Ewan McIntosh | Design Thinking, Education & Learning

Jeff Jarvis on institutions' fear of the net

A beauty from Jeff's What Would Google Do, currently accompanying my commutes:

"Industries and institutions, in their most messianic moments, tend to view the internet in their own image: Retailers thin of the internet as a store... Marketers see it as their means to deliver a brand message. Media companies see it as a medium, assuming that online is about content and distribution...

"The internet explodes [this notion that industries and institutions have some point of control over people]. It abhors centralization. It loves sea level and tears down barriers to entry. It despises secrecy and rewards openness. It favors collaboration over ownership. The once-powerful approach the internet with dread when they realize they cannot control it."

With 4iP we're attempting to amplify a few of those distributed gems rather than trying to ensnare them to channel4.com, better traffic and eyeballs or not. We're insisting, much to the distaste of some, on collaboration over ownership of stuff. Jeff thinks it's the right way forward. I think it's the right way forward.

What about you? What about your institutions? A few on which I'd love a discussion: BBC (especially its news), Glow (Scotland's national intranet), Scottish Government services... any more?

edu.blogs.com in Wall Street Journal. So what?

A fascinating and personal insight into the Long Tail in action. Earlier this week I appeared alongside illustrious company in the Wall Street Journal. However, I can't even find the referrals from there in the first few pages of my stats, with links from Google search, other educators and, lo-and-behold, Twitter, knocking the American giant of the printing press off into stat result obscurity.

There are, as usual, a lot of people typing the address into their browsers directly, but no discernible difference from normal numbers. Indeed, there's even been a 400 person decline in my subscription numbers since starting work at Channel 4 (evidently there's a great mistrust of thoughts coming from those who turn to the dark side of the media), a figure that's not buoyed by the one-hit clickers of the WSJ readership.

Conclusion? It's more worthwhile cultivating online and offline relationships with people than relying on large institutions' pull of strangers with no tangible digital breadcrumbs of their own. Here endeth the lesson.
Pic from Superamit

Are you part of this, or just a reflection of it?

The thing about social media is that you have to be, ahem, social. That means you have to be in it, not anti-social by ignoring people or trashing others' work. It's a shame that one of the largest ad agencies out there, McCann Erickson, feels the need to rip-off others' work, without even a casual link out to the people they're attempting to copy.

Common Craft have for years now provided the web with superb, short, witty videos explaining the most complex areas of the live web. They have been viewed millions of times, blogged by thousands. They're part of the currency of the web, appearing on Governmental and company intranets and external sites. Why, then, have McCann repackaged/stolen the idea and produced something that's mediocre at best, plain boring rather than plain English? Their version of Web 2.0 in Plain English is presented by someone with a clean corporate accent, the images used tarnished by the polish of corporate graphic artists.

Any company or organisation stands to gain a heck of a lot more linking out to the talent that's there already, employing it if it needs something more specific than is currently provided. Fair enough, McCann's corporate customers may not be connected (yet) into the world of Common Craft, but McCann are in a position to create some real change by introducing them to the real literature, rather than the York Notes version of it.

Update: Having met a nice chap from McCann the other day, the video's inspiration has since been added. Good job, guys! :-)

Don't send out a press release to say you landed on the moon

Over the past three years at Learning and Teaching Scotland I've seen significant change in the way things have been done, largely thanks to the humble blog and the voices behind them. By pressing the need for authenticity in what's said, rather than some glossy, postcard format marcoms message ruling us all, we've seen the beginnings of a healthy little blogosphere in LTS Towers, both externally and, in true iceberg fashion, internally, under the glossy surface.

There are undoubtedly non-believers in all this authentic-voice-stuff that still remain (we're a Government body, this project is too big to allow the simple message we've created to leave people's minds, we need to make sure people use the correct acronym [is it CfE, aCfE or ACE?]) but, by and large, especially since this summer's Inspiration Sessions and Mike Coulter's work in-house, there is an ever increasing chance that if you want to find out more about the people behind the policy, the implementation, the ideas or the websites, that they have a blog. You can converse with - no offence intended - the horse's mouth. From professional development experts to web services, the magazine to the gaming guys, the geeks to the boss, it's covered. If you want to see behind the scenes at the Scottish Learning Festival, be our guest, and see the stand designs, the podcast preps and even take a look at how well (and not so well) the Festival is doing. LTS is well on its way to finding and sharing its voice.

