Hyatt says in the video that “Twitter may be greatest leadership tool ever invented” in part because it’s “a marvelous way to leverage your influence as a leader.”
(The title of the video makes one think it’s all about ‘how to get started’ but the most important pieces are related to why.)
Knowledge workers get paid extra when they show insight or daring or do what others can’t. But packaging the knowledge is expensive, time consuming and not particularly enjoyable for most people. As you get better at what you do, it seems as though you spend more and more time on the packaging and less on the doing.
… The exception?
The intense conversations you can have with your customers and prospects, especially via a blog. Once you get the system and the structure set up, five minutes of effort can give you four minutes of high-leverage idea time in front of the people you’re trying to influence.
The book adds this to that last sentence: “This is pure, unadulterated leverage. The stuff you actually get paid for, with no overhead.”
Godin’s insight — “among highly-compensated workers, the percentage of the [knowledge] work you get paid to do goes down as you get paid more” and that “packaging the knowledge is expensive, time consuming and not particularly enjoyable” — was stunning to me and still is.
In the Why keep a blog? section of my 2005 Leadership Blogging Guide (currently under revision as a White Paper), my #1 reason to blog is to “Leverage your leadership interactions that otherwise disappear.”
In the course of any leader’s week, there are literally hundreds of interactions with colleagues, constituents, staff, media and other members of community. Whether these interactions are face-to-face, phone, electronic or paper-based, they comprise the bulk of how leaders exhibit their day-to-day influence. A phone call from a constituent, a conversation with a staff member at lunch, an email exchange with a colleague, an off-topic discussion at a team meeting – all likely evaporate into thin air, for all intents and purposes, as soon as they’re concluded. Even most paper documents such as memos and reports are quickly relegated to the trash, the shredder, or the filing cabinet, never to be seen again.
With a blog, leaders can select from among this never-ending parade of interactions the ones that they deem strategically significant, and give them a longer “shelf-life.” With a posting to their blog, the story of the interaction gains immediate wider audience while making it significantly easier for that audience to pass the story around to others who they think should know about it.
Prospective civic leader bloggers frequently ask, "How much time is blogging going to require?" It’s a fair question. Blogging feels like just another task when you first start out, and it does require some time commitment to work it into your week.
But once you experience feedback from your blogging, that not only are others reading your blog but that it’s starting to have influence, your attitude towards the task of blogging changes because it becomes strategic.
"I’m going to blog this because I know that she’ll read it and pass it on to…"
"When this group of people sees what I’ve blogged about this, then they’re more likely to…"
You start to realize that your blog leverages your leadership strategies in time-effective ways.
Among other reasons why a leader should blog/tweet is that the tools allow you to:
Use a voice of authenticity to have a one-to-one conversation with an audience
Extend your presence with a selective window into your day
Provide another way for people to interact with you
Convey your message directly to your audience instead depending on media institutions
@Ross Currier, my Locally Grown co-host, tweeted on Monday, “As citizens increasingly challenge politics as usual, is it no longer left vs. right, nor faith vs. reason, but individual vs. institution?”
The report’s emphasis on the importance of public officials building relationships with citizens, using social media in part, is encouraging and is the best writing I’ve seen thus far on the topic.
In my hometown of Northfield, this is more than a little timely because:
Impending budget cuts mean that local government will need to change the way it works, largely moving away from a model of delivering services to and for people, to a model of delivering services with people. Public servants will be required to build new relationships with citizens, relationships to help support civil society in responding to inevitable challenges.
As a consequence, local and central government needs to find better ways to forge new partnerships, involving citizens and the state working together to generate new ideas, tap into latent community capacity and make better use of local assets.
These challenges come at a time when social media has become part of everyday life for millions of people. For those in central and local government, social media will undoubtedly become part of everyday business, a channel for improved dialogue, wider networks and a new kind of mutualism that will be central to delivering effective public services. However, at this point social media is largely uncharted territory for many councils and public agencies.
