Tag: YouTube

RAQ: Personal and Professional Identities – SMUG

Jackie Fox (@jfoxhdr), who blogs at Dispatch from Second Base, writes to ask:

I haven’t noticed this in SMUG and was hoping you might have some advice on how to mesh our professional and personal activities online. I’m beginning to suffer from a bit of an identity crisis. My professional profile is on LinkedIn and my personal profile is on Facebook (and professional on Twitter but only for monitoring purposes). That seems fairly clear-cut but what if I would like to join LinkedIn groups as a “civilian?” I don’t think the engineering company I work for is well served by seeing women’s healthcare issues on my LinkedIn profile. I guess I could list breast cancer affiliations including my blog as personal interests on my work profile but that seems just a tad weird. Or is it? Any advice from you or how others handle it would be more than welcome. Even sending you this message I had to stop and think for a second about which way to identify myself. I chose personal and I think that made sense. But yikes! If I were writing to Ann Landers I would sign this “Confused.” Thanks.

Jackie was quick to add “jfoxhdr is my Twitter name but just a reminder I have never tweeted. I’m on there primarily to monitor certain news items and follow people for work (ENR and a couple of environmental reporters) and for fun (you and Stephen Colbert.)”

Answer:

Dear “Confused”…er, I mean Jackie. First, I’m honored to be in your “for fun” group in Twitter, along with Stephen Colbert. How cool is that?

Second, don’t apologize for the way you use Twitter. It’s perfectly fine to be in “Listen Only” mode if that works for you. Much better than being a spam machine.

Now to your main question:

I really think it comes down to Integrity, which my handy Mac Dictionary app defines as:

1 the quality of being honest and having strong moral principles; moral uprightness : he is known to be a man of integrity.
2 the state of being whole and undivided : upholding territorial integrity and national sovereignty.

I personally don’t think it’s a problem for your business and professional colleagues to know that you’re concerned about breast cancer and active in advocacy related to it.

Doing this advocacy on work time wouldn’t be good. But knowing that you have this interest helps your clients, customers and colleagues know you better. And if all your LinkedIn posts were about non-work passions, that probably would indicate that you’re really not that interested in your engineering work.

If you have clients to whom you are “selling” it’s better for them to get to know you as a person, not just as a disembodied voice at the end of the phone line. That makes it less likely they would drop your company for a $5 an hour discount they might get from a competitor.

If you’re involved in a jihadist group, that would be a different story. Probably best to keep that off your LinkedIn profile, because while it might not bar you from boarding a U.S.-bound plane from Amsterdam, it likely would turn off potential business associates.

But for almost any other kind of personal interest, it just comes down to proportion. Don’t go overboard in advocating for a cause so that’s all your professional colleagues and customers see.

In summary, I would just say: “Don’t be a Sybil.” Be one integrated personality (and online persona).

Be yourself.

How about the rest of you? How would you advise Jackie?

Thesis 20: Social media tools enable authentic communication if you don’t purposefully complicate things

Among the most important benefits of social media tools are their ease of use. While updating a static Web site can be onerous, and video shooting, editing and distribution also can be complicated, the beauty of blogs, Flip cameras (or Kodaks) and YouTube is the nimble authenticity they bring to communication.

Of course, it’s possible to develop bureaucratic processes that will completely erase the advantages of social media. By trying to fix perceived shortcomings of the standard social media tools by upgrading production values, you can lose their freshness and authenticity.

Don’t do that. Don’t complicate things.

To encourage you in this, I’m sharing a couple of examples from our Mayo Clinic experience, in which the nimbleness of social media tools enabled us to capture compelling stories that formerly would have been impossible, or at least impractical.

Exhibit A: Sharing Patient Stories

On Friday, September 18, 200, I received a late-afternoon call from one of our Mayo Clinic cardiologists, Dr. Michael Ackerman, telling me about an infant patient from the San Francisco area he had been evaluating. The call came about 3 p.m., and within an hour I was interviewing Trevor’s mom in the courtyard near their hotel. Here’s what she had to say:

See the rest of Brenda’s story.