And here's the crunch. People I know will object to this blog post, as they have objected to so many others. It makes them uncomfortable. They wonder if I'm talking about them in the para above. Or am I? Good. It's vital that the politic that got me a job with the education agency remains, for a month or two more at least, in people's heads: all anyone wants from a non-governmental body, a government, an organisation, a company is complete and utter authenticity. No compromises. No jargon. No marcoms crap that gets in the way of what really matters: "what are you doing to help me, and how can I help you?"

If you're still left thinking this is rubbish, and that traditional 20th Century corporate communications have a place in this connected world, then go read Seth Godin's superb rundown of NASA's best ever spokesperson, and then think about what watchlists need to be created, press releases junked and bloggers befriended. Happy blogging, folks.

Pic: Neil Armstrong

Innovation 101 (or, "Hoping you see the irony...")

Yesterday I was flying over Greenland, as you do, thinking about how one of those teeny weeny icebergs I could see from 40,000 feet managed to sink the Titanic nearly 100 years ago. Having just finished Gordon Torr's tour de force on Managing Creativity, I started ruminating about how things that seem so far away often seen so insignificant to most people, trivial and silly, while innovators get sneered at for even considering the possibilities for disruption.

It was at that precise moment I found the anti-creativity manifesto to accompany his oeuvre perfectly. From Michael via Euan comes the manifesto (pdf) that, if applied, really will kill your organisation, starving it of any creativity, innovation or chance of survival. Worryingly, I think we've all worked for organisations where at least one of these is the norm:

1. Insist on doing everything through "channels." Never permit short-cuts to be taken in order to expedite decisions.
2. Make "speeches." Talk as frequently as possible and at great length. Illustrate your "points" by long anecdotes and accounts of personal experiences. Never hesitate to make a few appropriate "patriotic" comments.
3. When possible, refer all matters to committees, for "further study and consideration." Attempt to make the committees as large as possible — never less than five.
4. Bring up irrelevant issues as frequently as possible.
5. Haggle over precise wordings of communications, minutes, resolutions.
6. Refer back to matters decided upon at the last meeting and attempt to re-open the question of the advisability of that decision.
7. Advocate "caution." Be "reasonable" and urge your fellow-conferees to be "reasonable" and avoid haste which might result in embarrassments or difficulties later on.
8. Be worried about the propriety of any decision — raise the question of whether such action as is contemplated lies within the jurisdiction of the group or whether it might conflict with the policy of some higher echelon.

Copy, paste and add your own examples in the gaps. I wouldn't blog it, though. At the same time, I wouldn't say no to hearing about it in an email ;-)

Pic: Icebergs

20 Ideas For Local Authorities To Engage With Web 2.0

A week ago I spent a whole day leading a session on behalf of Socitm, the Society of Information Technology Management, where we were exploring the impact new media could have in Local Authorities and other public bodies. Most of those present were from the world of corporate IT and, as someone presenting a variety of tools they were likely to be blocking on their home patch, I was a tad nervous about taking them on this particular learning journey.

I needn't have been. Having explained in broad terms the main drivers of change thanks to this technology, I was able to explore some more specific examples of public sector engagement with the social web, from eduBuzz in the domain of education, to several health-related initiatives of the NHS. We saw how technology is taking politics towards the realm of direct democracy, and explored the potential for some of the mobile, ambient and participative media that citizens are increasingly using in their day-to-day (social) lives.

We worked through the afternoon seeking practical, do-able actions that these IT managers could take forward, without the need for engagement of the senior management teams or specialist outsourced expertise. They relished the task, and came up with some superb ideas they could implement in days, rather than months or years. Some of them have even put them into action already: take a peek at Stratford's homepage, complete with Twitter updates. Here are the rest, coming to a local council near you:
What are the biggest challenges in your organisation?

