Know your stuff? Don’t be scared. Your insights matter more than you think

We all happily pass on our knowledge, insights and advice to friends, family and people we work with, yet many of us hesitate to share our thinking via social media platforms. Why?

Perhaps it's because we believe we’re not senior enough or that no one will be interested in what we think; that what we know isn’t very exciting or helpful. Or we may worry that we’ll come across as a show-off. After all, social media makes our thinking available for anyone to critique or cut down.

While laying our insights and opinions bare for anyone to see can be a scary thing, there is plenty of upside. 

Sharing what we know over time builds our impact and influence.

Meaningful participation in social media begins with identifying the core topics or 'pillars' of knowledge and insights that you want to share. I suggest you narrow it down to 3-4 themes. To help identify these, ask:

• What are you most interested in? Think about what excites you, both in and outside of work.

• What are you good at? Others will be keen to know how you built this expertise and will be interested in your tips and insights.

• What experiences and lessons can you share? The things you have learnt can be helpful to others starting out.

People who are successful in sharing their insights in social media consistently share knowledge, opinion and advice related to their core topics. Importantly, platforms like LinkedIn are increasingly prioritising these posts over the empty, humble brag.

No matter what your job role is, or how senior or junior you may be, what you know will be valued by others.

There is a ready audience interested in what you know. There are people out there who will benefit from your insights. Sit down and figure out what those areas of interest will be for you. What do you want to be known for?

If you’re absent from social media or your profile is unprofessional, how does this reflect on your value proposition and personal brand? If you’d like to build your credibility as a socially engaged leader, get in touch.

Educator, entertainer, help desk & cheerleader. The many hats of a community manager

“Good community managers need to be able to go back and forth between strategy and execution – they need to live in both worlds. They need to listen deeply to understand, ask powerful questions and not assume all issues are solved by the ESN (Enterprise Social Network). They connect dots that others might not even see.” - Keeley Sorokti

The comments from Keeley were prompted by a question I posted on Twitter several weeks ago, asking people to share their views on the top three tasks performed by Community Managers.

Doing the ‘business of the business’ in enterprise social doesn’t happen by accident. Pinaki Kathiari summed it up well in his response, when he described community management as “part customer service, help desk, educator, entertainer and cheerleader”. Community Managers wear many different hats.

The reality is if you want to have a thriving enterprise social network, you need to have professional community managers leading the effort to ensure communities are strategic, relevant and valuable to the organisation and the people engaging in them.

What follows is a rough role mandate for a community manager, based on input from people in the job. We start with the most important task and move down the ranks. Here goes.

1.    Influencer, connector and knowledge broker

“Know everyone and build strong relationships.” – Tom Boden. Great community managers are skilful connectors, facilitating relationships all over their organisations to improve how work gets done. They identify influencers and enlist their support as ambassadors and champions to demonstrate how community can work. Influential community managers also know how to ‘encourage’ people or groups to ensure opportunities to make valuable and productive connections are not lost.

2.    Strategic business enabler

“It requires … the ability to translate community needs into tangible business value for the company.” – Mary Thengvall. Smart community managers align use cases for enterprise social with the organisation’s goals and strategy – the real work of the business.  Enterprise social networks exist to help organisations and their people to progress. Savvy community managers understand what’s going on in the business and can articulate a clear strategy demonstrating how working in communities adds real, measurable business value.

3.    Community strategist and tactician

“Sourcing content to support the community goals.” – Daniel Leonard. Community managers own and lead their community strategy. This means setting the direction, as well as curating, creating and seeding content aligned to community goals. Strategic community managers moderate their communities and are always experimenting, trying to work out what type of content will engage, entertain and help their audience learn.

4.    Advocate of the people

“Protecting the vulnerable by advocating for their value and insight.” – Jeff Merrell. People are the focus for decisions about communities. Insightful community managers look at who’s in and who’s out of a conversation to ensure the right people are engaged. This could mean finding a subject matter expert to chime in to help sort out a problem or getting the right leader to answer questions about a big issue. They’re skilled at creating an environment in which "people are seen, heard and feel safe to share" (Rachel Happe).

5.    Role model and champion

“Be engaged, observe, lead, guide and be the most enthusiastic participant.” – Catherine Shinners. Community managers set the tone for participation. They know they can’t expect others to adopt a social way of working if they don’t do it themselves. This means being active and open in their enterprise social network and doing it regularly. They also identify and reward people demonstrating the right behaviours, picking great examples to share in reporting and communications so others may learn.

