I created this 3-minute movie today to help me think through issues of customer service.
I hope you enjoy it.
A customer service story
December 21, 2010
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Posted by paul baker
Fundamentals of your online presence
December 20, 2010
Book Review
Six pixels of separation: Everyone is connected: Connect your business to everyone.
By Mitch Joel.
Business Plus/Hachette Book Group, 2010. 288 p.
If you communicate on behalf of an organization, it’s understandable that you might assume that just about everybody is online now. But that’s evidently not the case. Mitch Joel aims Six Pixels squarely at those still considering establishing an online business presence.
By day, Joel runs TwistImage, a digital marketing agency that develops websites, customer relationship management initiatives, micro-sites, and online promotions for its clients. Joel sees his job as “helping people navigate the complex world of new marketing.”
This book lays out the decisions one should make before jumping into social media for business. Its title deliberately recalls the phrase “six degrees of separation” and takes it a step further. In today’s digital world, Joel says, “there are no degrees of separation between you and your customers. You are connected.”
“The big idea in a world of Six Pixels, Joel says, “ is to embrace community as the new currency.”
Six Pixels walks the reader through the online conversational channels where your business might become an important source of insight, information, and community in its niche. These channels include blogs, microblogs, podcasts, online social networks, sharing sites, user-generated content, wikis, and widgets.
Joel explains the importance of using search engine marketing, news readers, news alerts and watchlists, and Google Blog Search and Google Trends.
He points to Arianna Huffington as someone who has used online publishing not only to connect and get her voice out to the masses, but also to build a substantive media channel that generates significant revenues and competes successfully against major mainstream news organizations. Huffington has created her own personal brand. In fact, Joel says, the best way to build your personal brand is to give away your expertise. He cites as examples Robert Scoble, Steve Rubel, and Chris Brogan.
The book’s most up-to-date chapter addresses mobile technology and its growing potential as a marketplace. “Mobile is going to be much more disruptive to your business than the Internet,” Joel says. “If it was causing you a level of grief that people might go online and read a negative review about you, or see a search result that led to your competitor, imaging having consumers stand in your physical space and check online for prices and how close your nearest competitor is at the same time.”
Joel emphasizes the importance of innovation, of seeing market needs and jumping in with your new idea. “All new business models look weird and act weird,” he says, “because they are weird.” He points to several examples of innovation that changed rules of the game:
- While the big mobile carriers were worried about voice and churning consumers to other carriers they were blindsided by the companies offering data: RIM with the BlackBerry and Apple with the iPhone.
- While the music industry was charging high prices for plastic CDs and ignoring consumer interest in the single-song format, iTunes came out with songs for $0.99 by download and changed everything.
- The online publisher Lulu has sold thousands of books, but it doesn’t publish one book for 10 million people; it sells 10 million books to 10 million people.
Joel asks his readers to consider the following: Given that we’re all intrinsically connected, the bigger question is, How are you going to spread your story, connect, and add value to your life and the people whose lives you touch? How are you going to explore your network to grow your net worth? How are you going to add tremendous value to a brand, product, or service that can always be made cheaper and faster by someone else? How are you going to connect and stay connected?
Six Pixels is among the latest in a number of books about creating an online presence to grow your career and your business. Many of the ideas here can be found among titles including Chris Brogan’s Trust Agents (2009), Shel Israel’s Twitterville (2009), Paul Gillin’s Secrets of Social Media Marketing (2009), Dan Schwabel’s Me 2.0: Build a Powerful Brand to Achieve Career Success (2009), Jim Tobin’s Social Media Is A Cocktail Party (2008), Amy Shuen’s Web 2.0: A Strategy Guide (2008), Charlene Li’s Groundswell (2008), Martin Thomas’s Crowdsurfing (2008), John Cass’s Strategies and Tools for Corporate Blogging (2007), Shel Holtz’s Blogging for Business (2006), and Gerald Baron’s Now Is Too Late (2006). If you’ve read a few of the titles above, you won’t find a lot of news in Six Pixels. But if you are new to social media for business, then I can certainly recommend this book.