…
Listen to social media users and conversations about local issues
Participate in conversations, building dialogue with citizens through social media, but also by energizing them around local issues, providing spaces for residents to support each other, and ultimately empowering them through decision making. The impact of participation should also be measured.
Transform service redesign, replacing or complimenting existing ways of working and adopting new models of working
This reinforces the Citizens League’s finding on the importance of the quality of the dialogue between pubic officials and citizens that I blogged about last August:
One hypothesis about citizen involvement processes is that citizens view processes as “authentic” if the processes results in policies that citizens favor. This turned out not to be true. The most critical element citizens used to evaluate the authenticity of their involvement in MAP 150 projects was the quality of the dialogue with public officials. The quality of the dialogue was more important than the eventual result.
The disincentives for public officials to meaningfully engage with citizens are strong (see related blog posts here, here, and here) but the financial pain that everyone is about to experience as pubic services are cut back just may be enough to overcome them.
For those who want to go deeper, I recommend two other recent Young Foundation papers:
I’m mainly interested to see how detailed she gets on the actual use of social media tools by individual leaders vs. the overall use of social media by an organization.
The title of the book seems to infer the former but I’m guessing that most of the content will focus on the latter. I’m following her on Twitter and keeping track of her blog.
Mindcasting (WordSpy definition): “Posting a series of messages that reflect one’s current thoughts, ideas, passions, observations, readings, and other intellectual interests.”
But I always unfollow anyone whose mix of tweets feels like a balance of lifecasting and mindcasting (unless they’re a family member or close friend) because then they’re expecting me to relate to their whole life… and I just don’t have the personal bandwidth for that.
In the two years I’ve been using Twitter, I’ve primarily seen it as a micro-blogging service, another platform for publishing with some unique advantages that make it an important complementary tool to a blog.
But in past few months, I’ve discovered how valuable it also is for tuning into the voices of the people I’m most interested in.
David Carr wrote a Jan. 1, 2010 NY Times column titled Why Twitter Will Endure in which he describes this unique advantage of Twitter.
I’ve reread his column several times as I’ve come to experience what he’s described.
Several weeks ago I chatted by phone with Shields Bialasik who, among other ventures, runs a site called Hyperlocal101 which focuses on “hyperlocal marketing and monetization.”
This sandwich board in the front of one of my regular Northfield coffeeshops, the Goodbye Blue Monday, caught my eye, not only because it’s clever (“Look for us on Facebook & Twitter – but you won’t find us”) but because I’ve been trying to get smarter about how Twitter and Facebook can complement a blog, both for me, my clients, and here in Northfield.
Of course, no one approach fits all. Social media tools should be deployed in specific ways in order to achieve a specific outcome. But that generalization aside, I’m trying to determine what the issues are to consider for those who are wondering how Twitter and Facebook can be complementary to their blogs.
I started thinking about this in earnest a week ago when I read blog developer and WordPress consultant Kim Woodbridge’s post from June 2009 titled Twitter and Facebook Integration: Stop Making Every Tweet Your Facebook Status. Kim argues that “posting automatically takes some of the social out of social media” but concedes that time is a big consideration for some people. The commenters on that blog post seem split on the issue.
I’m always coaching leaders on the importance of using an ‘authentic voice’ with their blogs. In the past, however, I’ve rarely used an authentic voice on my own Twitter account, and likewise for the group Twitter account for our community blog, Locally Grown. It’s mostly been a manual Tweeting of blog post headlines. And on our Locally Grown Facebook fan page, the blog post headlines with excerpts are posted automatically to both the Wall and a special RSS tab.
So today I checked out some of the other web-savvy people who I follow to see how they’re using these tools.
Brian Clark has a blog, a Twitter feed, and a several other websites (eg, Teaching Sells) but no Facebook fan page. He doesn’t publicize his personal Facebook account.