1. Competitions for art work on Flickr
2. Mental health blog
   1. Teachmeet-style therapy group
   2. Video diary of experiences
3. Flickr/Google Earth mashups
   1. Things to do in the area, events, locations for recycling etc...
   2. Online estate agency for social housing
   3. Statistics in a glance mashup
   4. Graffiti tracking, crowdsourcing for finding the source of the 'tag'
   5. Mashups to reveal extent of disruption during strikes, accidents
4. Crowdsourcing FAQs on a wiki
5. Homeworkers can have real-time advice between 'virtual desks' (RSS feed to mobile)
6. Twitter for mass-collaboration during crises and a blog to quickly publish information and provide an instant feedback loop
7. Longitudinal e-consultation on complex issues
8. Using Flickr to provide stock photography to local press and council workers (like this)
9. Providing digital cameras to council gardeners to share the process and final result with enthusiasts and ciizens.
10. Twitter private groups for quick intranet publishing
11. Watchlist introduction for the PO, PR, Comms team
12. Culture change through a "from-the-top" blog by the CEO
13. Suggestion box for cost-effectiveness

Social media and ambient intimacy for software engineers

When you're designing a new piece of kit, a platform for the web or a nifty widget for Bebo, it's vital that you have an audience in mind, an understanding of what might be possible, and the ability to change your plans frequently without sacrificing the integrity of your project. That was the main message at my lecture to the BScs and BEngs at Napier University, Edinburgh, today.

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Why the 'users' are different

The generation of 21st Century 'users' would not appreciate the title. They are contributors, creators, co-creators, participants... 90% of 15-25 year olds have visited their social network in the past month, vast numbers of these Bebo Boomers using the platform in ways the platform engineers hadn't dreamt of.

Expertise comes in different forms from before. It won't be long before PhDs will be submitted on YouTube. Wine buffs don't need to wear particular clothes and visit stuffy vineyards; you can be an expert on your own blog, or have your passion facilitated and encouraged by the platform itself. You don't have to visit a pub to feel like you're a regular. You can join its Facebook group or take a peek at what's going on through its Flickr photo pool.

The main global shifts affecting innovation

With technology providing a means for consumers, users, participators to take part in the co-creation of products, services and knowledge (think Dell's community, Seesmic's relationship around product development with its users (as many follow it as it follows; its users are fanatical) and educationalists around the world, or Wikipedia, even), it means that competition in the space to have your voice heard and your service used has never been greater.

Daniel Pink notices what technology has allowed to happen, and sums it up with the three 'A's.

Asia

What happens in Asia won't take long to happen elsewhere. At the moment if it's mobile, it's happening, yet so few software engineers start out by thinking how they'll make a mobile app usable on the web. Instead, we see companies struggle to make mobile products from the web. The one exception to this: Twitter. Asia's not only a growing market but a global one: China will soon be the number one English-speaking country in the world, its top 5% of graduates numbering more than the whole population of the UK. They have more gifted and talented students than we have students. Change is on the cards, with tomorrow's teens facing over 29 jobs in their lifetime, which means long-term planning and big budget developments risk more failure for software engineers than small-scale, agile, flexible development.

Abundance

The need for being mobile has never been greater. What's this? Or this? Try this then. With 426,000 mobiles being chucked out every year in the States alone, the signal is this: mobile telephony and internet access is not only burgeoning, but consumers are becoming fans, and want to engage with the latest, most powerful kit. They need apps that push their devices and they will be ready to chuck the device before they chuck the web service that makes their mobile tick (think iPhone).

Automation

Automation of search has probably been the one most important automation to have taken place since the net was born. Everyone has become a cataloguer, but people still need help understanding the stories large amounts of data can tell. To prevent information overload, we need computer designers and engineers to come up with ever more ingenius ways to find and present information to the 'user'/co-creator. Jonathan Harris is getting there, showing us some degree of geography in the way we feel (the web's never been great at location or time) or time and pace in a photograph.

Automation of copy and paste has also meant that we have the potential to be more creative - or a lot less creative. It might be down to software engineers to design interfaces that make it more fun to be original than to be a copy cat. Adidas seem to  be having some success on Jumpcut with their sneaker remizes.

