John McCrory

Since last weekend’s Gov 2.0 Camp New England “unconference,” there’s been a bit of meta-discussion about the format. A couple of bloggers have dwelled on the shortcomings. I want to offer a contrasting view.

Brian Keaney weighed in early with a critique, saying he found the sessions rife with questions but thin on answers:

I think most of these panels were proposed by people who just wanted to sit around and discuss these topics. Few were led by anyone who could be called an expert.  As a result, I was left with scarcely any takeaways.   I have less than a half a page of notes from the entire day.  The most valuable things I heard all day were the 5 minute “lighting talks” given by those who were experts.

(Ari Herzog expressed similar sentiments.) Brian concluded that the day was worthwhile overall, but there was room for improvement. Many of us who were there would probably agree on that point. Nevertheless, while there are certainly others who feel “let down” as Brian and Ari do, it was my impression that most participants were thrilled with the day, feeling that distinct pleasure of coming out of the wilderness and finding one’s tribe.

I suppose whether one was satisfied with this first Gov 2.0 Camp or not depends on what you wanted to get out of it: were you looking primarily for answers or for compelling dialogue? Any good meeting should provide both, to be sure, but which will evolve your thinking more? That depends on the state of the field and the people in it, I think.

A traditional conference led by experts sharing what they have learned can be great. Ideally, the expert knows more about the topic at hand than all the others in the room put together. The conference is a vector enabling leaders to pitch their  ideas so an innovation may spread into greater practice. Perhaps this standard kind of conference works best in well-established professions in which advancing the profession is the primary goal.

The tools and practices of Gov 2.0, however, are still quite young. It is not a single profession but gathers people from diverse backgrounds. There are a few interesting success stories we can learn from, but for the most part it is an emerging field. There simply are not a lot of answers, yet.

There are, however, a lot of smart and curious people, including some leaders, and there are some good ideas that need more road-testing.

The unconference approach works well when more can be learned by pooling what the people in the room know than by listening to the single smartest person in the room. Because it creates group experiences through which an emerging community can grow and coalesce, it is a good fit. (Wisely, I think, the organizers of this Gov 2.0 Camp created a hybrid meeting with some lightning talks, rather than a strict unconference.) It was the right kind of meeting for where we are now.

I can understand the disappointment of Brian and a few others, but for me, the camp was a fantastic experience. I wanted to get a sense of the state of the field, learn about some interesting innovations, get a grasp on where people in this community are coming from, and get to know a range of people coming to community from very different perspectives. The day succeeded splendidly on all counts for me, and I am looking forward to see the Gov 2.0 New England community gel in the future.

Once upon a time I was a staunch opponent of social media policies. The last thing we need, I felt, is for the lawyers to get involved. But to truly scale up social media efforts in an organization, you need to get the practice out of the skunkworks. That takes the buy-in of a range of stakeholders, and it takes training and education of people throughout the organization.

The process of developing a social media policy can be a great way to begin that education. Now I don’t just promote social media policies, I help organizations to create them.

If you are ready to begin utilizing social networking media in your workplace, here, based on what I have learned so far, are 5 tips to guide you when you craft a social media policy:

1. Start your policy with a clear declaration of your organization’s overall approval of social media and social networking. Clear up any misconceptions and make sure supervisors know that employees are allowed to use social media within the guidelines set out in your policy. Particularly if you are reversing previous bans, or settling differences in policy across different parts of your organization, it is essential that your message be heard loud and clear. See how the Department of Defense led the issuance of its new policy recently with a clear statement of the value they saw in social media.
2. Balance the legal requirements with the opportunity to teach and model good social media practices. A social media policy has to address copyright, privacy, record retention and other legal issues, but it won’t work if it is just a big fat book of NO. Potential dangers of using social media are risks inherent to any communication. Show employees how to behave appropriately online and you will reduce the risks of disaster.
3. Cover broad, basic principles that apply to all social media engagement. Some of the most important good practices to follow, such as being transparent about your identity and not faking being someone you aren’t, are true across all social media networks. Help your employees learn to be good social citizens in general, and they’ll do a better job no matter which tool they are using.
4. Back up those basic principles with concrete guidelines and advice on using specific social media tools and services. Each social media network has distinct ideosyncracies, lingo, and culture. Guidelines for each particular social media network shorten the learning curve and translate your organization’s legal requirements for each social media tool. Mass.gov’s toolkits for blogging, Twitter (and soon, Youtube) are a great example.
5. Make your policy human-readable. You want your social media policy to have impact, to engender conversation, and to be something employees can learn from. A certain amount of legalese is probably unavoidable, but take care to explain the legalese in plain English. Provide concrete examples to show what is and isn’t allowed. Be transparent about why the rules are necessary and trust in your employees ability to understand. Look at Flickr’s fabulous Community Guidelines and see how they are written for real people.