The Kings were leaving for home the next morning, and if I had been unable to shoot the interview, we would not have been able to tell this story. Getting one of our professional videographers to break away on short notice would have added one more complicating factor to the equation, making it unlikely to work. But with the Flip, we captured the authentic moment.

Here’s another story from Sharing Mayo Clinic about Dr. Ackerman that will warm your heart. It doesn’t necessarily fit the theme of this post, but you should check it out anyway.

Exhibit B: Late-Breaking News

On Tuesday, June 3, 2008 at 8:45 a.m. I got some good news and some bad news. The good news was that one of our Mayo Clinic researchers, Dr. Victor Montori, had a paper being published in a major medical journal, Journal of the American Medical Association, or JAMA.

The bad news: the paper was being published that day, and was coming “off embargo” in just over six hours. This left us no time to prepare a formal news release or shoot and edit broadcast-quality video. In the era before our Mayo Clinic News Blog, we would have had no good options for calling attention to this research.

But since we had the blog and the Flip camera, called Dr. Montori and interviewed him at 10:20. By 11:55 we had uploaded the video to YouTube and had also prepared this blog post about the diabetes research. We sent “pitches” by email and Facebook to some journalists starting at noon, and the next day the Wall Street Journal Health Blog carried the story and embedded this video from our YouTube channel:

These are just two case studies of the practical advantages of using social media tools as more efficient and effective means of doing your work, if you don’t purposefully complicate things.

How have you used the Flip or similar tools for authentic storytelling?

Thesis 14: Strategic Thinking about Social Media is no Substitute for Action

At a certain level, it’s important to think strategically about how your organization will use social media.

After all, if Thesis 4 is true, and if social media really are the defining communications trend of the third millennium, then using these powerful tools in a way that aligns with your overall strategy just makes good business sense.

Strategy is “a plan of action or policy designed to achieve a major or overall aim.” Aimless use of social media is no better than aimless advertising or product development research. It’s never a good idea to devote your organization’s time and resources to an activity that doesn’t relate in some way to an overall strategy. Aimless is pointless.

As B.L. Ochman has chronicled, there’s no shortage of self-proclaimed gurus, experts, specialists and strategists — nearly 16,000 at her last count — on Twitter. She also has a good post on “The only two questions you need to ask your prospective social media agency.” The problem I see with many of the self-proclaimed “gurus” is that they lack experience in tying social media to organizational strategy, and as B.L. says, “they’ll be learning on your dime.”

It’s much better for YOU to learn on your dime. Or your time.

After all, you know the strategic initiatives in your organization. The outside consultants and agencies don’t. Instead of paying them to learn about your organization, why not take the time to learn about social media so you can see how these tools can support your goals?

There is certainly a place for agencies to help in this area, especially if you have more money than time. They may be able to help you refine your plans, and bring perspective from other similar organizations to help you sell management on your plans.

But instead of insisting that you have a grand, fully developed strategy before embarking in social media (and which is accompanied by a hefty planning and consulting price tag that will make the ROI harder to prove,) I would suggest there are some goals compatible with social media strategies that apply for most organizations.

So here are a few goals you might want to pursue in the new year, using social media:

  1. Improving communication and collaboration among employees. Find a work unit in part of your organization that doesn’t deal with your most proprietary or confidential information, and encourage those employees to pilot use of Yammer, PBWiki or other networking and collaboration tools.
  2. Preventing brand-jacking. Claim your organization’s name on popular social networking sites to keep impostors from posing as you. That’s what we did with our Mayo Clinic Twitter account, Facebook page and Mayo Clinic YouTube channel.
  3. Improving customer service. Use social media tools like Twitter to listen to customers. Comcastcares is an example of this.
  4. Reaching niche “audiences” with in-depth content, and helping those “audiences” coalesce into communities. A YouTube channel, blogs and podcasts all may be good tools to use in reaching this goal, as you can provide information and resources to people who really want it, instead of using expensive advertising to interrupt those who don’t.
  5. Learning all you can about social media. By becoming conversant in social media and accustomed to its norms and mores, you’ll see many more specific applications for your work that will support your organization’s goals. I can recommend lots of books, but hands-on experience is essential to understanding. That’s why you might want to become a SMUGgle.