We also talked about the role of the engineer in adoption strategy, especially when such a strategy feeds back into the development of further fuctionality, and how privacy issues, which can sometimes be the death of a project, can lend itself to structuring social media projects for particular groups of potential participants. Case in point: ARGs and Voluntary Computing.

Ultimately, as we started, we saw that the potent power of the net is not in code, but in people. If we can code to bring people together, the right people at just the right time, then we release the potential. It's hard to do this, with most software engineers working in groups where the ideas and direction may come from mere mortals like myself ;-) Communication, therefore, remains a key skill, and one that is often underdeveloped until the engineer is summoned to Demo and given a course by Shel. I love the way some developers express themselves in presentations at the likes of Demo or BarCamp, or in YouTube videos: this SecondLife development is more beautiful in its development than in the final product, I'd argue.

The easiest way to communicate with potential clients, employers or programming peers? A blog. In this case, if you're developing software for the web, for the social web at that, there's no excuse to be towards the end of a university career with no means to market yourself and build contacts in the slightly less cossetted world out there.

Software developers need to jump on every bandwagon going, to see if it's headed anywhere (thanks, Mike). They need to make sure that, using the tools of the ambiently intimate, they are at the front of the minds of everyone who matters to them now and into the future.

Community-building - why bottom-up alone doesn't work

For the hard of understanding: this is not, as Stephen seems to think, a defense of some kind of 'web aristocracy', as very recent posts would make clear. It's expanding some metaphors in a bid to find out how even small 'bottom-up' communities thrive, and whether there is always a central 'core' who are pushing and directing things.

It's a myth to believe that purely bottom-up culture will lead to any form of truly successful community. Purely bottom-up communities are, ironically, difficult for newbies to infiltrate and, once in them, hard for anyone to have their voice heard.

Stuart, from the NCSL, left a really worthwhile and considered comment on my last post, where I was considering why people would want to join a state-administered community at all. He points out the vital role of the top-down working in harmony with bottom-up passions:

"Large, nationally-run initiatives are successful too if they influence the culture in a more ambient fashion, if they encourage people to learn from what can be found within them - creative tools and the opportunity to connect with like-minded people - and then they go off and build their own networks, spaces and connections online.

"There's a role for institutions modelling and supporting these tools and behaviours, giving teachers a kind of first class ticket into a network they don't have to build from scratch like lego. Isn't eduBuzz an example of just such an initiative to kick start a networking culture?"

Indeed, eduBuzz was built in both a bottom-up fashion by being invitational (you were invited to sign up and share, not ordered or expected to) and open door (our Board meetings were Open Meetings - anyone could come along, whether part of the Local Authority or not, teacher or parent...). But there was also a degree of top-down management of the community, which I catalogued in last summer's series of talks at BLC07. What kind of actions were top-down? Here are some:

• We provided a portal page, to let people know what the principle aims of the teaching and learning policy were.
• We provided one web address where people could go to learn why they might want to share online, find others doing so in their field or geographical area and start sharing themselves.
• We helped connect people who 'should' have known about each other, but maybe didn't, being teachers with busy schedules and not as much time to read the panoply of blogs, wikis and podcasts coming out of the local teacher population. (I guess this backs up Andrew Keen's point that innovation comes from individuals rather than the digital crowd.)
• The Head of Education (now Director of Children's Services and Education) had created his own blog: the messages from this are often top-down, managerial, decision-making related, but coupled with the bottom-up approach of seeking comment and accord.
• We provided training sessions on digital new media - podcasting, filming, photography, blogging, animation - and used these as a means to encourage people to share the results in the online community.

eduBuzz has experienced a level growth (5000% a lot per year) well above more organic completely bottom-up communities with the same aim (for the previous 18 months the area's online community had stagnated), and was strongly linked to the image, vibe and ethos of a geographical place: East Lothian. It certainly offers all the advantages of being an essentially bottom-up community but with the direction and purpose of top-down.

Stuart's comment makes me think of what Charlie Leadbetter was talking about on Monday night (after I had written my previous post) in his tête-à-tête with Andrew Keen. In a chapter of his new book, We-Think, that wasn't published, he talks about cities, both those designed on a bottom-up settler tribal ethos (e.g. Lagos) and those designed on a purely top-down state-controlled basis (e.g. Shanghai). Neither extreme works particularly well, with one a chaotic, crime-ridden, slow-developing sprawl and the other a successful burgeoning but not particularly human-friendly concrete jungle. You can hear more of Charlie about the role of users and consumers in his TED Talk from 2005.