All these people, with the exception of Seth Godin, are very engaged with their Twitter followers, creating somewhat of an online-community feel to the feeds. They’re master curators, as they nearly always add value (and in a personal way) to whatever they decide to retweet. They use Twitter as an extension of their brands which they’ve already built elsewhere (blogs, books, speaking gigs, etc.). To me, this is somewhat similar to using content platforms like WordPress, Blogger, or Typepad to build a space for your online ‘presence.’ Twitter, however, is in a class by itself because its viral value rises as more people use it.
Facebook is less a content platform like WordPress and more a social platform, where conversations and interactions occur in a complex viral stew. But it’s not your ‘property’ like your blog or your Twitter feed. (I can’t imagine a scenario in which I’d advise someone to first start with a Facebook fan page before creating a blogsite or a Twitter feed.)
But because Facebook is so big, creating a presence there (beyond your personal account) has to be considered as 1) a way to drive traffic to your own properties (your blog, your Twitter feed); and 2) as a place to engage your audience, even if you’re creating content elsewhere.
So for me, my inclination is to:
Continue my practice of not doing any automated posting of blog headlines to Twitter
I’m hoping that the smarter that I get in my own use of Twitter and Facebook, the more helpful I’ll be to my clients and to the community of Northfield.
Nate Garvis, Vice President of Government Affairs for Target Corporation (he has a Twitter feed but doesn’t appear to have his own web page), gave a great speech at last week’s National Civic Summit last week titled, “Weaving Civic Fabric Out of Our Tangled Mess.” The pre-speech abstract:
Polarization has become a powerful force with social and civic consequences and has potential to strengthen based on the vast leap in communications technologies that have allowed us to become more insular. Nate will offer his keen perspective on the forces shaping society today and suggest ways to weave ourselves back together by promoting civil, civic conversations that better connect citizens in our communities for the common good.
Here’s the audio of Nate’s speech.
Click play to listen. 33 minutes.
I chatted briefly with Nate after his presentation and told him that I moderate the online discussions on Locally Grown, a civic issues blog in my hometown of Northfield, where we get 500-1000 comments a month. Our discussion guidelines have two unusual rules that have helped to ensure civility over the years.
The National Civic Summit is being held in downtown Minneapolis next week, July 15-17. The two-day conference is free and open to the public, though there is a charge for the pre-conference party and National Tweetup at the Mill City Museum on Wed. night. I’ll be attending all three days. The key questions for the conference:
“How can we increase civic imagination and capacity to solve today’s challenges in ways that serve the public interest?”
“How do we use technology to move from isolation and overload to effective collaboration and solutions?”
The folks at the Citizens League, one of the event’s co-sponsors, will be unveiling CitiZing!, their new online civic collaboration utility, at the Summit.
“They all get the idea that if we’re transparent about what we’re bad at as well as what we’re good at, we’ll get better.” That’s a quote by Paul Levy, President and CEO of Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center in Boston, speaking about his staff. Levy maintains a leadership blog called Running a hospital where he regularly shares “thoughts about hospitals, medicine, and health care issues.” You can also follow Levy on Twitter.
I’ve been thinking about Northfield (my hometown) area public leadership, transparency, and social media tools this week for four reasons.
Northfield City Adminstrator Joel Walinski has invited me to speak about civic engagement technologies for 10 minutes to the Northfield City Council next Monday at their work session. See my previous blog posts on Locally Grown about civic engagement here, here, and here.
Tonight I’m going to the Northfield School District’s Key Communicator Network meeting (I blogged about this on Locally Grown here). The District has received some criticism lately for its handling of the proposed calendar changes and the SNL cancellation.
Lots can be learned by watching how Levy uses his blog and Twitter as a public leader. For example:
Last summer, Levy blogged about how a surgical procedure was performed on the wrong body part. Notice 1) his detailed reflection in the post after he republished the email that was sent out to all employees and the local media about the incident; and 2) the positive reaction to the handling of the incident among many of the 54 comments attached to the blog post.
There’s a continuing stream of both good and bad news stories like these at all our Northfield area institutions that serve the public in some capacity: the city, the townships, the county, the schools, the colleges, the hospital. And yet we rarely hear about them. The ‘bad news’ stories too often never see the light of day. And the ‘good news’ stories are too often spun in such a way that they’re either not believable or they’re ignored. Not always, just too often IMHO.