I am sure there are other good tips; these are the ones I have found most useful. What are yours? I hope you’ll share in the comments.

Some neat things I discovered or was reminded of over the past few days:

Frontline SMS, a free, computer-to-cellphone text messaging application enabling one-to-one and one-to-many two-way communication.

Dave Winer’s “What is an Unconference” (2006) and “Rethinking the Conference” (2008).

SeeClickFix: deputizing citizens as inspectors of public services and public space.

Social Media Governance’s online database of social media policies.

Dish and Dine, a social network for people who love food

At yesterday’s Gov 2.0 Camp New England Unconference, the final session of the day I participated in was, “Getting to Yes,” led by Brad Blake and Jess Weiss. The obvious premise of the session was that social media enthusiasts usually face significant barriers to employing social media in their workplace. There were several good takeaways from the session, particularly the pointers to Mass.gov’s social media toolkits (which I have found very useful and adaptable). However, the discussion surfaced more challenges than solutions and it seemed to me that many in the room were frustrated by various institutional obstacles to using social media in their work.

The session took its title from a classic book on negotiation, second only to my favorite, Start with No.

It’s a familiar situation to a lot of us: say you want to start a blog for your department or agency so that you can engage with constituents more easily, and in a more timely manner than you can through your official web site. Or perhaps you want to use Twitter, Flickr, Facebook or some other social network. Unless you are the chief executive, you need to get permission, and in most cases, that permission is given by committee, with input from the IT department, the communications department, the legal department… IT fears security breaches; Communications fears losing control of the message (often, communications fears communicating); Legal fears everything, but particularly the exposure of private information. Supervisors fear lost productivity, that you’ll be wasting time on the company dime. Getting to yes can be quite a gauntlet.

Though much has changed in the past five years as awareness of social media has grown, fears about security and wasted time remain high, as does the fear of technology. To non-enthusiasts, social media is just a big Pandora’s box they’d rather not open.

It all boils down to the fear that if we engage through social media, something big, bad, and more than embarrassing is going to happen; the fear that an employee will do something stupid that will hurt the organization and torpedo its credibility; leading to the conclusion that using social media well will require a lot of training first, and that there just isn’t time for that right now.

To be sure, there is no shortage of social media fiascos, or employees who have been fired thanks to posts on Facebook or Twitter. But — and here is my message to the supervisors and directors at the top — the truth is, the chances of a social media disaster grow greater every day you and your organization wait to learn how to use social media. If you look at the history of social media blunders you will see that nearly all of them were self-inflicted wounds that resulted from inexperience at social media.

Let me just get one illusion out of everyone’s heads right now: There is going to be a crisis. Disaster is coming. You can’t avoid it. It’s like an earthquake — it is going to happen, you just can’t know when. So, are you going to be prepared? Are you going to start shoring up your plans now to respond and deploy social media effectively?

For those who’ve been wary of opening the social media Pandora’s box: consider that box is going to open one day no matter what you do, and the havoc unleashed will be greater the longer you keep the box closed. Here are a few things you can do to get started today:

• Assess your employees’ readiness: find out what their existing skill and experience level with social media is. You may discover some surprises, and you’ll learn what kind of social media training you really need.
• Deploy blogs, wikis or other social media tools internally, where it is comparatively safe, and train employees in using them; even if these don’t “take off” it will start moving your people along the learning curve.
• Develop a social media policy. Balance legal requirements with the opportunity you have to educate your employees how to do social media well.
• Create a social media engagement strategy. To get the most out of social media, like any initiative, takes planning. You’ll want a strategy that provides basic models for how social media engagement can be carried out in different situations.
• Set a near term deadline for deploying social media externally to make it real. Two to three months maximum.

