Social Mediators Video Podcast launches

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Today, we’re launching Social Mediators, our new video podcast.

Each week, Terry Fallis, Dave Fleet and I will talk about social media, ubiquitous connectivity and their impact on communication, organizations and society. We’re always on, always connected. How are we taking advantage of the new capablities that gives us? And how is that affecting the way we relate to one another and how we organize around common interests? Finally, what does that mean for traditional organizations – companies, cause-based groups and government?

In this first episode, we talk about the concept of personal brand. Terry, David and I will be serving as mentors at the upcoming Personal Brand Camp 2 that Michael Cayley is organizing for the Humber College social media students. So, we talk about some of the issues relating to personal branding and our concern that young people not build an artificial brand online, but instead make sure that their personal brand reflects the same person they’d see when they look in the mirror – their real self.

We also talk about how Thornley Fallis’ new Online Communications Policy guides our employees to understand that what they do in their private online spaces reflects on the judgment they exercise in the workplace and, by extension, on the company.

You can watch the podcast here or subscribe to the RSS feed directly on the Social Mediators Website.

After you’ve watched the episode, please leave a comment. Let me know what you think of it. What topics would you like us to cover in the future? What guests would you like us to interview?

You can leave a written comment below or a webcam comment on the Social Mediators video blog.

Thornley Fallis' new Online Communications Policy

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Simple works

For the past four years, Thornley Fallis has had a simple, two sentence online communications policy: “Be smart. Cause no harm to any person.”

This simple policy has served us well. We had only a few bumps – and we learned from each one.

This policy worked because we have many people who are active in social media and they are steeped in the blogging culture. They understand the importance of transparency, authenticity and generosity. They also understand the power of search and the permanence of what we put on the Web.

New people. New needs

A few months ago, we updated the Thornley Fallis and 76design Websites. In doing this, we introduced new Twitter feeds for both Thornley Fallis and 76design. We also created a page on our corporate Website that displays the current conversations our employees are having in social media. Each employee has their own page on which they can display whatever social media and information they want to share. They can add their personal blog feeds, links to their Facebook pages, Twitter streams, LinkedIn profiles – whatever social media they wanted.

I soon realized that our employees are generating much more social media traffic than I had been aware of. I also realized that not everyone spends as much time thinking about social media best practices as Dave Fleet or Terry Fallis might.

So, it’s time to take a second look at our online communications policy to be sure that it provides basic guidance for new employees and others new to social media and our perspective on its culture.

Under the hood

In refining our policy, I wanted it to be written in plain language. I also didn’t want to be so prescriptive that people would feel the need to refer to it constantly. And, bottom line, I respect the intelligence of the people I work with and trust their judgment. So, how to draft a policy that provides essential guidance but still puts the onus on people to exercise good judgment?

The answer, in my mind, is to ground the policy and guidelines in a clear statement of our objectives – why we are active in social media. Having stated this, I’m comfortable encouraging people to post freely if they know that their actions contribute to the achievement of our objectives. If they aren’t sure or feel that their posts/actions may actually detract from those objectives, then I suggest that they don’t post it. It in doubt, I ask people to consult a colleague before proceeding. Having spelled out this general framework, I needed only a handful of specific guidelines.

I posted the policy on our Internal Wiki and asked for comments. I received some good feedback from several people, including Jeremy Wright, Dave Fleet and Bradley Moseley-Williams. So, here’s the first draft of our new online communications policy.

What do you think of it? Have we missed something important? Would it work for your organization?

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Thornley Fallis Online Communications Policy

This policy is intended to provide us with practical guidelines that we can apply to ensure that our online actions and communications will make a positive contribution to our reputation as individuals and members of the Thornley Fallis & 76design team.

You’re always one of us

Each of us represents the company to the world and the character of the company is defined by our beliefs and actions. We must be mindful of this when participating in social media and any kind of online communications.
You may be active in social media on your own account. That’s good. But please remember that whether you are on your own time or company time, you’re still a member of our team. And the judgment you exercise on your own time reflects on the judgment you exercise at work. There’s only one you – at play and at work.

Our Objectives

First, when participating in social media, please always be mindful of why we are involved in social media. Our company’s objectives are:

  • To educate ourselves.
  • To contribute to our community by sharing our knowledge with others. (We believe in the culture of generosity and recognize that we should contribute more to the community than we take out.)
  • To attract talented people
  • To attract sophisticated clients

As a first step in deciding whether to write or post something online, ask yourself if doing so would contribute to the achievement of these objectives. If so, then publish away. If your post would be at odds with these objectives, please do not post it.

Guidelines

Of course, sometimes, it’s nice to have some simple, plain language guidelines to point the way. So, here are some basic rules for day to day conduct.

  1. Cause no harm to any person.
  2. Be respectful and civil in your tone. (After all, that’s the kind of people we are.)
  3. Respect our clients’ right to decide for themselves what they want to make public. Unless they specifically grant us permission, do not post about client wins or client assignments.
  4. Be transparent. If you are posting about a client or commenting on a client competitor or posting about anything in which we may have a material interest, disclose the relationship or interest.

