Supermetrics: how to easily collect Analytics and YouTube data

Collecting and charting data from your YouTube and Google Analytics can be a time consuming process and not a very enjoyable one, as I’m sure you are aware of...But there’re some good news here. And it’s called Supermetrics.

What is Supermetrics? 

Supermetrics is a Google Drive add-on - an extension that you can add to your Google Sheets and Docs. Add-ons are similar to Google Apps Scripts but with some differences. If you’re curious to know more about this, go over this blog post here, where the two are compared in detail. And where you can also find a good overview of some useful Add-ons.

With Supermetrics you can create queries to (semi)automate your reporting from sources such as Google Analytics, Youtube, Twitter, Facebook, Google AdWords, etc….Data from these sources are added to a Spreadsheet (or Google Doc). You can then create live charts from these data, so they are automatically updated once you refresh your Supermetrics queries. Supermetrics comes with a free and pro versions.

The main two differences are about the amount of data you can get from each query and whether you can schedule automatic refresh of your queries, which is available only for the pro version (49 USD/month).

In CARIAA program M&E dashboard, we used the free version of Supermetrics.

How to activate and use Supermetrics?

To use this tool follow these simple steps below here:

1. Activate Supermetrics - Navigate to the Add-ons button in your Google Sheets and browse the gallery to select Supermetrics.
2. Set up your queries by 
1. Connecting your data source and selecting your profiles - Launch the Supermetrics sidebar and connect the various sources you want to monitor. In our case, we only connected the Google Analytics and YouTube profiles that were shared with the Google Account we used.
2. Selecting the date range you want to monitor and the metrics you are interested in - In our case, we set up queries for a specific time frame but you can also have a year-to-date query, last month, etc...Out of the many Google Analytics and YouTube metrics you can collect, we limited the query to web sessions, users and pageviews for Analytics, and views for YouTube.
3. Launch your queries and see your data - Once you’re all set, decide how you want to get your data, in a table or in the various default charts. Data will be downloaded and added to your spreadsheet.
4. Refresh your queries - From the Supermetrics menu under your Add-ons tab, you can refresh all your queries with a click and update your results and charts.



Launch Supermetrics from your Add-ons menu

5. Modify and edit your queries - Alternatively, you can click on Manage queries; this will open a worksheet where all your queries are listed. From here you can manage and modify them, for example changing the date range of the query.

Using Supermetrics has proved to be a very effective and efficient way to collect usage stats and traffic data for multiple Analytics profiles and YouTube channels at the same time, without having to waste time navigating in and out these various accounts to get individual data.

Note that, while at the beginning of this post I mentioned that this tool can also be used to collect data from Twitter, in our case we decided not to use Supermetrics for Twitter.

In the next post, I’ll explain you why we took this decision, and what we used instead. In the meantime, if you haven’t try it yet, give Supermetric a shot and see for yourself how it works.

Are you digitally competent?

So you are on the West Manhattan cycleway on your way to work at the mission in the UN and a US airways Airbus A320-200 crash-lands, deafeningly, on the Hudson river beside you.

Being a well-trained diplomat you respond coolly. You assess the situation and realise instantly that you can be of no practical help in the water - freezing - and that boats are already turning and heading towards the plane, which is beginning to settle lower in the river. This is NYC, so your first-aid training is probably going to be trumped by the well qualified professionals who are doubtless already leaving their bases. So do you join the increasing number of shocked spectators on the waterside, take out your smartphone and start filming the scene or do you get back onto your bike and head quickly to the mission so that you can contribute to the response of your national delegations in New York and Washington DC.

Wait - haven't you even taken a photograph? Being digitally competent you take a good shot, tweet it it immediately, echoing your post onto the Embassy Facebook page, with a message of support and praise for the pilot and the US response  (You work for an enlightened Foreign Ministry, that encourages staff to be active in social media and trusts them to do so professionally and competently -  you've had training, of course). Then you head to the mission, already working before you've even taken off your Lycra. By the time you've showered you've got messages from too many colleagues and friends to deal with immediately, as well as several acknowledgements from different US agencies. Both you and your embassy are well connected on social media, having identified 'influencers' who can support your own policy positions and engaged with them regularly online. You talk it over with your colleagues and agree that part of the official response should be a quick blog from you, expressing your personal reactions - which are only now beginning to make themselves felt - as well as appreciation for those who've saved 100s of lives, and maybe making an appropriate reference to a national issue of relevance. You've blogged before, understand how to walk the fine line between personal and professional (talking to people as a person, but from within the context of your professional position), how to upload and embed your photo, make links to other relevant websites.... and so on. Which means that you will be able to make your 11 am appointment.