The increasing pervasiveness of social media tools means, in part, that local leaders have less ability to keep a lid on issues of public concern. (Employee ‘leaks’ travel far and fast. Citizens with blogs pry more effectively.) So ratcheting up the transparency (along with judicious amounts of authenticity and engagement) is a smart strategy. The end result, as Levy says, is the institutions get better at what they do. And that’s what we, the public, want to see. And when we do, we’ll applaud it, thereby encouraging the virtuous cycle to continue and spread.
Paul Mulshine, opinion columnist for the Newark Star-Ledger, misses the point when he argues that citizens aren’t likely to voluntarily ‘cover,’ for example, city council meetings for their blogs in the same way that a reporter does for a newspaper.
Yes, it’s valuable to have local reporters sitting through public meetings and then reporting on them.
But it’s more valuable for their stories to be published in an eco-system of civic engagement where the media, public officials and citizens are all involved in the effort to inform so that better public outcomes can occur.
Imagine a year from now that a version of the above chart (from last summer’s JTM New Pamphleteers conference) is happening here in Northfield. For example:
City Hall puts up the digital video of a council meeting, complete with ‘annotated markers’ that allows citizens to view just the segments of the meeting they’re interested in.
Two citizens post to their blogs about a Council agenda item that they viewed online.
Locally Grown links to those blog posts and starts an online discussion about the issue.
Two councilors and one City Hall staffer post to their own blogs about the issue and the pingbacks to Locally Grown add to the discussion. One of the councilors decides to open up comments on her blog and so now, there are two places for citizens to engage in online conversation about it.
The RepJ reporter does an in-depth story about the issue, interviewing others, linking to the blog posts and discussions, etc. Councilor bloggers and citizen bloggers link to that story, and further discussion ensues.
When the City Administrator and staff prepare the Council packet (digital only; printed packets ceased in Feb. 2009) for the next City Council meeting, all of the elements of the issue’s ‘eco-system’ are summarized and linked for the Councilors.
Citizens and reporters have online access to the Councilor’s agenda packets. Further discussion about the City Administrator’s summary occurs online prior to the next Council meeting
Some citizens show up at the Council meeting open mic to voice their opinions about the issue. Their comments are streamed live online as well as included in the next online video of the Council meeting.
Repeat as necessary
This eco-system of civic engagement can’t easily exist in a town whose citizens don’t blog or discuss issues online, whose media reporters don’t link, whose public access cable TV station only broadcasts analog video at select times, and whose public officials aren’t regularly making an effort to be more transparent and engaged with citizens.
In Northfield, I think we’re getting closer to a civic engagement model that really works.
On the horizon: a new crop of elected officials who are open to blogging and participating in online discussions
On the horizon: streamed, archived, and annotated digital video of City Council meetings
On the horizon: a KYMN radio station that offers more opportunities for citizen-produced shows and which selectively amplifies those participating in the local blogosphere and online discussions
(Not yet on the horizon: a Northfield News newspaper that selectively but consistently links to, excerpts from, and gives credit to local civic bloggers and online discussion participants in both the print and online versions of its stories.)
I don’t quite have the Vision Thing perfected yet but I’m getting closer.
Minnesota Public Radio’s Public Insight Journalism (PIJ) project hosted a moderated discussion last Friday night in their UBS Forum. A group of about 20 citizens selected from their PIJ database were invited to discuss the topic: The Press and the Public: What’s the new relationship?
In the PIJ handout that was used to help focus the discussion, Locally Grown (the blog/podcast that I co-host) was cited as an example of Approach 4: the public is the press.
Here’s the text (partial transcription) but click the photos of the doc to see it all:
There is no starker example of the divide between the press and the public than these statistics from a recent survey by Zogby International: Most Americans – 70 percent – say journalism is important to the quality of life in their communities, but almost as many (67 percent) say traditional journalism is out of touch with what they want from their news.