With the right mindset and preparation, you can better handle the blunders and the fiascos which are sure to happen (they happen to everyone!) and deal with the earthquakes that are certain to upend your world one of these days.

I read a lot of news on the web, and I’ll tell you, it’s terribly annoying, because so many newspapers do the web badly. No wonder newspapers hate the internet; They fail miserably on it. Here’s an industry whose days are numbered, and what do they do on the medium that is killing them? Adopt the practices of the worst of the worst scammers, and then complain that no one wants to pay for their “respectable” product. Please!

Here are 10 reasons newspapers are failing on the web:

1. Pop under ads. We’ve all got pop-up blockers now, so you serve up pop-under ads that linger in the background. Ooh, tricked me! Classy.
2. Dancing ladies in silhouette, selling mortgages. You sully yourself by the poor quality of advertisers you keep. You’re like a Wal-Mart truck heading down the highway with naked lady mud flaps.
3. Multi-page stories and slideshows that require me to click for more — even though the concept of pages makes no sense on the internet. Why? Only to show me more ads. Bastards!
4. You actually believe the nasty comments on articles on your site are a guilty pleasure for readers. Truth? They make me digusted with my neighbors and wanting to take a shower.
5. 10,000 items I don’t care about on a web page are not a good experience.
6. You devote just 10% of the page to the story I want to read.
7. Splash “Welcome” pages featuring some kind of advertisement when I come visit you via a link from another site, Facebook, Twitter, or something. You are insane if you think such a page is welcome. For every one who watches the splash page, there must be a dozen of us who either click “skip” or leave.
8. Everything you have to offer is on your home page. Don’t act like a cheap whore. Show us some respect!
9. Classifieds. Ha ha. Cute.
10. You are my local paper. Yet, you blast me with news of the latest Hollywood celebrity who’s crashed a car and is going into rehab and you frontpage the crime in some village miles away in some hollow of the state where you have 10 home delivery subscriptions (but are hoping for 11!). Yet somehow you can’t be bothered to tell me why half the city whose name is in your nameplate had a blackout yesterday. What exactly do you think you are good for?

Why do you think newspapers are so terrible at the internet? Tell me, please!

The serious point here is that the format of your web presence provides a context by which you are judged. Every element of your site matters, not just your editorial.

The interesting discussion over at Chris Brogan’s about engagement on Twitter left me unsure where I stood regarding autofollowing. Then something happened that turned me firmly against it.

I don’t autofollow people back who follow me, but to each his own, I felt. The only thing I find disconcerting is when I get a direct message from someone I follow, but discover when I try to direct message them back that they don’t follow me and I can’t DM them. It’s a flaw in Twitter I think that I can’t look at my list of followers and see whether I follow them back or not.

Then, by coincidence, around noon today I happened to follow my 1,000 person on Twitter. Now, the people I follow are a carefully-curated group of real people and organizations whose tweets I actually want to see and who I would want to have a conversation with. I have built this group up gradually since joining Twitter in May 2008.

A funny thing happened next. Within minutes of following the 1,000 person — BOOM, I suddenly got all these new followers — 50 in a few hours — who are all like this guy: “Terrence Watson” a.k.a. @media2AtlantaGA. He has has just 7 tweets yet has managed to get 1,100 followers out of 1700 he is following. He has a web site that has the tagline Cutting edge Internet marketing and social media campaign development company in Atlanta, GA. Utilizing proprietary systems and software applications to acheive top ranking on Google in just a few days. Take a look at his cutting edge site (Screen shot below — I won’t link, but it’s on his Twitter profile) and you’ll see an empty Wordpress site with “Hello World!” and “This is sidebar 1″… you get the picture?

I know what’s going on: these poor folks have signed up for some scammy service like boostyourtwitterfollowers.com to help them sell make money fast schemes, multi-level marketing diet supplement programs, and phony SEO baloney. If you are new to the world of social media and internet marketing, please don’t fall for these scams. Following 1,000 is apparently some threshold that these services now recognize me as an easy mark to get their customers more followers. Perhaps folks who follow 1,000 or more people are more likely to autofollow back, and it’s easier to “hide” in a big list and not get pruned off.

