communication. community. cognition.
Archive for January, 2010
Out and About
Jan 28th
From Zoer on Flickr
Last year, I did a bit of traveling and speaking. While it’s been nice to share, it’s also nice to learn a little. For the next few weeks I’ll be doing a bit of both.
Friday the 29th, I’ll be at the University of Alabama, talking with the faculty of the College of Human Environmental Sciences about social media.
Sunday, I leave for New Orleans, where I’ll spend a day and a half learning about Crisis and Emergency Risk Communications from one of the best in the field, Dr. Barbara Reynolds. She plays a key role communicating for the Centers for Disease Control.
Wednesday the 3rd, I am back in house for a presentation to another department. Then on the 10th I’m back in Tuscaloosa, spending about an hour talking with Dr. Suzanne Horsley‘s Public Relations students about how to integrate social media with traditional channels.
Then I will be in Atlanta for the Ragan Social Media Conference February 21-24. I was privileged to present this past March in Las Vegas – this time I will be something between a spectator and a sponge.
What I Am Up To
Jan 28th
“You don’t write about your job anymore.”
After a couple of gentle prods, I was reminded that I don’t talk about my work as much as I used to. The nature of my work with Alabama Power is quite different than what I did with the American Red Cross. The Red Cross is in the spotlight whenever there is a major disaster, and I’ve had more than a few inquiries from people who wanted to know more about the relief effort in Haiti. In contrast, when a regulated electric utility deals with a storm, the goal is to work quickly and restore power, then fade back into the background.
So what are you doing there, anyway?
When I came to Alabama Power, fresh off having my position eliminated, my role was primarily in internal communications. I edited the news on the company site, inherited a number of geek-related communications projects. It involved a broad array of internal needs, including the exploration of social media.
You sold Alabama Power on Social Media Koolaid?
No, I didn’t really “sell” them on anything. I was, by every account, quite patient. No one wants to hear from the guy who busts down your door each morning screaming “Blog Twitter Twitter Facebook LinkedIn Facebook Twitter Foursquare Twitter Blog  Facebook Blog Blog!”
Instead, I merely posed questions to my boss. And we had some rich conversations about how and why some of these tools might integrate into communication goals. Not as enterprises in their own right, but toward a high-level purpose (like everything else we do.)
Then one day late last fall, my boss and my VP approached me and said “It’s time.” While I still play a role in scattered geeky-tech communications projects and research, social media will be a huge part of what I do.
So now you’re the face of Alabama Power on social media?
Nope. Not at all. Some companies have elected to take that approach. We’re not.
I don’t want to be the face of the company. I am not a company spokesperson, and that is not my role.
The way we’ve defined my job is as an internal facilitator. I don’t want to be the guy who “owns” the social media accounts. Rather, I am the guy who helps people in other departments and divisions figure out if they need to be in social media, how they might use it, and how to get started.
Photo by Linda N.
Maybe you could think of me as the Instructor Pilot. I ask you why you want to learn how to fly, help you chart some flight paths, show you where all the dials and gauges are, and fly with you until you’re comfortable enough.
I have no desire to be the “Social Media Guy,” because that doesn’t scale. I can only monitor so many accounts, moderate so many conversations, and cultivate so many communities. But if I can show others how to do it, with the right spirit and attitude, then I be a part of something bigger.
To that extent, we’re doing that too. I’m one of more than two-dozen Southern Company employees working on a committee to set some standards and direction. Unlike some corporations, it didn’t bog down into micro-managing, but has stayed at a high-level framework which leaves us purposeful yet nimble in an ever-shifting environment.
Coaching, Not Doing
Sure, coaches ought to have a little experience in what they teach. But the best manager is one who realizes his job is to bring the best out of others, not to belittle them by reminding him how much better he is at what they do. (Really great managers surround themselves with people who surpass their own skills.)
In a way, I’ve been teasing toward this for months. I wrote about “Building a Dynasty,” and the differences between practitioners, teachers and coaches. In “Coaching is an Art” I expounded on the qualities of a coach. I wrote those as I was developing the mindset for this position. Officially, I am a “Communications Strategist,” which is exactly what I was before. (Salary stayed the same, too…) However, I want to approach the job from the perspective of the coach – one who is graded on how many games his team wins, how much their skills improve, and not on how many free throws he can make in a row.
And that is what I have been up to lately.
A Menagerie of Analogy
Jan 26th
(This is a guest post by Occam’s Razr’s resident non-resident vagabond, Adam Daniel Mezei. Canadian by birth and Czech by genes, Adam has roots on multiple continents. After years in Prague, where he wrote and coached a young generation on tapping into a previously suppressed entrepreneurial spirit, he’s now focused on the emerging cultural and commercial ties with China. (Does he only live and work in nations that start with “C?” is Cameroon next?)