Established news organizations can’t help but notice as newspaper circulation numbers fall and broadcast outlets see fewer people tuning in. The notion of the public as passive consumer of news is passe. What is emerging is a new model of journalism built on partnership.
The question on the table is: What should it look like? Here are four broad approaches that can help get a conversation started.
Approach 1: the public as critic
With this approach, the public engages in critiquing news reporting. This can include the creation of the Minnesota News Council – a group of journalists and citizens who rule on complaints with the press, or NewsTrust.net, a website where news stories are rated for quality by the public. It also means that established press organizations become more transparent. Methods include open comments on stories and providing the public with greater understanding of the news-gathering operation (through, for example, chats with reporters online to discuss stories).
Approach 2: the public as collaborator
This approach calls for the public to participate in becoming sources for stories. Initiatives like MPR’s Public Insight Journalism reach out to the audience en masse for knowledge, which can then shape coverage. Other initiatives ask the public to help with investigatory work. This method, called crowdsourcing, sometimes uses the public as a way to compile information on a subject or enlists them to comb through voluminous records (as the Fort Myers News-Press did on a sewer project).
Approach 3: the public as correspondent
With this approach, news organizations turn over segments of their space to the public and let them produce content with little interference. It could happen on news pages or on the air, but most times occurs online.
Approach 4: the public is the press
This approach avoids established news organizations entirely. The public starts a grassroots journalism effort to provide coverage of issues ignored by the press. It’s typically done online and while there are examples of national Web sites such as Talking Points Memo, most of them work on a local level. A small scale example is “Locally Grown” – a website dedicated to the news of the Northfield, Minnesota area. This effort is also part of a larger initiative called Representative Journalism that seeks to marry local producers with funding to support them.
L to R: the way it was; the new press-sphere; the me-sphere.
The new news process
Jarvis: “Stories and topics become molecules that attract atoms: reporters, editors, witnesses, archives, commenters, and so on, all adding different elements to a greater understanding. Who brings that together? It’s not always the reporter or editor anymore. It can just as easily be the reader(s) now.”
The NewsTools2008 map demonstrates that, in the new ecology, community is crucial. It even introduces an unfamiliar term—the “community weaver.” His/her roles include inviting audiences to participate, and filtering reader comments. Meanwhile, in this world, it’s the community’s role to offer editors (now reframed as “sense makers”) tips on coverage, conversation with reporters (now lumped in with “beat bloggers”), content, and, of course, dollars. Are those communities publics? Well, it depends on the issues being addressed.
At Locally Grown, we’re trying to make this vision — or at least a version of it — happen.
Twitter is a service for friends, family, and co–workers to communicate and stay connected through the exchange of quick, frequent answers to one simple question: What are you doing?
Like my colleague Michael Fraase, I tried Twitter a few times when it was first introduced but it didn’t ‘take hold’ for me.
But after reading Howard Rheingold’s reasons for why he’s hooked on Twitter, I’m ready to give it another try, only with a local, Northfield twist. I plan to focus my Twitter posts on Northfield-related ‘stuff’ – my whereabouts in my hometown, as well as miscellaneous other Northfield-related musings. I’d like to ‘follow’ (that’s a Twitter term) other Northfield-area citizens doing likewise with their Twitter accounts.
I’ve got my cell phone and Google Talk (IM) account hooked up to my Twitter account so that I can send and receive messages with both.
I’ve added the above Twitter badge to our Locally Grown (LoGroNo) sidebar, about halfway down the page, right after the comments section).
I’ll consider switching that badge to one like this (the above image is recent screenshot, not a live view) that tracks all the people I’m following who’ve likewise committed to focusing their Twitter posts on Northfield-related activities.
Knowledge workers get paid extra when they show insight or daring or do what others can’t. But packaging the knowledge is expensive, time consuming and not particularly enjoyable for most people. As you get better at what you do, it seems as though you spend more and more time on the packaging and less on the doing.
David Carr wrote a Jan. 1, 2010 NY Times column titled 