I’ve been getting a trickle of phony Twitter followers for a long time, of course, and I simply add them to the Twitter list I made just for them called “Spammer or Scammer.” If they don’t disappear after a while, I will just report them for spam, which expunges them from my follower list. They remain on the Spammer or Scammer black list, tho.

Now, here’s why I’m against auto-following back: If there was no auto-follow back option, there’d be a lot less of this scammy behavior, and Twitter would be an even nicer place.

I still feel it’s your choice what to do since everyone’s situation is different. But if you decide to auto follow back everyone who follows you, be aware you are feeding the Scam-n-Spam beast. If you have a huge following and it is too much to manage, you can always use a validation service like TrueTwit.

In working with clients I’m often introducing them to the importance of engaging their customers or constituents through social media and other channels. We discuss examples of engagement, but when it comes to planning how they are going to engage, I find it helpful to focus our initial creative brainstorming with a clear definition.

What are we talking about when we say “engagement,” “engaging a community” and planning an “engagement campaign”?

Below is what I’ve come up with so far. What do you think? Is this right? Wrong? What am I missing or forgetting about? At the very least, I hope it is helpful to share what I mean when I use these terms.

Engagement
Prompting, listening, mirroring and acting in answer to what is heard

Example: You walk into a clothing store and here’s what happens:

1. Salesperson approaches, asks what you are looking for today (prompts).
2. You tell him you are looking for a red sweater (salesperson listens).
3. Salesperson repeats “A red sweater. Were you thinking of a cardigan or a pullover?” (mirrors, prompts)
4. You say “Pullover” (salesperson listens)
5. Sales person shows you to a display of pullover sweaters, saying “We have some nice red pullovers here,” picks out a red one for you to consider. (mirrors and acts to answer your specific desire)

Community Engagement
Engagement in a group setting in which roles of prompter, listener and mirrorer, and answering actor rotate among the members of the group. A facilitator prompts individuals in the group to take on one or another of these roles to advance the conversation and keep the roles moving. The facilitator also moves the overall discussion through the stages of engagement with appropriate prompts that signal to participants a new frame for the discussion.

Engagement Campaign
For each engagement campaign, we want to consider:

• When does the campaign begin and end?
• Who are the campaign’s participants?
• Which engagement channels will be used?
• What engagement collateral needs to be created?
• What is the “story arc” for the engagement and what are the change points that divide it into stages?
• Which objectives and goals of the company, organization or project does this campaign advance?

I was in my first real job, 20 stories up in a brown-paneled midtown office building. After two years of recession-forced freelancing, at last I was  employed. But, there was something else I needed.

First day, there had been a few hours of HR paperwork.The I-9 form. W-4. Medical/Dental plan. Retirement savings. Life Insurance: 20 thousand dollars to a beneficiary if I was killed on the job. I put down my Mom as the beneficiary.

I was taken to a room where my picture was taken and few minutes later sent on with a laminated ID card. I was taken to my boss’s office. He talked to me with his arms folded behind his head. He gave me my instructions, told me how I was taking on the job he used to do. He showed me my office: a desk, filing cabinet, computer, and a window looking out on a brown-paneled office building.

Then my boss took me on a tour of the floor to meet my new colleagues. I smiled, shook hands, tried to think of some mnemonic system to remember their names, failed.

I spent that afternoon and the next day learning the basics: how to work the copy machine, send a fax, set up the phone. But, I was still missing something. I went home at night and back to work in the morning on crowded subways, staring into the spaces between people, thinking about all this new experience.

The third day, it happened. I was standing in the doorway of my office, having a conversation with a couple of my new colleagues. A few others came down the hall, joined in. It was me, Stephen, Andrew, Mildred, Sean, and Marguerite. Next thing I knew I was entertaining them with some story, and they were laughing and nodding their heads.

I don’t know what story it was. Maybe the one about getting stuck in the blizzard on I-80 in remote Pennsylvania. Maybe the one about the foulmouthed barefoot woman at the hot dog stand. Doesn’t matter. What matters is that my friends were listening to me and responding, making me feel validated. That’s what I needed.

When you talk to clients, customers, members or employees: are you listening to their stories in a way they know you are listening? Are you validating their stories, and them? Few things are as powerful as simply listening, responding with enthusiasm, and validating.

In January it’s so nice… this week we happen to have a leftover chicken carcass on hand so a big batch of chicken stock is in order.