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Stewarding technology for communities
December 20, 2010
Book Review
Digital habitats: Stewarding technology for communities.
Etienne Wenger, Nancy White, John D. Smith.
CPsquare, 2009. 227 p.
We humans face profound environmental, economic, cultural, and political challenges. These new challenges require new kinds of communities to learn together. Our communities have to match the problems we are addressing in size and in complexity.
One way to address a specific challenge is to form a community of practice. A community of practice represents an intention to steward a domain of knowledge and to sustain learning about it. A high level of identification with the issue connects the members and their orientation to practice.
Lots of learning potential is generated by the interplay between technology and community. Technology for community use has become an important area of practice, and it needs to be developed and nurtured to yield its full potential. People who take on the task of making this happen are called technology stewards.
Technology stewards usually are members of an online community addressing a domain of knowledge. But technology stewardship is not merely about technology, technical support, or even user support. Technology stewards search for better ways to serve their communities. A digital habitat is part of the life of a community, so choosing technology, installing it, and supporting its use requires understanding and improvisation.
Ideally, the ultimate effect of careful stewarding is an increase in community and in learning capacity.
Co-author Etienne Wenger is author of several books on communities of practice, including Situated Learning. Nancy White, Full Circle Associates, supports collaboration in the nonprofit, NGO, and business sectors. John D. Smith is the community steward for CPsquare.
The 11 chapters of Digital Habitats describe the idea and the role of technology stewards. The first section defines the notion of technology stewardship intellectually, historically, and practically. Section 2 offers three models for thinking about technology in communities. These models are meant to help tech stewards “read” situations and propose sources of action. Part 3 focuses on the evolving practice of stewarding technology. Part 4 addresses the future of technology stewardship: the interplay between community and technology, and how tech stewards can best develop their practice.
Good tech stewards provide the level of technical expertise needed by their particular community. For example, when a community has grown so large that many people don’t know each other, the tech steward may set up a membership directory in response.
The authors clearly distinguish between technology stewardship and traditional IT support. They emphasize the importance of working within the community, and how an insider perspective creates the fit between community aspirations and technology.
A steward’s choice of technology should reflect the style of the community: formal versus informal, presentation versus discussion, whole group versus breakouts. The effective tech steward doesn’t just manage the configuration, but makes it a productive habitat. He or she maintains the community’s vision while maintaining some flexibility with uncertainties and changes.
Determining what communities will tolerate or demand—including their needs, interest, and motivations—makes stewarding interesting work. This kind of work cannot be reduced to one formula.
The book’s final two chapters consider trends in the search for new digital habitats at the intersection of community and technology.
This is an inspiring book and I recommend it. For my purposes, though, the book would have been stronger with a few detailed profiles or case studies of stewards and how they worked within their communities.
The authors have created two online spaces that do offer rich supplemental resources. One is a group blog at http://technologyforcommunities.com . The other is a tools wiki http://technologyforcommunities.com/tools .
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Learning with Web and Mobile Technologies
November 3, 2010
Book Review
Teaching with the Tools Kids Really Use: Learning with Web and Mobile Technologies.
By Susan Brooks-Young.
Corwin Press, 2010. 137 p.
How can teachers ensure that students acquire the skills they’ll need while making the learning environment engaging and – shall we say it – entertaining?
In Teaching with the Tools Kids Really Use, Susan Brooks-Young starts from the point that students’ learning environments will continually need to evolve to keep up with new technologies that take root in the workplace.
Brooks-Young encourages school administrators, teachers, and support staff to consider the educational uses of the mobile technologies and Web 2.0 tools that students already use away from school. She speaks from experience as a prekindergarten through Grade 8 teacher, site administrator, and technology specialist, and has written for a variety of education journals.
Each chapter in Teaching with the Tools provides basic information about an emerging technology or tool; offers strategies for classroom use; closes with a series of discussion points; and includes references to books, web sites, and online documents.
We hear a lot about 21st-Century skills. Brooks-Young defines these as the “content knowledge and applied skills that today’s students need to master to thrive in a continually evolving workplace and society.” As educators work to align curricula to such knowledge and skills, she says, it’s important to remember that these do not replace content area standards; “they support them by emphasizing the important of using modern tools and strategies to achieve academic goals.”