I'm waiting on my review copy of We-Think to arrive in the post, but I think it may provide some leads on where our various 'state-controlled' online communities might stand in the future, and how much of that leash needs to be slackened to ensure both the unthreatening and helpful intervention from 'them up there', to help those at the bottom get the most out of them and the people in those communities.

And where does this leave my analogy of the bothy as the enviable bottom-up community that we might want to emulate? Well, I guess there is actually a strong element of top-down in bothy culture: historical expectations. The people who use bothies are coming with a particular cultural and historical contextual baggage, expectations of how that bothy is used, how we treat others within it, and how we leave that community when we leave it. Likewise, those who choose to blog and stick with it come having done a little homework (reading others' blogs) and bring a set of expectations from history and culture that, ultimately, are top-down, coming from those who've been 'mastering' the art of writing or speaking through the medium. Blogs, wikis and bothies all have this hidden (or not-so-hidden) aristocratic history woven through them.

It's no mistake that Jimmy Wales has called 'his' wiki's Editors the 'aristocracy' of Wikipedia, with him as the Monarch. But it works. For him. Bottom-up, it seems, always requires a bit of state, monarch or Parliament, to make it work in the long term.

Tipping Point Toast for Communities?

There's new research from a Yahoo mathematician researcher which shows that Malcolm Gladwell's 'Tipping Point' theory, where small groups of influential people tip new objects or ideas into the mainstream, may be mere whimsy. In my experience, he may be right.

This provides some further thought not only about why people might (not) join online communities in the first place but who might join online communities. Duncan Watts is published in the latest Fast Company magazine showing how the notion of the Tipping Point, from its incarnation as the "opinion leaders" thesis of 1955 through to the notion of 'six degrees of separation' in 1967, can be proven less persuasive with some maths:

"In 2001, Watts used a Web site to recruit about 61,000 people, then asked them to ferry messages to 18 targets worldwide. Sure enough, he found that Milgram was right: The average length of the chain was roughly six links. But when he examined these pathways, he found that "hubs"--highly connected people--weren't crucial. Sure, they existed. But only 5% of the email messages passed through one of these superconnectors. The rest of the messages moved through society in much more democratic paths, zipping from one weakly connected individual to another, until they arrived at the target."

I subscribe to many ideas from Gladwell's Blink and Tipping point books, mainly the notion that people thin slice (make up their minds on something the instant they see it) and that good ideas require a small targeted group of people to help it spread initially. Gladwell's example was a bunch of influential fashionable hippies who spread the wearing of Hush Puppies around Manhattan in the 90s. My example is of good teachers sharing new ideas about how we can do our jobs better.

It's not how influential you are...
However, I've never believed that the influentual-ness of those individuals is particularly  important. It's more been a case of finding people who believe in the notion, idea or service that I believe in and helping them spread the word on whatever it is to others. Influential people already come equipped with presumably equally influential contacts and that way of explaining things to others, but that doesn't preclude 'non-influentials' (yuck, horrible term) from becoming influential in their own right, simply by being passionate to their friends, colleagues and community. And here's the plus side: with influentials probably 'selling' stuff to other influentials there comes the risk that your idea simply remains in its echo chamber. Get some regular folk together and you have a chance that your idea hits the mainstream.

In the eduBuzz community, where rapid growth in the numbers of teachers sharing their work on blogs and other collaborative sites was initially linked to the Tipping Point notion, we quickly realised that, in fact, there was a chaotic blend of classroom teachers, parents, librarians, students and managers taking the lead - not necessarily our "Top 10% Influencers" that we may have identified beforehand; just good learners or teachers who found plausible the idea that sharing learning experiences was a good thing.

Ultimately, we would understand from the Fast Company story, it has little to do with the person trying to propagate the trend, and everything to do with the trend itself. If a community is ready to embrace a trend then anyone can help kick that trend off. If, however, the culture of a community prevents people from easily getting 'infected' with the new idea, then whether persuasive influencer or Average Joe, you stand little chance of getting that idea to spread.

