The other day I was invited to take part in a brainstorming session as the "social media expert" (notice the quotes). I was introduced by my friend as a past colleague who had just finished a 6 year, around the world, sailing adventure and no one laughed.. but I'm sure more than one team member was wondering how the two were related. If you take a newbie with a full inbox, an already overloaded schedule and stick them in front of the social media firehose I guarantee you will create a skeptic. I used social media throughout my trip to make life easier and free up valuable time and resources, not just because somebody told me I should.
A little background.. I'm an electrical engineer who switched to software after I realized the incredible leverage I could gain by developing it. I could create a library of components for CAE tools, typing them in by hand, or I could write an awk script with some csh pipes to accomplish the same result adding re-usability, creating flexibility, and increasing efficiency. I was hooked and I never turned back. My experience ranges from customer support to developer to VP of engineering services all within start-up or advanced development organizations where customer interaction is critical. As part of my reintegration I've spent a lot of time evaluating the tools and data flows used with social media, then it hit me.. it's really NOT new to me!
Limited Time for CommunicationIf an organization is running efficiently then no one really has any "extra time". Unless you've experienced the benefits of social media when someone talks about using it (blah blah blah) they might as well be talking about some black magic voodoo. "Interact more.. yeah, me and that clone you are developing to help me right?" You can't be passionate and genuine about something unless you truly understand the value and believe in it.
Sailing to the middle of nowhere is about as isolated as you can get. You must rely on yourself, your research/planning, and the community to fulfill every need. My wife and I used a daily one minute email-only burst to "communicate" and considered ourselves lucky if we found Internet access once a month. During those rare moments (or the cyclone season) I would research like a bloodhound and had a hard time finding results that were relevant to me. If you perform a Google search on "Travel Sudan" the results you get are basically.. "What are you nuts?". We needed to find information specific to our needs and situation as sailors: harbor entrances, anchorage location/safety, cultural protocols, provisioning resources (with no grocery stores) and other things to do. Basically all the things not at the top of a google search or covered in a traditional Lonely Planet Guide for tourists (we've even been to places that don't even have a guide yet).
Sailors are prolific bloggers
Come on, you're sitting in Bora Bora on your boat.. wouldn't you want to share that with the world? I realized the most valuable search results usually appeared in blogs/sites from fellow cruisers who had "been there done that". During the research phase I would download multiple sites from people a season or two ahead of us and over time I could tune their likes and dislikes to ours. In effect I was identifying my trusted resources and using them to help me find higher quality information more efficiently than I could on my own.
Sense of Community
I can't begin to describe the community that develops between cruisers in remote foreign ports. When someone needs help the rest of the cruisers jump in to help, freely giving both time and resources without expecting anything in return. Subject matter experts naturally surface based on individual backgrounds or expertise (I was the computer backup, mapping and blogging guru and hardware store/spare parts man). We constantly bounced ideas off each other and took the time to share what we learned for the benefit of the community.
Ease and Flexibility of Social Media
The main reason we started blogging was so that we could keep our friends and family updated more frequently than on our website. We could send off an email, include a photo and it would get posted automatically (which is 1000 times easier than maintaining our website). Those posts could be easily shared among the people who were interested. If we met someone down the road they could easily "catch-up" on our travels without us having to forward old emails or newsletters. Blogs also prevented email responses and spam which could delay or interrupt our critical daily weather updates (Yes we were actually using social media to be anti-social). I discovered utilities like Google Reader which allowed me to quickly catch up on my favorite sites and topics of interest when I actually did find time and internet access. It became my dashboard to the web and I finally felt like I was gaining control over the chaos.
As time went on we started adding more information to our blogs, sharing maps, gps tracks and developing chartlets for areas that had none. Using RSS feeds as input, I developed an automatic trip navigation map that aggregated all of our scattered web content into a single persistent map so our followers could focus on areas of interest or find out exactly where we were. It was automatic, when we posted a blog the map would be updated too. Since then I've discovered solutions that auto-post photos, videos and documents (and more) to facebook, linkedIn, twitter (and more) all from a single email.