Brooks-Young discusses how mobile technologies including cell phones, netbooks, and mp3 players in classrooms can contribute to higher-order learning and how teachers can discourage using them to cheat.
Social networks, virtual worlds, online games, blogs, and wikis can support student collaboration and communication, Brooks-Young says. She shows how effective use of such tools prepares students for workplace skills like professionalism, work ethic, critical thinking, and problem solving. At the same time she cautions that teachers first will need to invest time reviewing teaching students collaboration techniques. A chapter on digital citizenship addresses legal and ethical uses of technology, including how to deal with online bullying and privacy issues.
Brooks-Young also explores the critical yet often touchy relationship between educators and IT staff, noting that both groups would benefit from knowing more about the other’s needs and assumptions.
I particularly appreciate Brooks-Young’s well-thought-out decision-making and implementation model, which closes the book. This exercise walks educators through questions that apply when considering adopting any technology:
What are the reasons for using this technology?
What are the concerns about using this technology?
How can we enhance or expand our ideas about using this technology?
How can we address our concerns about using this technology?
What questions must be answered before we pursue use of this technology?
An Appendix provides URLs for web sites covering 21st-century skills, educational uses of cell phones, MP3 players, netbooks, social networks, virtual worlds, etc.
I also recommend:
Disrupting class: How disruptive innovation will change the way the world learns. Clayton M. Christensen, Michael B. Horn, Curtis W. Johnson. McGraw-Hill, 2008.
Digital Citizenship in Schools. Mike Ribble and Gerald Bailey. International Society for Technology in Education/ISTE, 2007.
Blogs, wikis, podcasts, and other powerful web tools for classrooms. Will Richardson. Corwin Press, 2006.
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GIS and the future of humanities scholarship
September 22, 2010
Book Review
The Spatial Humanities: GIS and the future of humanities scholarship
Ed. By David J Bodenhamer, John Corrigan, Trevor M Harris
Indiana U Press, 2010. 203 p.
Can Geographic Information Systems (GIS) software provide new insights in humanities scholarship?
This book proposes the development of a spatial humanities that would revitalize and redefine scholarship by (re)introducing geographic concepts of space to the humanities.
The editors acknowledge that the term “humanities GIS” sounds like an oxymoron, both to humanists and to GIS experts. The qualitative-based humanities are problematic for a quantitative technology.
But the power of GIS for the humanities, the editors propose, lies in its ability to integrate varied kinds of information from a common location, regardless of format, and to visualize the results in combinations of transparent layers on a map of the geography shared by the data.
The authors include three historians, an archaeologist, a professor of religion, and four geographers: 3 scholars from the UK and five from the US, who participated in a 2008 workshop coordinated by the Virtual Center for Spatial Humanities, a collaboration among three universities.
At the moment, GIS technology requires that humanists fit their questions, data, and methods to the rigid parameters of the software. To remedy that, the authors propose taking what GIS offers in the way of tools, while urging new agendas upon GIS that will shape it for richer collaborative engagements with humanities disciplines.
The challenge for humanities GIS is to use technology to see, experience, and understand human behavior in all its complexity, the editors say. As in traditional humanities scholarship, the goal is less to produce an authoritative or ultimate answer than to prompt new questions, develop new perspectives, and advance new arguments or interpretations.
For example, in his chapter “GIS, e-Science, and the Humanities Grid,” Paul Ell describes an online resource called the TimeMap, developed by The Electronic Cultural Atlas Initiative.
In the chapter “Turning toward place, space, and time,” Edward Ayers discusses The History Engine, a moderated wiki, populated by hundreds of students at five colleges and universities.
In his chapter, “The potential of spatial humanities,” David Bodenhamer discusses how one researcher used GIS to rebut the standard Dust Bowl narrative that blamed farmers in Oklahoma and Kansas in the 1920s and 30s for using ruinous, ecologically insensitive agricultural practices, thus turning a pristine prairie into wasteland. He illustrates how another researcher re-mapped Europe from AD 300 to 900 to show the connection between developments in communication and transportation that scholars previously had studied in isolation.