Still in doubt?

If you’re still in doubt, seek out the counsel of one of you colleagues. Two sets of eyes are better than one.

Mitch Joel on your Personal Brand at Third Tuesday Toronto

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We have a special Third Tuesday Toronto on Feb. 23. It’s special because we’re holding it in conjunction with Personal Brand Camp – a project being undertaken by Michael Cayley for the Humber College social media students.

During the afternoon, the Humber students will meet with volunteer mentors to discuss the importance of their online personnas, the issues involved and how they can develop an online brand that will be consistent with the people they are.

Then, in the evening, Mitch Joel will be our featured speaker at Third Tuesday. Mitch has built a remarkable personal brand. He is well known and widely respected as a marketing thought leader. This year, he published Six Pixels of Separation, a handbook to digital marketing and social media.  He’s often referred to as “Canada’s Seth Godin.” That’s no small feat.

Mitch will offer us his perspective on the concept of personal brand. Does he build his brand consciously? Are there rules, implicit or explicit, that he applies in doing this? Is personal brand building something that we all should be engaged in? What advice would he offer to anyone concerned about the image they project online and in the real world.

Interested? Register online to attend Third Tuesday Toronto with Mitch Joel.

As always, I want to thank our Third Tuesday sponsors – CNW Group, Molson Coors Canada, Rogers Communications, Radian6 and Fairmont Hotels and Resorts. Their support make it possible to bring great speakers like Mitch, and others including Katie Paine, Julien Smith and Shel Israel not just to Toronto but also to Third Tuesdays in Ottawa, Montreal, Calgary and Vancouver. (Speaking of Vancouver, stay tuned for the announcement of a Third Tuesday Vancouver with Mitch Joel.)

Thank you to our sponsors – and thank you to our speakers.

Will you volunteer to mentor students about their online personal brand?

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When we participate in social media – whether posting or commenting – we are leaving digital footprints. And as people follow those footprints, they assemble a picture in their minds of the person who left those footprints – what we are interested in, our thoughts and opinions, the way we communicate and interact with other people. These factors and many more can be assembled to paint a portrait of each of us. In effect, they amount to our personal brand.

Michael Cayley, who teaches Social Media at Humber College, is organizing a Personal Brand Camp in Toronto on Feb. 23. Through a series of rotating round tables, attendees will have the opportunity to talk about the issues surrounding the care and feeding of their online personal brands with Mentors drawn from Toronto’s social media community.

Michael is looking for 20 Mentors who will lead roundtable discussions with the participants. The best Mentor is someone who is active online and has developed an online presence that is positive and well-regarded. You may be young. You may be old. But whichever, you’ve created a positive halo around yourself.

If you’d be interested in volunteering to be a Mentor at Personal Brand Camp, please contact @michaelcayley on Twitter.

Social Mediators Video Podcast: Ready, Set, …

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We’re just about ready to launch the Social Mediators video podcast. Last week, I posted some images of different settings we’d tried.

Today, we have the opening sequence ready to go.

Each week, Terry Fallis, Dave Fleet and I will get together to talk about the convergence of our online and real world lives and the impact of social media on community, communications and society. Yes, we’ll talk about technology. But technology is only the jumping off point for our real interest. How are new technologies and social media developments affecting the way that people relate to one another, shaping our expectations of institutions and removing the barriers to collective action?

We hope that you’ll subscribe to the feed and join our conversation.

The New PR

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Last week, Jeremy Wright joined our team at Thornley Fallis & 76 design.  Since then, several friends have asked me how we were able to attract Jeremy to join a public relations agency.

It’s the new PR.

For several years, we have been moving Thornley Fallis beyond old style public relations to understand and participate in the new communications, communities, and social relationships that universal search, social media and ubiquitous online access have made possible.

This new public relations is grounded in anthropology, sociology, and technology.

The new public relations is about understanding relationships between people, what people want and need from these relationships, and how they form, sustain, and use communities of interest.

We don’t see people as target audiences.  We see people through the lense of communities.  And we participate in those communities. We earn our place by understanding the dynamics of the communities and adding value.  We add value by helping those communities to function better and by contributing unique and new content to the conversation.

We still draw on our ability to write clearly, an understanding of what people are interested in, and a knowledge of traditional media and how they work. (They haven’t turned off the lights at traditional media yet – and I don’t think they will in my lifetime.)

However, these traditional skills now must be supplemented by other expertise.  An understanding of community formation.  What makes people seek out one another?  What makes a community grow? What makes it die? What is the impact of the removal of barriers to collective action online? How far can we push social media’s ability to transcend the limitations of geographic proximity and bring people together in one conversation, regardless of where they are in the world? What of the new online intimacy? How do we revise our notions of privacy in this era? How do we help people satisfy their desire to extend their online relationships with real world relationships?