I share this because it highlights a theme that becomes increasingly important in communication – how to overcome cultural signposts. While analogy can be a most powerful tool in quickly bridging the gap between minds, those literal words lose context when translated into another language or culture. Often, they gain contexts the author never intended. And as Adam’s example shows us, finding the appropriate “parallel” analogy from a new culture can open up new meanings, and explain why other nations end up with insights that shape their perspective, direction and action.
Enjoy – and thanks ADM!)
Panda Huggers vs. Dragon Slayers
I’ll be manning Your Good Ship Occam today, so I thought I’d introduce myself and say hello. Sit back, unbuckle your belt, and sip your cognac or grape juice slowly. Let’s try to enjoy this wild ride at 30,000 feet, shall we? And if you’re teetotalling, that’s fine too, just don’t say we didn’t warn you…
Since I’m guest-ing on the bleeding edge of today’s “razr,” what would an Occam’s post be without a snappy Occamist-type title? I’ve settled on “Panda Huggers vs. Dragon Slayers” and I hope you like it.
Panda hugger? Dragon slayer? What in tarnation am I on about?
Well, it’s connected to one of my long-standing pet projects, a field I’ve been spending a considerable amount of time on these past few months: the Sino-US relationship. Through my humble efforts, this here crazy Canuck is trying to help the two sides see clear through to each other’s intentions in the lead up towards what’s shaping up to be this century’s new policy of detente.
Look, it’s no secret I get most of my good ideas during exercise. Mornings, preferably, and ideally on the stationary bike. Like any garden variety ISTP on the Myers-Briggs Type Index, I don’t waste too much free time faffing around doing idle stuff, so having said that my book du jour is Serge Michel & Michel Beuret‘s China Safari: On the Trail of Beijing’s Expansion in Africa, a tale of China’s expansionist policies on the majority Dark Continent. I’ve spoken about this book recently here, but the premise of China Safari is so mission-critical I felt it warranted an encore post.
Michel and Beuret make frequent references to the China “hawks” and “doves” in the US State Department. There are some leading Americans who feel a more robust global engagement with China is indeed unncessary, that softer methods are more appropriate in an effort to cajole the PRC into modes of behaviour which align more closely with US political interests in Africa (read: realpolitik). On the other hand, there are those hawks who claim that the People’s Republic is surreptitiously ekeing out key global territorities in a reprise of the sorts of proxy wars we and the Soviets used to trifle with back in the day.
Let’s deconstruct this, shall we?
Panda Huggers:
The name stems from China’s popular zoological export. Such an individual has the following characteristics:
- believes that China is a reasonable interlocutor and can be persuaded via “soft diplomacy” to cease encouraging or otherwise inducing chaos and bloodshed amongst Africa’s warring tribes and nations (egs. Ethiopia-Eritrea, Chad-Niger-Sudan, Darfur, the Congo, etc).
- believes that China retains a global competitive and sovereign right to prospect for oil and mineral resources around the world as part of its “peaceful rise” and that the developed nations have no right to interfere in this given their own abhorrent polluting pasts.
- accepts that China is not altogether forthright about its ultimate political aims in Africa but as it simultaneously improves its African client states’ overall infrastructures (egs. roads, airports, bridges, ports, and schools), China hardly mimics former European rapacious imperialism.
- dimisses the global scaremongering about China’s all-pervasive influence in African conflict zones, given that at only 4 to 5% of the total global trade in fatal small arms (compared to the US’ approximately 25%), the PRC is hardly the dastardly Grand Game player as the US’ hawks will readily claim.
- likes to cite the overall “win-win” relationship in China’s dealings with rogue states like Sudan, Chad, and Liberia, whereby the latter are raised up several societal notches through China’s fiscal generosity through interest-free loans and/or outright credits. The classical, “Yeah, but look what China’s done to improve…” excuse.
Versus…
Dragon Slayers:
This term finds its root in China’s fortune-bringing mighty fire-breathing talisman. Such an individual has the following characteristics:
- realizes that China has been aggressively hyperanalyzing European colonial history since the PRC’s Reform and Opening Up period, and, as such, is aware that China has rather employed a decidedly more magnanimous approach to the “rape” of the African continent which effectively obscures the rising juggernaut’s stated superpower aspirations.
- understands that the US, bogged down in its Iraqi and Afghanistan military odysseys, has been devoting scant resources to its African Command (presently based in Stuttgart, Germany!) and is essentially powerless to stop China’s African rollout.