Your social media strategy doesn’t have to be perfect right away. In fact, I believe it should continually evolve as you learn more about the tools and see new applications.

The other point I want to emphasize from the definition of strategy is that it is a “plan of action….” Action without a goal is likely unproductive, but planning without action is even worse. By acting rashly without full consideration you might possibly do the right thing: you could just get lucky. But analysis paralysis means you will consume resources with no hope of accomplishing anything.

So those who seem to be the greatest defenders of strategy run the risk of undermining it.

To avoid this, identify one or two goals for your use of social media, either picking from the list above or something else you have in mind. Goal #5 can always be your personal entry point, if necessary.

Then execute against that plan, putting your strategy into action. General (and later President) Dwight Eisenhower famously said “plans are useless, but planning is indispensable.” I believe his wisdom is best applied in an almost continuous planning process that is accompanied by continuous execution and modification.

Remember, it’s a lot easier to steer a moving car than it is to get it started from a dead stop. If you find yourself going off course, you can always steer back or even tap on the brake. And by choosing some small but well-defined (and likely successful) social media projects, you can build momentum.

In a future post, I’ll tell how we used a series of mini-plans at Mayo Clinic to grow into full-scale incorporation of social media. We’ve had some minor course corrections along the way, but through the process we’ve learned a lot and built momentum that will help carry us forward.

Thesis 23: Everyone uses social media today

The growth of social networking sites like Facebook and Twitter has been phenomenal, particularly in 2009. Facebook now boasts 350 million active users, while Twitter grew by more than 1,500 percent during 2008 – and then the growth really started to take off in 2009.

Thesis 4 would be reasonable, I think, based on these factors alone. Social media are the defining communications trend of this millennium, which is not to say they are the only important means of communication or that they have supplanted TV, radio and newspaper. (OK, well maybe newspaper.) But they embody the communications characteristic that defines our time: that anyone

But Thesis 23 says social media already are bigger than most people realize, because they don’t just include networking sites for which you need an account to participate, such as Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter and MySpace.

YouTube is in essence a social networking site for videos, and it is the world’s second-biggest search engine after Google. So everyone who watches a YouTube video is in essence participating in social media. Those videos may even be embedded on  mainstream media Web sites. But the reason we even get a chance to see them is because there is a site like YouTube which is open for anyone to upload a video at no cost. This again is how social media are defining this era.

The other reason I say everyone uses social media comes from the nature of blogs. I heard Susannah Fox of the Pew Internet Project speak at a conference in October, and she said something that validated an opinion I’ve long held. She said she expected that her organization would soon retire one of its standard survey questions because it doesn’t provide reliable information. That question asks whether respondents read blogs or not, and the affirmative percentage has held steady at about 30 percent for the last few years.

But the reality is that a blog is just an easy-to-publish Web site that allows comments. So lots of people are reading blogs as they search and surf the Web, and in most cases there isn’t a flashing icon that alerts readers that they are on a blog. I believe that anyone who spends appreciable time on the Web spends at least some time on blogs. Especially given how search engines like Google favor blogs and YouTube videos, it’s almost inconceivable that someone could do 20 Google searches without ending up on at least one site with social media elements.

So between YouTube, the most popular video source on the Web, and blogs, which are the easiest way to publish a Web site, I believe the overwhelming majority of Web users participate in some way with social media, even if it’s only as a consumer of content.

In Thesis 23 as originally posted I said:

Almost all Web surfers use social media today. They just may not know it.

For the headline of this post, and in keeping with the provocative nature of social media, I just rounded up and said “Everyone.”

I don’t think it’s much of an exaggeration. Everyone uses social media today, whether they know it or not. Even more than that, social media dramatically affect the types and amounts of content available to be consumed.