Public relations practitioners must also know how to create the new meeting places.  As the ties that bind us to traditional media break down, people find new ways to discover the information they need and to share it with others.  The combination of search with social software provides us all with the power to do this.  But some solutions are better than others.  The new public relations practitioner must know what makes a social platform work and how to improve on what is already there.

Measurement is essential to understand what is going on and the impact of what we do. Old yardsticks are inadequate to gauge the new dynamics. GRP’s, impressions, reach – these are the metrics of a bygone era.  We must develop and apply new metrics for engagement, momentum, influence and the growth, depth and characteristics of our social graphs.

New possibilities, new tools, new channels.  All call for new people with new expertise.

The new public relations agency is a hybrid that draws on new areas of expertise and skill sets.  We’ve been trying to create this kind of agency at Thornley Fallis and 76 design. More than anything, I think it’s the thrill of participating in that innovation and invention that brought Jeremy Wright to us.

Of course,we’re not the only firm doing this. We know that several other firms are heading down this route. Firms like Shift, Voce, Edelman.

Bottom line: For those who think of public relations as they might have even five years ago, please take another look. You’ll find something quite different under the hood at the thought- leading public relations firms.

This isn’t your parents’ public relations.

Coming to a small screen in the palm of your hand

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Terry Fallis, Dave Fleet and I are weeks away from launching a new video podcast. And Terry Fallis, Dave Fleet and I have completed three demos. With each one, we’ve changed the setting –

starting in our boardroom,

then moving to a couch and chairs and,

finally settling on the staff gathering area just outside our kitchen. And we think we’ve found the right spot.

There must be a reason why people arriving at a house party often head straight for the kitchen. We just feel comfortable there. It’s where we gather during the day. We share meals with family and friends. We relax there. So, that’s where we’ve decided to produce our video.

We’re not quite ready to launch publicly. But soon.

How can Regulators use social media?

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I’m speaking next week at a conference of health profession regulators. The theme of the day: Innovations in Regulatory Communications.

I’ve been asked to speak to the topic, “Social Media: What you need to know to be effective.” I think I can give them some good ideas – and I’ll post about the presentation and their reaction after the session.

In preparing for the session, the organizer told me, “We’re most interested in how social media can be used in the regulatory environment, given the challenges we face as regulators.  We’ve all been to conferences and sessions about how social media works as a marketing tool in retail and other environments, but we’ve always come away from those kinds of events thinking that these tools don’t really seem suited to us.  But as communicators, we also know that we want to do a better job of communicating with all our audiences – the public, the profession and others in the health care environment.  So essentially, how can we best use social media without compromising our regulatory duties?”

I thought this was an interesting glimpse of the basic conundrum the regulators face. They want to reach out to the public, but they feel that they have to be responsible to duties of fair process and being careful not to be seen as prejudging as well as staying within their assigned responsibilities and not straying into the realm of policy-making that the politicians have reserved for themselves.

But does that mean that they can’t use social media? I don’t think so. But rather than simply preach about the virtues of social media, I want to provide my audience of regulators examples of other regulators and government agencies who have used social media effectively. I think of the way the Office of the Privacy Commissioner of Canada uses their blog to raise awareness of privacy issues and make us think more deeply about them, the way that the Ontario Ombudsman uses his Twitter feed to alert people to reports he will be releasing, to listen to public discussion and to convey a sense that there’s a real human being behind the title, the way that Canada’s Washington Embassy’s Connect2Canada program uses blogging, Twitter, Facebook, YouTube and other social media platforms to bring together Canadians living in the United States, or the way that Ottawa Public Health used Twitter to inform the public about the H1N1 vaccination program.

Now, you may say that these aren’t really regulators. And you’d be right. So, I’m looking for examples of government and profession regulators using social media.

Do you have a favourite example of a regulator that has used social media well? How about an example of one that has used social media and regretted it?

What would you tell a group of government and profession regulators about how they can use social media?

Thanks to you many children's wishes will come true

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Every November, friends and family cringe as I engage in the annual Mustaches for Kids campaign. Through Mustaches for Kids, men around the world band together to raise funds for charities such asDonorsChoose.org, the Make-A-Wish Foundation, Children’s Hospital of New Orleans, and San Francisco’s Legal Services for Children.

The local chapter I participate in – Mustaches for Kids Ottawa – raises funds for the Make-a-Wish Foundation – which uses the money to make a sick child’s wish come true.

This year, the mustache-growing men of Ottawa raised over $32,000 for the Make a Wish Foundation. That brings our five year total to $82,000.

Several people noticed my hirsute appearance and contributed as a result. Big thanks to Terry Fallis, Dave Fleet, Guy Skipworth, Eden Spodek and Dave Hicks. Somewhere there is a sick child who feels a bit happier thanks to your generosity.

And thanks to to M4K’s Ottawa organizer Brett Tackaberry for keeping this effort growing for the past five years.

So, for now it’s back to being clean shaven. But don’t worry, I’ll give everyone reason to chuckle at me when I start the whole process over again November 1, 2010.