Ed Keller, author of The Influentials, disagrees with this based on his own experiences, where top 10% influencers happen to be five times more likely to dispense advice, and they're early adopters, too, using mobiles and the net years before anyone else.

If being influential isn't important, wherefore professional organisations?
But he concedes an important point: "Duncan is making a straw-man argument. Because nobody, including myself, thinks that Influencers are the only group of consumers who matter."

This, again, puts a compelling question mark at the foot of communities. What is being part of a community? Tonight I speak at the annual Naace strategic conference, a professional organisation which prides itself on being influential, having that cachet as a group of innovators, the Hush-Puppy wearers of the Education ICT world. Does this stand up in an age where anyone with ideas that society can grasp can take on an influence of their own?

Gareth Davis of Naace already has some ideas on this, although in the light of this research it would be interesting to see them developed further. I think there may be a case of what Mark suggests, that we distort what actually happens in the light of retrospection.

Six points for organisations entering the Live Web

What are the points worth bearing in mind if you are a medium or large organisation about to try out some new things on the Live Web? Here are my updated thoughts from over the last six months.

Increasingly, business in Scotland is seeing the potential that social media can bring to extend messages, connect better with customers, communicate more and deeper with colleagues and spot opportunities for developing their skills or business further. These are the same lessons that education has been finding its way through for the past while.

No-one should ever feel compelled to 'dive in' without thinking things through, but at the same time there is a need to "fail as soon as possible to find success sooner". There are six main themes for me:

Authenticity: Don't make your people skip the 5th Amendment

The 5th Amendment might come under "not guilty until proven" on this side of the pond. Blogs have a huge influence on individuals, even if they themselves are not bloggers, and as a result many organisations would rather play it safe and not risk falling on any potentially negative side of that influence. Blogs are effectively "guilty before proven". One of the easiest ways out is to say that "our customers/stakeholders don't use blogs. They're too old/young/countryfied".  This is not true - if Bill Marriott can blog at 78, so can your 55+ customers. However, bloggers can make large swathes of people choose to do something or not do something and, unless you're on a level playing field (i.e. you have a blog of your own and are 'part of the conversation') you will find yourself not only incapable of controlling their messages, but also incapable of directing the dialogue. Listen to this extract from the January 23 BBC Digital Planet programme (mp3) if you want more convincing. When a member of the public feels an organisation is not telling the whole truth about its affairs their word can be final if the organisation doesn't listen and jump in to explain.

Sure, there is a risk that even when blogging an organisation still makes a pig's ear of trying to communicate effectively with its stakeholders. If an organisation does venture into the blogosphere, though, and makes a mistake first time round, this doesn't mean that all is lost. Organisations must have the courage to turn tack, chuck out the staid press-release-by-blog and find an authentic voice with blogs written by authentic contributors. Look what happens when companies try to run a PR blog, to pull the wool over the eyes people they serve.

Blogs are conversations - so converse!

David Cameron, the Tory leader, is video blogging (vlogging) and, at first sight, making a genuine effort to engage with a new group of potential Tory voters. At closer inspection, however, the 5/5 ratings and lack of comments from him on many posts leads us to think that the Tory leader is less concerned with having a genuine conversation with his readers.

That, and the cringeworthy attempt at realism with crying baby, clothes horse and, oh yes, making a cup of tea just as the camera starts rolling - pesky video producer, tsk, tsk. I also think it's quite entertaining to note the quality of the video - it's not an off-the-cuff cheapo camcorded moment in the family home. It's a widescreen, possibly a wee HD number. They don't come cheap. There's a highly skilled cameraman putting in 'amateur' shakes. Another case of "The Changing Face of Tory Boy?" ;-)

What's needed here is a rethink on company-produced materials for public consumption. Where high quality levels used to be vital to creating a credible image it's less important now, and might even be a hindrance. If telling the story of your company means getting the guys and gals on the factory floor to record some quick vids on their mobile phones, then great. The person to talk about stuff isn't the PR person, it's the person most passionate about the product or process. It's the story that is key, not the production values. This is the age of the amateur professional.