As social media grow, the proportion of time people spend on sites with social capabilities also will increase, as will the proportion of participants moving from strictly consuming content to at least commenting or rating. And many users will move from the ranks of consumers to producers, especially as the user interfaces continue to get easier.

The fact that you are reading this post means you are a social media user, at least at this moment.

Welcome to the revolution.

Flip Video Camera vs. Kodak Video Camera

In many of my presentations this year I have used the video embedded immediately below to illustrate the quality available through consumer-grade video cameras, such as the Flip video camera. With my daughter Rachel’s permission, here’s an example of what you get from the Flip UltraHD, from my granddaughter Evelyn’s first birthday party in August:

Here is an example of a video I shot earlier in April with the standard definition version of the Flip video camera (before we got HD), with Philadelphia Phillies outfielder Jayson Werth, in a room behind the dugout at Citizens Bank Park in Philadelphia:

You will note that in this video there is background noise from the indoor pitching machine and batting cage, but I think in both cases the quality of the video is perfectly acceptable for use on the Web. And since the HD only costs $50 more, I think it’s well worth the extra cost. (Of course, I’m kind of partial to the subject of that HD video .)

Kodak has some similar consumer-grade video cameras, such as the Kodak Zi8 HD, and their key advantage is that they have an external microphone jack, which could improve the audio quality in some cases. If I had used that camera for the interview with Jayson Werth, for instance, the batting cage noise probably would have been less pronounced. The good news: you can put in a huge memory card to get really long recording times without having to download the files to your computer. The bad news: extra cost.

Here’s an example of a video we shot with the external microphone, and uploaded to YouTube:

One additional advantage of the Kodak is it can record in 1080p, but can also downshift to 720p or even standard definition. Here’s a brief sound bite to that effect from my colleague Joel Streed, shot and edited as 1080p.

The downside of 1080p is that for a video of any length, the processing power required is pretty immense, without much of a perceptible difference in image quality, at least for Web video.

If you don’t see yourself complicating the recording process by attaching a remote microphone to the interview subject, the Flip video camera is fine.

So, to sum up, here are the advantages I see for each of these cameras (as compared with each other):

Flip UltraHD Camcorder, 120 Minutes (Black)(Amazon Affiliate link – currently $149.99)

  1. Simplicity and cost. One-button operation and a ready-to-go camera. With the Kodak, by contrast, you really can’t shoot video unless you have purchased an SD memory card. And if you’re going to take advantage of the external microphone, that means you need to buy an external microphone. So the Flip video camera price is pretty much “all inclusive” while you will have some additional costs for the Kodak. Given the $70 difference on Amazon you see here currently between the Flip and the Kodak, you’ll likely spend at least $100 more for the Kodak.
  2. Solid, durable design (the Kodak’s USB connector seems a bit more flimsy)
  3. Can use AA batteries. (With the Kodak, you could possibly be stuck with a temporarily unusable camera if the built-in rechargeable batteries run down. On the Flip Ultra HD, if you’re in that situation you can swap out the rechargeable pack and replace it temporarily with AAs.)

Kodak Zi8 HD Pocket Video Camera (Amazon affiliate link – Currently $219.99)

  1. External microphone jack. If you’re shooting in a noisy environment, this gives you the possibility of using a remote microphone to get better sound. With the Flip you need to choose where you shoot if the sound quality is important.
  2. Flexibility in storage. The Flip UltraHD holds two hours of video in its 8 GB memory. With the Kodak you can use a bigger card and record longer, although a larger card adds to the camera’s cost.
  3. Multiple resolution choices. You can record 1080p, 720p or standard definition. The Flip UltraHD is just straight 720p.

The really good news to take away from this is that there are at least a couple of good options for capturing video using consumer grade cameras for use in your professional efforts in social media, whether it’s posting videos to YouTube, Facebook or some other sharing site. Both of these cameras are light, small and therefore easy to carry in a coat pocket or purse, so you’ll never need to worry about missing an opportunity to capture video.

The first rule of video is that you can’t edit what you don’t shoot, so these cameras both make it more likely you’ll get some good material for editing.