In their chapter, “The geospatial semantic web, Pareto GIS, and the humanities,” Trevor Harris, Jesse Rouse, and Susan Bergeron argue that the release of Google Maps in 2005 fundamentally changed the landscape of Web mapping. Google Earth, released in the fall of 2005, built upon that phenomenon and added a virtual globe and the ability to explore data in a pseudo 3-D environment. Google Earth and Google Maps support embedded multimedia including photographs, text, oral narrative, sketches, video, and audio within the map or globe representation.
The editors conclude with a discussion of six themes that mark the nascent field of spatial humanities.
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Follow the (education) money
August 24, 2010
Education writers and journalists will be checking out EdMoney.org, a resource that shows spending on K-12 education from the federal economic-stimulus law in states and school districts nationwide.
The site currently features data on $62.1 billion in grants from the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act, including 39,594 grants to 12,408 school districts and other education agencies across the country.
EdMoney.org is the only national website to link district-by-district spending with demographic data from the federal Common Core of Data.
Education Writers Association Assistant Director Lori Crouch says the site shows how districts’ grant information stacks up to others of similar size. “You can compare how fast urban, suburban, and rural districts are spending their money,” she said. “And you can see if your district is spending stimulus money at a faster clip than the rest of the state, or whether it’s holding on to a particular grant.”
EdMoney.org is a project of the EWA with support from the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation was developed with Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist Matt Waite.
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It’s a manifesto. It’s an encyclopedia. No – it’s Brian Solis
July 8, 2010
Book Review
Engage! The complete guide for brands and businesses to build, cultivate, and measure success in the New Web.
By Brian Solis
Wiley, 2010. 382 p.
“Suddenly, everyone is a social media expert, but very few are indeed champions and far fewer are change agents. So what are you going to do to rise above the fray while also delivering true, incontestable value to those you are helping?” – Brian Solis
This encyclopedia of a book can be read cover-to-cover, if you have a week or two. Otherwise, the reader can jump into any chapter that looks good and go from there.
In this weighty tome Brian Solis tells all, and he has a lot to say. Over his long career in marketing, branding, PR, and social media he has consulted corporations and out-researched some researchers who make a career of research. He has a unique perspective, and he shares lots of juicy tidbits about who is doing what.
Solis is author of The Social Media Manifesto and co-author with Deirdre Breakenridge of “Putting the Public Back in Public Relations.” With Jesse Thomas he designed the Conversation Prism, a tool intended to prompt discussions about where, why, and how to engage in social networks and the critical conversations that define and position the “sentiments, perceptions, and resonance of the brand in the social web.”
Solis’s manifesto for marketers is: Engage, or Die.
One of his nutshell observations: “Winning organizations will effectually shift outward activity from broadcast, us-versus-them campaigns to a one-on-one, and eventually to a many-on-many, methodology that humanizes and personalizes the spirit and personality of our brand.”
A section on branding leads into discussions of the “rules of engagement” and finding the “new influencers.”
Perhaps the most immediately applicable part of this book is Part V, Developing a Blueprint for New Marketing. Read this carefully. It’s killer-good. It will make you rethink habits and try new things.
Solis concludes with a section on relationship measurement, earned and paid media, and measuring investment returns.
Although this content is first-rate, I might have exercised tighter control over Solis’s writing style. God bless ‘im, but Brian tends to lard his paragraphs with metaphor and cliché that (in my opinion) slows down reading and interferes with his message.
But the message is there, and it’s important. True social marketing is not marketing at all, he says. “The new era of communications necessitates personalization through a genuine and humanized approach. It fuses marketing, service, sociology, psychology, creativity, soft-selling, and a dedicated practice of transparent relationship management.”
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Wanted: Ambassadors for Science
June 16, 2010
Unscientific America:
How scientific illiteracy threatens our future.
By Chris Mooney & Sheril Kirshenbaum
Basic Books, 2009. 209 pages.