The Value of Social Media
We started meeting fellow cruisers who "knew us" through our blogs, cruising tips site and Google Earth files. People were discovering our information and we were becoming one of their trusted resources. Notice that I didn't mention anything about best practices for business or any other marketing buzz words. We used social media because it made us more efficient and flexible as publishers. As readers/researchers we leveraged trusted resources to help find and filter content allowing us to harness the power of the internet while using (ridiculously) limited resources. We didn't do it because we were told to, we needed to be effective and efficient .. and it worked !
Online Social Networks
Do you remember your first experience? Mine was through facebook and my friends were sharing the minutiae of their day (remember I was used to limited contact). Although It was nice to be able to checkup on my friends when I did find the time, my first thought was .. "this is a complete waste of my time". It was way too much noise for me and didn't cover topics that were of professional importance. I needed to find the discussions relevant to my needs.
Welcome to the Information Age Overload Age. Try searching for social media in Google, you'll get 209 Million results. Where do you start? I found friendfeed and initially used it to aggregate my content for broadcast *gasps*. After a while I realized other users were sharing valuable resources/links and snippets which usually led to further discussions and feedback. I could interact, share thoughts and ask questions. Over time I developed a network of trusted resources that I could search, filter and tweak (Friendfeed is incredible for this) until I consistently found valuable content that was relevant to me without the noise. In some cases the discussions were more enlightening than the original source material. Friendfeed changed the way I interacted with web and showed me the power of social networks.
Getting Started
If social media can be beneficial to sailors (and engineers) almost anyone can find value. The key is to start with the basics, learn the tools and understand the value. How can you become a trusted resource if you haven't relied on one? How do you know what is valuable (in the context of social media) if you haven't had to differentiate? How can you make things easier to find/share if you haven't done it yourself? I guarantee if you throw a team that is new to social media at twitter or facebook they'll be overwhelmed by the noise, or they'll just add to the noise by literally answering .. "What are you doing?" or "What's on your mind?" and describe their lunch plans. Show them the value, make it relevant and then get them involved on the development side.
A Noise Free Introduction
To me the power of social media is exemplified by the use of trusted resources to surface valuable content. Do you have questions about how to optimize social media for your specific product and customers? Use social media to investigate, discuss and review your (social media) options. Note: product could be generalized to anything you are trying to discuss and share (a company, solution, group, widget etc).
Create a private group blog (I recommend posterous and it's bookmarklet). Sign up with Google Reader and subscribe to a trusted resource's shared items feed. Start by reviewing the content and notes they share, highlight text that is relevant or raises questions, add your own summary, thoughts and/or questions and post it to the blog for team review and comments. By then it has already been refined and filtered twice, saving team resources on both the discovery and review side, leaving more time to focus on the optimal solution. You can even summarize your team's initial strategy on your own (private group) blog including the top open questions within the post.
Next expand the group to include all customer facing people related to your product, include a short introductory post with a blog summary, goals and questions. Use the interaction, feedback and comments to refine your strategy and messaging. Keep track of what works and what doesn't and use the experience to detemine how you can deliver the most useful content to your customers.
Develop Your Resources
Review other posts from the authors you like, subscribe to their blogs and start to build your own set of trusted resources. Focus on the underlying fundamentals, not the tool specific features. Next, add some automatic monitoring resources (Google Alerts and Twitter Search) to help find articles and eavesdrop on discussions about your products that are occurring around the web. The key to any good conversation is to listen and understand your audience before you engage.
A quick note on tool selection
I've developed this initial methodology to cover the basics without introducing too many tools or adding too much noise. I used Google Reader because it is a great dashboard for web content (monitoring, consuming and sharing) and posterous for its ease of use for publishing (including curation) and distribution. I would have included friendfeed as the best utility for conversations but that would add another tool. I'll go into more tool, process and monitoring details/options in subsequent posts but I think it's critical to realize the benefits first, and you can't get that from a presentation or sales pitch!
Any experts out there? How do you introduce the power of social media tools without overwhelming the user? How do you get them to see the benefits without subjecting them to the noise?
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