Blogs are as much about reading as they are about writing and I would say it's more important at the beginning to read your industry or customers' blogs first before necessarily writing. At the beginning, in reality, your time will probably limit you to doing one of these activities. My tuppence worth would suggest reading first, leaving comments second, getting a blog of your own as soon as possible after. By then your style shouldn't be as staid as this. Just remember, it's all about conversations.

Finding those first few blogs to read can be hard but, once you've found them, use their blogrolls as a guide to what you should read next. A consultant who can recommend a few blogs in your sector is worth their weight in gold, saving you a lot of wasted hours of reading and false leads.

 

Learn to react: but who will (be allowed to) be proactive?

So, once you're reading lots of blogs and wanting to leave comments, do you feel you can do on behalf of your organisation? Most people would probably reply 'no'. This is not down to the potential evils of the tool - it's down the culture of the organisation, be it a multinational corporation or a primary school. Knowing when to write stuff on your own 'corporate' or work blog in relation to your organisation's culture is even more complex.

Every organisation needs all of its professionals, and not just a 'blog watcher', to keep track of what's going on in their sector. Use the tools available to keep watchlists - and then watch them. Create watchlists for the whole organisation which cover all bases so that your face is not covered with egg. On a more positive note, start tracking what your colleagues are up to - even if you don't think that person is relevant to you at first. You might not think that Billy will be doing anything that you could possibly be interested in, but he might just write about something one day that would offer the organisation it's biggest and best collaboration. This kind of passive-active collaboration costs nothing but a very little time each day, and shouldn't be directly linked to making money or raising attainment. Technorati is the best tool for creating these watchlists of most recent information, not the most 'important' information, which is what Google's job is.

This means that skills have to be taught at some point - and your people, whether colleagues or customers, have to be keen to learn them. Think about your strategy for doing this, find some guiding principles that will help everyone understand it and be ready to change it when it's not working.

Viral success cannot be planned

There is often a desire from CEOs and management teams to take advantage of the latest tool, gadget or gizmo. Even better if its adoption can be 'viral', picked up and used by everyone. Part of me thinks 'viral-ness' can be encouraged by providing easy-to-use tools and appropriate guidance for newbies. If you want to have a more clear-cut set of principles by which to work then get your whole staff to create the guidelines over a couple of weeks on a wiki, a webpage anyone can edit. That's what we did and it works really well.

Keep it simple and write your blog with care.

 

Don't patronise or miss your readers' point.

If you want an example of what I mean by patronising your customers/readers / stakeholders then take a look at the story behind Facebook's decision to make private info on its users public. "Stalking isn't cool" - quite. You've got to be prepared to reply to your readers' comments and criticisms, good or bad, constructive or not.

Don't just let them sit there waiting for your response, and don't stop and don't delay their comments on your work. If you've been slow off the mark in responding certainly don't attempt to chastise them and don't think of leaving anonymous comments in support of your organisation - it'll be so clear who's commenting. You can, of course, stand up for your beliefs, but make sure you've got some solid ground to stand on (that's why a policy might not be such a bad idea, just to make everyone think twice before posting).

Don't plagiarise

It seems obvious, perhaps, but increasingly educationalists and organisations of all shapes and sizes are interpreting Creative Commons as "free for all". Link back to the people who feed you your ideas or you might find you go hungry in the long term. It's also a great way of creating some publicity for your organisation if the photographer from Flickr or blogger links back to your project to show off their work to their friends. That's why Scoopt works so well.

 

Don't do a me-too

It's important to strike a balance between being keen and quick, and getting egg on your face for trying. Part of your organisation's brain should be desperate to make a failure quickly so that you can make your successes sooner but, at the same time, try to do this with some common sense and some knowledge of the medium you are in. "Embracing a medium does not mean just copying a format, it means understanding the rules of engagement", and, above all, not putting up barriers to the very people with whom you want to engage.

Taking that last example, from SecondLife, we can see the importance in getting your research done properly, and not just looking for the answer you want. While some will quite rightly say that many organisations are pouring money away into virtual world advertising and seminars, some deeper research would lead the way into new methods for approaching virtual world work.