametime you can simply explain that they can change their status to “not available” or “do not disturb” or you can start a discussion and address the topic of constant availability, where IM stands in the array of options we have nowadays to contact each other (mail, phone, face-to-face, etc), why and where it can be handier to use one over the other and how users can – and should – make choices about their availability to be contacted in that way.

Last but not least:
Enablement, education and training should never be seen as temporary things. Good adoption of technology and methodologies requires repetition and involvement so don’t stop after you’ve implemented the software; done your training sessions and provided reference materials. Reiterate the knowledge by regularly posting small tips & tricks on bulletin boards or intranet sites, by uploading videos, by having users interviewed  – or better yet – stimulating them to write blogs and wiki’s themselves about how it helps them to do their job better and by offering over the shoulder support.

So….

  • Never assume
  • Involve the user to train the user
  • Start with addressing the ‘why’ before going into ‘how’
  • repeat & reinforce

But most importantly have fun doing it… Nothing is more satisfying then seeing that ‘light bulb’ go on in someones eyes when they learn that one thing that will make all the difference to them in their day to day job… :)

 

Blackberry I hate you… or do I??

Yes, you read it correctly. For the last few years I’ve been loathing my Blackberry Bold. It’s clunky, slow loading, the apps don’t do what I want them to do (heck, they won’t even update without requiring a full reboot which takes at least 15min), installing apps is an absolute nightmare and most of all I hate it’s really unhandy position of the mute, hold and speaker buttons on the ‘phone’ screen.

Why you ask? Well because the ‘phone’ app is about the only app on that device that is really fast and efficient and actually behaves like I would expect from a touchscreen enabled application but unfortunately comes with some very large and sensitive buttons on it to enable ‘Mute’, ‘Hold’ and ‘Speaker’. This means that as soon as I pick it up to answer or start a call and accidentally hold it too close to my cheek I end up talking to myself or on speaker phone. Neither of which is very handy. So when I finally convinced our management to allow me to buy an iPhone I literally danced around the room.

And then IBM Connect happened and I saw the Blackberry 10….

So now it’s all up in the air again. I really liked the things I saw, most importantly that division between business and private usage and the opportunities that brings to companies investigating BYOD. What does that mean? Well, that for now my plans to buy an iPhone are shelved until I see the new Blackberry in action and can experience it a bit more (most importantly use it’s phone function!). I’m also curious to see whether the app developers will still see it as an interesting platform to code for. Any mobile platform without a vibrant developer eco-system is dead on the ground and the suggestion that was made that it would run Android apps natively is something I would want to test first.  But if those pan out…. well, I could (unexpectedly) find myself going for yet another Blackberry here.

Chris Miller and Kathy Brown did a really good (and fun!) video about the BB10. It’s worth the watch if you are interested to learn more about the new BB10 functionalities.

Video was originally posted here

Dutch social – does culture help in social business adoption?

During my opening at Social Connections in Amsterdam on November 30th a few weeks back I tried to make a link between how the Dutch culture of ‘Consensus decision making’ that was formed by hundreds of years of fighting together against the rising water levels and social business relate to each other.

Water to The Netherlands traditionally is both a blessing (as it gives us opportunities for trade and access to the rest of the world) as well as a curse (as it is a constant threat with 1/3 of the country being below sea level). It forces us to constantly reinvent ourselves and our environment and forces us to work together on all levels. It has shaped the way we do business, do politics and live together and resulted in a flat hierarchy system focused on collaborating for a common goal with strong ties outwards. Which is underwritten by this report by DHL on the global state of connectedness where The Netherlands is ranked first out of 140 nations.

So does that make The Netherlands better at ‘social’?
I think it certainly helps as social business thrives in flat hierarchy systems and collaborative environments… but what do you think? Does national/regional culture help or not and if so, what aspects of your culture do you see that play a role in how Social Business is taking off (or not!)?

social Language tutoring – paying in translations

Last week, while talking to a friend about how more and more books are becoming available online he mentioned reCaptcha. Now I didn’t know this one so when he explained that it uses the Captcha’s (those ‘are you human?’ tests you get when you comment on a website) to have the crowd digitize texts that are hard to OCR (“Optical Character Recognition”), I was mind boggled. I love it! by showing people words from actual texts that computers “can’t” read and cross check it with other users returns, they effectively transcribe hundreds of pages worth of text each day. Such a simple but effective idea. I love how internet and some quirky ingenuity is making things like this possible.

A similar concept to this is a DuoLingo. A simple idea whereby people can learn a new language by translating pieces of texts. The double edge here is that while you do that, and while you check others translations you are actually not just learning a new language but helping translating actual texts as well. I haven’t yet been able to test it myself as it’s in Beta and by invitation only for now and already overwhelmed by invitation requests. But the video looks promising.

Is this just great? Well yes, while it is altruistically used for the translation or capturing of texts that would otherwise never be translated/captured. But no doubtedly it will be used commercially as well…
Companies like Google (reCaptcha) and DuoLingo can sell this as a paid service for companies to have their old ‘paper’ documents and texts indexed and translated easily & quick and make big bucks of it.

Is that really a problem though? We seem to expect services on the web to be free but things like language tutors or having a bouncer to keep unwanted people out of your club (which is more or less what Captcha’s do) were never free so why is it that we expect this to be free on the web? At least, in this way, we get the services and someone else pays. I think that is actually not a bad deal!