6.    Trainer and coach

“Helping the organisation cross the chasm from early adopters to majority of employees participating – the most critical point in the life of a community.”  - Dennis Pearce. People are at different stages in their journey to become socially engaged, from those who are happy to give it a go, to those who are anxious about working in a fundamentally different way. Community managers address this by providing training, coaching and support catering for different stages of social adoption – and the different learning preferences of people – in their organisation. 

7.    Trouble shooter and technician

Being able to identify, mitigate and manage risks and put out the occasional fire featured on the list of top tasks. Unsurprisingly (for me anyway), working with IT and vendors to ensure your enterprise social platform is fed and watered regularly received but a brief mention. This demonstrates the further we go into the digital age, the more we realise we’re dealing with people’s mindsets first and technology second.

Who’s right for the job?

A great community manager is patient, persistent and resilient. A good networker, strategist and tactician. Curious, open-minded, empathetic and a good listener. They are slow to judge and quick to help.

Clearly, community management is not for the faint-hearted. But it's a rewarding job leading organisations and people to take up an open, networked way of working.   

Six lessons about connection from a karaoke night out

Earlier this year, I went to a karaoke night in Chicago with my cousin, Angela. It was at little bar above a hamburger joint. There were props galore, a great sound system, a huge song library, a spotlight trained on the stage and a receptive audience waiting for the show to begin. 

Angela orchestrated the visit, including putting me on the list of people to sing. Without. Asking. Me. First.

After first wishing a lightning bolt would come and strike down Angela, I immediately thought to myself: I can’t do it. Too many people will be watching me. I’ll be judged. What if people boo me off the stage? In that moment, I believed I could in fact die of embarrassment in a karaoke bar.

Let’s park my karaoke predicament for just a second and focus on a different kind of performance.

Imagine I’m at work in my office job. A new enterprise social tool has just been launched to help lift collaboration, improve productivity and so on. My manager says to me: “Our enterprise social network is our new, visible place to get things done. Yes, thousands of pairs of eyes will be watching you, but get out of your email, jump in there and go collaborate!”

In both these situations, it’s little wonder people’s hearts start racing at the thought of others assessing their very visible performance.

There’s a lot more at stake when it comes to performing at work versus performing on the karaoke stage.

For starters, there’s the obvious performance anxiety. According to Gallup, 40% of adults dread speaking in front of an audience. Was it Jerry Seinfeld who said the average person at a funeral would rather be in the casket than give the eulogy?

For the vast majority of people though, there’s a lot more at stake when it comes to performing at work versus performing on the karaoke stage.

According to an exploratory study on employee silence, employees stay tight-lipped about problems and issues at work because they’re fearful of being viewed negatively and they’re concerned about the knock-on effects this will have on their relationships at work. And just as I thought I might die of embarrassment from singing on stage, the research showed employees are genuinely fearful of their career prospects suffering as a result of speaking up.

Yet, there were some forces at work that eventually made me feel comfortable about getting up on stage to sing. Here are six lessons from a karaoke night out to encourage people to fight their fears and try a new social way of working:

1.    Karaoke is valued in a karaoke bar. When you’re in a karaoke bar, you’re immersing yourself in a culture that values singing. The music, lights and enthusiastic audience all contribute to an environment in which you feel it’s safe to perform. Similarly, to encourage people to step out of their silos and connect, design an environment that demonstrates people’s voices matter. Things like open and honest leadership communication and rewarding great ideas show that people’s contribution is genuinely valued in your organisation.

2.    Leaders show you how to sing by doing it themselves. The first thing the lead for the karaoke evening did that night in the bar was to kick off proceedings by belting out a couple of numbers herself. If you want people in your organisation to connect and speak up, leaders had better not just ask others to do it; they must do it themselves. Great leaders show up, ask questions, applaud their people and take action on what they see and hear.

3.    Think about your audience and pick great songs. The key to a fun time in a karaoke bar is choosing great songs you’ll feel comfortable performing and you know the audience will probably enjoy too. In enterprise social, figure out what you want to be known for and how you can add value to others and post on those topics. When you engage in conversations about your areas of expertise or even a personal passion, you’ll feel confident posting and your audience will know you’re the real deal.

4.    Watch others sing for a while before taking the plunge. Watching lots of other people get up and perform can make you feel more comfortable about your own karaoke experience. If you want people to try enterprise social tools, then let new users build their confidence by watching and learning from others. From a communications perspective, highlighting success stories of people using social tools also work well as examples for others to follow.

5.    No one acts like a jerk at a karaoke night out. No one really cares if you can sing or not – karaoke is about having a good time with your friends. No one is there to boo and hiss you off the stage, but I’ll bet if anyone did, they’d probably be thrown out. Don’t act like a jerk in enterprise social - the network will simply do the work to put you back in your place. Be respectful.