- knows that China is the living embodiment of Sun Tzu’s classic dictum of “giving in order to bring your enemy closer…to make him unaware…only then can you strike.” Dragon slayers know that China has been spoiling the Sudanese, the Nigerians, the Angolans, the Zambians, the Ethiopians, the Sudanese, the Egyptians, the Algerians, and many of the forty-nine other African states which China maintains official diplomatic relations with rotten, in order to brazenly buy its way into exclusivity situations for oil, uranium, bauxite, and other precious resource deals. Slayers also know that China desperately needs Africa’s resources to ensure its resource security into the foreseeable future, given how the French, Italians, Dutch, British, and Americans have crowded the PRC out in their traditional Middle Eastern fiefdoms.
- laments the fact that the US is once again “sleeping at the wheel” in Africa. Meanwhile, China has staked out all of the best claims and is winning friends and influencing people all across Africa and, consequently, in the UN. In comparison, the US will eventually seem like a carpetbagger when it awakens to the ongoing realities and will be only too late to put a stop to things.
The Final Word:
As I fashion myself as something of an amateur Sinologist, I’m tending towards siding the Dragon Slayers who seem to have a firmer understanding of the entrenched realities and the hunt for untapped oil.
Given what recently transpired at #COP15 in Denmark during the Climate Conference, what with the groundbreaking all-encompassing document the G20 somehow knew would never be inked in Copenhagen and how it only reiforces the West’s seemingly incurable addiction to carbon-consuming technologies, China’s leaders seem to have their collective heads screwed on properly. With China’s annual market just for automobiles set to exceed 11 million units in 2011 and beyond and with a national market of over 100 million cars, China isn’t taking any prisoners (nor chances) with its petroleum destiny.
So which are you? Panda Hugger or Dragon Slayer?
Of course, please let us know in the comments below.
(and follow Adam Daniel Mezei on Twitter. – Ike)
Failure by the Numbers
Jan 24th
Sudoku.
It’s a logic puzzle that involves placing numbers or letters in a grid such that you get no repeating characters within a given row, column, or highlighted grid.
I got a book of puzzles for Christmas, and things finally slowed down enough I could check it out.
You’d think a publication so prestigious to be designated as the “OFFICIAL PUBLICATION OF THE INTERNATIONAL SUDOKU AUTHORITY” would only promote and publish puzzles of the highest quality and rigor.
That there would be a painstaking process of editorial control, whereby the selected puzzles would represent the very essence of Sudoku as originally intended — and that the puzzles therein would go through a vetting round to earn their stripes as “Easy,” “Middle,” “Hard” or the pinnacle: “Devious.”
You might also assume that the publishers of “SUdOkU Fever” would choose to properly market their product with a sample puzzle right there on the cover. A puzzle that was chosen to establish the first pillar of Customer Satisfaction – that all-important initiative to properly establish and manage expectations.
A Sudoku book with a crossword or a word-find on the front, for example, would be a colossal failure, because not only would it not engage those seeking Sudoku, it would be mistakenly purchased by one seeking a letter-based, verbal puzzle.
In fact – since so many of my readers here have a more decided verbal orientation, maybe a little primer in creating a Sudoku might be in order.
You create a nine-by-nine grid where there are no repeating numbers in columns, rows or the smaller 3×3 grids. Then you turn most of the numbers into blanks. But for the sake of all that is holy, you start with a working grid. You don’t begin with a broken grid and expect it to suddenly blossom into a working puzzle.
And if you do have a broken puzzle, well, I suppose it’s okay if it winds up on the cover, just as long as that error isn’t too obvious — like having two of the same number so obviously in the same frame.
Who Needs Avatar? We Already Live In Parallel Universes
Jan 12th
Sarah Palin is joining Fox News.
Cue the cheers from her fans and loyalists who will get her fresh and mavericky take on world events and politics.
Cue the jeers from her detractors, who are already writing punchlines that reinforce their existing opinions.
The fact is we now live in a strange age, one where there really is no common ground.
Years ago, one could read an analysis from the left and one from the right, and somewhere in the middle there would be an intersection from which one could reconstruct an objective truth. But that doesn’t happen anymore. The circles have split, and those in the left bubble can’t even fathom the cognitions of those in the right bubble (and thus conclude those in the right bubble are incapable of anything approaching reason and cognition.)
We’re now seeing the consequences of feeding your brain with only one side – selecting and never leaving your ever-deafening echo chamber: ultimately, you surround yourself with more noise, and get no closer to objective truth.
Hair-raising Legal Issues
Jan 11th
Legal disclaimers are often annoying, and sometimes hilarious.
The Bumpit is a toothed, plastic arc that is embedded near the scalp to provide the illusion of more voluminous hair.
Just remember, each disclaimer is there for a reason. Because someone did.