Elected leaders point to a heavy snowfall in Washington, D.C. and claim that refutes the claims of global warming.
Forty-six percentage of Americans subscribe to young-Earth creationism.
Scientific research refutes the contention that vaccines cause autism in children. But every time a new study comes out on the subject, the parents and their supporters have a “scientific” answer that allows them to retain their beliefs.
Many people get their “science” from celebrities, friends, and a few non-mainstream doctors who continue to challenge the scientific consensus.
Where is today’s Carl Sagan?
As science awaits the next Great Communicator (Neil deGrasse Tyson is one possibility) this book considers other avenues for bringing useful and accurate information about science to the news media, political and cultural leaders, and the general public.
The authors have communicated about science for quite a long time. Chris Mooney hosts the Point of Inquiry podcast and is author of The Republican War on Science. Sheril Kirshenbaum is a member of the Webber Energy Group at the University of Texas-Austin and is a former congressional science fellow.
Their lively book discusses the rifts between science and the major subcultures that shape our thinking—politics, news media, entertainment, and religion. It then proposes ways to bridge these rifts. Mooney & Kirshenbaum argue that the burden of bridge-building rests with scientists and their professional organizations. For science to attain its deserved place at the table of public discourse, several things must happen.
Universities must reward scientists for public outreach and communication. University science programs should offer a more interdisciplinary education that unites scientific culture with communication and mass culture.
Scientists and their organizations must learn to make their knowledge politically relevant. They must learn to negotiate the halls of Congress as skillfully as any other interest group.
Film and television are massively powerful media and can be used to misinform. Scientists must learn how to wield these media, and for virtuous purposes (Randy Olson is doing a good job).
Although science and religion seem to clash regularly, the official position of the National Academy of Sciences and the American Association for the Advancement of Science is that faith and science are compatible. The scientific method in no way rules out the possibility of entities or causes outside of nature; it simply stipulates that they will not be considered within the framework of scientific inquiry. Besides, the authors say, scientists might benefit from more conciliatory exchanges with the religious community: The faithful have a vast store of knowledge about what it takes to motivate people, create community, and bring about social change.
Reconnecting science and our society will require mobilizing a new workforce, the authors say. The higher education science “pipeline” should generate more “science ambassadors” who can engage in outreach. At the same time, pro-science activists need to help. This can occur through communication with politicians, the news media, the entertainment industry, and religious organizations.
As universities trains more scientists, also ensure they learn more about politics and the media. Scientists need communication skills to act as culture-crossers who engage in outreach.
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New models for education journalism
May 28, 2010
Reimagining Education Journalism
By Darrel West, Russ Whitehurst, and E.J. Dionne, Jr.
Governance Studies at Brookings, 2010. PDF, 24 p.
Read the report
Teachers do it.
Journalists do it.
Researchers do it.
They all bemoan the lack of coverage of education in mass media.
In this case, three Brookings Institution writers go beyond complaining to imagine ways of improving and expanding the coverage of education.
Their white paper, released this month, summarizes new trends in education coverage and how major news organizations are re-inventing their futures.
In a 2009 study, these authors documented that (a) education makes up only 1.4 percent of the total front page and prime news hour coverage, and that (b) much of that 1.4 percent focuses not on classrooms and school reform, but on the politics of education.
This report, issued May 11, outlines new delivery systems, including niche publications, news aggregators, social media, and new content providers. Since readers of this blog are familiar with those topics, I won’t elaborate. But the report goes on to describe three business models for education journalism: subsidized content, for-profit models, and indirect public subsidies.
The Carnegie Corporation subsidizes K-12 education coverage on National Public Radio because it’s a Carnegie focus area and because NPR reaches Carnegie’s target audience of practitioners and policymakers.
Successful for-profit models of education journalism include The Chronicle of Higher Education and InsideHigherEd.
The authors point out that U.S. has a long history of direct or indirect public support for various publications. For example, newspapers and magazines long have benefitted from subsidized postage rates. They refer to the recent book, The Death and Life of American Journalism, by Robert McChesney and John Nichols, who suggest a tax credit for the “first $200” spent on daily newspapers. This approach focuses assistance on consumers, not individual news outlets. This model would allow subscribers, not the government, to direct the flow of the indirect subsidies.