6.    The risk is worth the reward. Do a half reasonable job of your karaoke experience and you will most likely be rewarded for your efforts with a big round of applause. So it goes in enterprise social. If you make an effort to step out and connect in a way that will add value, your audience will appreciate it and you’ll begin to build your reputation as an expert inside your organisation.

Having survived my karaoke experience – and dare I say having enjoyed it just a little bit - I may go back for another round at some stage in the future. Likewise, if the conditions are just right for a social way of working, then we should see our people go back for more in their enterprise social networks too.  

Make good technology choices. But put people first in the digital workplace

I was catching up with some Twitter buddies at Digital Workplace Experience 2018 in Chicago early last week when I was grabbed to go and record a video on my thoughts about the conference.

Besides the conference hosting a great group of digital workplace experts in one place, the thing I loved most was the overwhelming focus on people and change. Not technology.

Yet shiny new tools are difficult to resist and there are more of them every day. For example, the social business application market alone is expected to grow to be a $37 billion industry by next year, according to tech analyst firm 451 Research. Just like an all-you-can-eat dessert bar, tech vendors are tempting us with the alluring promise we’ll enjoy eating their sweet treats. Without thinking, we rush in for the sugar fix. Feels good in the short term, but how do we feel about our choice later?

Just like an all-you-can-eat dessert bar, tech vendors are tempting us with the alluring promise we’ll enjoy eating their sweet treats.

The irony of the march into the digital age is the further we go, the more we realise being ‘digital’ isn’t about teaching people how to use tools. Instead, the main game is helping people get into the right headspace to want to try new ways of working.

Why does this make sense? Because traditional adoption methods focused on technology won’t work to rally people around digital tools in a modern workplace. As digital workplace futurist Dion Hinchcliffe pointed out at #DWX18: “Adoption of new technology is not automatic, because participation in the digital workplace is optional.”

People choose whether they want to come along for the ride in the digital workplace. So, we need to focus on people and provide them with clear value in order to have them try something new. 

Catastrophe hit earlier this week when Slack, the messaging platform went down. The tweets about the outage were hilarious, but the undercurrent serious. Slack users had embedded the chat tool so deeply into the flow of their day that suddenly life was a disaster without it. Apparently.

There were loads of vendors at #DWX18 and I talked to many of them about their tools and how they were convincing customers of their business value.

Between the content of the conference and the insights from vendors, it’s clear we need to have better conversations about digital workplace tools that are centred on people and enabling real work.

We need to have better conversations about digital workplace tools that are centred on people and enabling real work.

The problem with starting the conversation from a ‘tool first’ perspective is we end up focusing on checklists of functional features, rather than working to a clear and compelling business purpose.

As Tony Byrne and Jarrod Gingras point out in The Right Way to Select Technology, “If you don’t have a solid business rationale for what you’re doing, you will never achieve business value”.

No one will use digital workplace tools if they don’t understand why they should or how the tools will add value. Worse still, an ill-prepared workforce will try new tools and then blame them when value isn’t delivered. Vendors may run a real risk of becoming the nearest throat to choke.

No one will use digital workplace tools if they don’t understand why they should or how the tools will add value.

Here’s a way for us to think about this:

• Start with people. Get in their heads to understand their personal fears or the excitement of trying a new way of working. Could they be champions for you, or are they resistors? How will you address their concerns or harness their enthusiasm?

• Identify a compelling purpose. Help different audience groups appreciate how a new tool will enable their specific type of work. Address the What’s In It For Me to make it meaningful. Create a link to real goals and work to be done.

• Explain how people can get into different ways of working. Focus on behaviour. With enterprise social, for example, explain what it means to listen and contribute value. Simply asking people to do those things doesn’t mean they’ll know how.

• Tools next. A balance of functional training and building digital capability is essential. Build confidence by helping users make the most of new tools. Jump straight to this step and skip over people’s concerns and a clear purpose at your peril.

• Better business outcomes. When people are clear about the purpose of a new tool and feel confident in using it to get real work done, you’ll achieve meaningful adoption.

Of course, rallying people around new technology may happen in an organisation where leadership may not be engaged or where a culture is not ready to take the plunge. We should take more interest in organisational preparedness to welcome change, so we don’t waste time spinning our wheels and ensure the success of new digital technology deployments.

Making good technology choices is important, but is only part of the success equation. For new digital technology to stick, put people at the centre of the action. Solve a problem for them and then you really are giving them something they’ll value.