We’ll use the stock for a good winter warmup of Chicken Soup with Rice when the boys come in from playing in the snow tomorrow morning. We’re expecting 5 to 9 inches of the white stuff overnight and into Martin Luther King Jr. day.

To make the stock we began by grabbing some raw veggies we had on hand, then roasting them on a cookie sheet for about 10 minutes at 400 degrees. I happened to use

• 1 celery rib, split and chopped in thirds
• Half an orange bell pepper, cut in wide strips
• 1 medium onion, not peeled, cut in eighths
• a handful of green beans
• 1 carrot, split and chopped in thirds
• three cloves garlic, not peeled

Meanwhile, I took the leftover drippings from the roast chicken out of the fridge and discarded all but one tablespoon of the fat that coagulated on the top. I had about a cup and a half of drippings. I broke up the chicken carcass into manageable pieces, then browned them in the tablespoon of fat over medium high heat in our French Oven. I removed the pot from the heat, then added the drippings and the roasted veggies and added water to cover. For additional seasoning, I through in some salt, pepper, fresh sage, dried marjoram, and a handful of leaves from the celery. Unfortunately I didn’t have any parsley; I would have thrown about a cup and a half in.

Roasting and browning, along with the drippings should give the stock a heartier flavor. If I wanted a clear broth, I’d skip those steps and omit the drippings. For a super-clear broth, I’d use an uncooked chicken carcass.

I wanted make a big batch of stock (to freeze some in 1 cup portions later) so I filled the pot up with more water, about an inch and a half below the rim. I returned the pot to the heat, brought it just to the edge of a boil, then turned the heat down to low. Now, I am simmering it all afternoon, or about 5 to six hours. Every now and then I’ll check in on it, skim some fat off the top, and give the pot a stir or two.

Tonight I’ll use a colander and then a sieve to filter out all the veggies and chicken bits.

For tomorrow’s chicken soup with rice, we’ll chop up a few veggies, shred the leftover chicken, cook some rice, and that’ll be it. Our soup will include:

• chicken stock
• 1 carrot, chopped or sliced
• 1 celery rib, chopped
• 1 scallion, chopped fine
• a handful of minced fresh dill
• shredded pieces of chicken

After it’s cooked, we’ll add in an appropriate amount of rice and serve to two red-cheeked boys. I’m not sure how the brightness of the dill and scallions will play against the hearty broth, but we’ll see!

Late last year Karen and I were enjoying warm bowls of mushroom barley soup we’d made and it was so easy and so delicious we wondered why we didn’t make soup more often. We decided right there to try to make soup every weekend. So, starting today and for the rest of the year, we’re going to make a different soup each week. We hope to discover some great soup recipes, and to add a great staple to our kitchen repertoire. But mostly, we just want to enjoy the most basic comfort food: soup.

Soup is easy to make, a nice starter to a weekend meal that cascades into lunches during the week. So, every weekend this year, we’re going to try to make a pot of soup Each week we will try something new.

Won’t you join in? We’ll never be able to come up with 52 different soups to cook!

We’re starting out with a simple split pea soup. And I mean simple:

Prep time: 10 minutes
Cook time: 2 to 4 hours

• 1 onion, diced
• 2 carrots, diced
• 3 cloves garlic, minced
• 1 bag of dried split peas, rinsed
• 4 strips bacon, cooked and crumbled (optional)
• a couple dashes Allspice
• 2 cups water
• 2 cups chicken or vegetable stock

1. Combine all ingredients in soup pot
2. Bring to a vigorous boil
3. Reduce heat to low and simmer for 2 to 4 hours or until split peas are very soft or dissolved and the soup is not too thick.
4. Optional: puree some or all of the soup with a hand blender.
5. If the soup is too thick for your taste, dilute with water and/or stock, a half cup at a time, until it reaches your desired consistency.

If you want a vegetarian version but still want the smokiness of the bacon, you might try substituting a rind of salty cheese. I’ve used locatelli but have heard provolone works well: dice the rind, then fry in a scant mix of oil and soy sauce.

The verdict on our Split Pea with Bacon? I only used 2 strips of bacon, and it needed more. I also might add a little heat, perhaps a teaspoon of Colman’s mustard or some cayenne. But all in all it was a great warm comforting soup for a cold winter day.