Beyond business models per se, education news organizations are developing new partnerships that benefit readers and the organizations themselves. Education Week stories will soon appear on the Associated Press newswire. The weekly also partners with the McClatchey Wire and with education aggregators such as ASCD Smart Brief.
The Center for Public Integrity partners with two dozen news organizations to offer its “Investigative News Network” for watchdog journalism.
The authors caution us to not forget print media. “Millions of citizens, notably including parents, still rely on older media forms for most their information on education,” they say. “Despite newsrooms cutbacks, the ‘old’ media still provide most of the daily coverage of school systems across the country.” And that, they argue, presents an opportunity to improve on something that already exists. They suggests creating alliances among education reporters around the country. Newspapers themselves can do more to share coverage. The Education Writers Association can become a focal point for such partnerships.
“The dilemma facing all media is figuring out how to get readers or advertisers to pay for online content,” they observe. “Determining how to migrate from an ecosystem with a large amount of free online material to paid content is the chief contemporary puzzle.”
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Communicating research is a public service
May 26, 2010
Book review:
Am I making myself clear? A scientist’s guide to talking to the public
By Cornelia Dean.
Harvard UP, 2009. 274 p.
Journalists and researchers both have important roles to play in communicating science to the public. Anyone questioning the need for better science communication need only consider recent debates over topics including climate change and evolution. Misinformation is spread by parties with financial or political interests at stake. And even when accurate news is available, it’s not always accepted. In some quarters it’s considered a badge of honor to place faith over reason.
The public’s ignorance of science helps explain how otherwise savvy people can think that creationism or its ideological cousin, intelligent design, is appropriate for a science classroom.
It’s not news that we Americans just don’t know much about science. We tend not to reason probabilistically, we have a shaky grasp of facts, and we don’t understand the scientific process. Arguments about values are often presented as if they are legitimate scientific disputes. People become disenchanted and confused.
Cornelia Dean is a science writer for the New York Times and teaches college seminars on science writing. In this book she provides practical, political, and policy reasons why scientists and researchers should engage more vigorously in the public life of the nation.
The tectonic shift in the news industry is forcing journalists to cover science and other complex issues with fewer and fewer resources. Researchers could help. But many scorn the mass media as an arena where important research is all too often misrepresented or hyped. In fact their graduate programs and academic departments train them not to spend time on anything but research.
But Dean argues that communicating research to the lay public is important for society—and a valuable use of researchers’ time.
Communicating research is difficult for a number of reasons. There’s a poor match between what researchers do and what ordinary journalists think of as news. Researchers and journalists tell stories differently. Researchers go from evidence to conclusion. Journalists report the conclusion first, then they put in as much detail as they have room for—often leaving out facts the scientist thinks are crucial.
Dean argues that communicating science to general audiences is a public service that’s equally as important as doing the science itself. Scientists who explain their work and their motivations help the public understand and deal with what feels like a chaotic rush of technological change.
It’s helpful when scientific and engineering organizations issue formal position statements on matters being argued in public. For example, in 2008 the National Academy of Science issued a book explaining that the theory of evolution is the foundation of modern biology and medicine, that there is no credible challenge to it, and that accepting evolution does not imply a rejection of religion.
Some researchers object that it’s pointless to try to communicate seriously with people whose attention span limits them to a minute or two per item. But if you are interested in reaching an audience, Dean says, you must consider the capacities of that audience.
Even the act of talking to a reporter is a public service. A scientist may speak for an hour and then end up with only one sentence in the article or on the air. But don’t assume the time you invested was wasted. You helped that reporter understand the issue and improved the quality of the report.
Researchers also perform a public service when they write a letter to the editor, even if the letter is never published or aired. The process trains one to express yourself tersely and clearly, and the letter helps educate the people in the newsroom.
Institutions that employ researchers can help too. They should encourage and reward experts who take the time to communicate with the public and participate in public discourse.
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