The digital dimension of a Capacity Development 2 

We developed a digital competency framework as a tool for our social media training and development work and have used it in a wide variety of contexts, including with diplomats at all levels, hence the references above. The framework is grounded in the notion of behavioural competencies, used to guide, assess and evaluate holistically how people operate within their work, as introduced in a previous post. There we suggested how being digitally competent is clearly an essential component of any definition of a Capacity Development 2, the concept we have been exploring with a team of Itad staff and associates for the UN GEF. Thanks to team-member Cheryl Brown in particular, we extended our standard '5Cs' model, drawn initially from the work of Howard Rheingold on digital literacy, into a two level, 8Cs model. We identify three foundational and five core competencies.

Foundational competencies

These are largely passive in nature (reading, looking and listening), maintaining a low profile, keeping in touch with what is going on and who is active

• Comprehend
• Connect
• Check Context

Core competencies

These competencies are about active engagement in digital media and platforms, developing a profile and working with others to build inter-connected collections of content

• Collaborate
• Create
• Critique
• Curate
• Communicate

We provided more information about each of these in a Google Spreadsheet, along with examples of how they are used and links to illustration reference sites. The competencies are mapped in the table to elements of the GEF Theory of Change although of course the framework is transferable to other contexts.

We're very interested in any comments and suggestions for improvements.

CTA web2.0 and social media trainings - What have we learnt?

Over recent years, CTA web2.0 and social media training programme has become a flagship initiative of the organization, receiving positive feedback from participants and host institutions and being awarded the WSIS Project Prize 2013 in the category e-agriculture.

While we are in the process of finalizing the evaluation of the second phase of the programme (2011-2012), I was recently invited to present and discuss the initial findings of the evaluation with CTA staff and managers.

 

Web 2.0 and social media capacity building initiative - What have we learnt over the period 2011-2012? Results of an impact study from Euforic Services

A few of the headlines emerging from the evaluation are:

• There is general, high satisfaction of how the training is conducted and its content; 
• Participants describe the training events as an eye opener and they feel inspired by the potential of social media to support their work;
• The trainings work for improving participants' social media skills and knowledge;
• Face-to-face trainings perform better than online trainings in terms of adoption of different social media tools;
• There is a clear ripple effect, with the training being replicated (in different forms and degrees) by participants in their workplace or with their own partners;
• Institutional adoption of social media is increasing, but only a few organizations use social media in an advanced way.
• Resistance to change and lack of management support are the most common challenges to social media adoption.

Some recommendations include:

• Putting more resources into the documentation and sharing of success (and failure) stories of putting social media to work in the agricultural sector;
• Investing in a training of trainers programme, to expand the formation of a solid base of trainers across the ACP countries;
• Sensitize senior and middle managers on the advantages of social media.

The meeting provided a good opportunity for CTA staff to reflect on what has been done so far in the programme, and discuss how to take it forward.

About Pier Andrea Pirani - Join Me on Google Plus

Using ICT with older people - a workshop with HelpAge International

Help Age International (HelpAge) has been working with older people across the world for over 30 years. It’s far from being the sexiest end of development, so there’s little money and less attention from many major donors and Foundations. That perception doesn’t come from insider knowledge but is a supposition based on the way they’ve built their programme, focused on local level activities supporting, advocating, campaigning, mostly voluntary. The small offices are as full of creative, committed, wise people as you’d expect of long-lived NGOs. So it was a privilege to help facilitate a fascinating exchange with HelpAge staff in a session on the use of ICT to support their programmes. As well as the people in London, we had on Skype people from international offices, including Tanzania, Pakistan, South Africa, the Occupied Palestinian Territories and a South Asian regional programme manager.

First, a facilitator’s note, especially for those working in ICT4D: don’t forget the obvious, which is that many people come to conversations about using ICT in programmes suspicious, often on the basis of experience, about whether or not good development practice will be trumped by talk of tech-led programmes or a belief that programmes and people’s lives can be transformed by new-tech. So it’s important to have assumptions and challenges out on the table at the beginning, to get as quickly as possible to a creative conversation about how to engage in the new context constantly being created by the march of ICTs. Some that could usefully have been stated at the beginning:

• ICT4D isn’t (shouldn’t be) technology led: technology is a core enabler
• New developments must be programme led, which means country and/or regional offices, in decentralised organisations
• Don’t make assumptions without some data – do we know about uses of ICT by segments such as older people? 
• Don’t simply focus on the obvious constraints (connectivity, cost etc.) that don’t take into account the existing spread of ICT like mobiles, even in the context of shared ownership. People came up with plenty of examples of engaged use by older people
• Don’t use digital as the topic header, use ICT, otherwise the conversation is all about mobiles – important enough in itself – but ignores older ICTs like radio
• Context is all important in determining what might be useful, based on what is already happening as well as the goals and capacity of the people involved

I gave a brief presentation about trends, drawn from four sources:

• our recent experience at the ICT4Ag conference
• conversations on the ever excellent eCampaigning Forum
• the ICT4D strand from a recent INTRAC M&E workshop, Track A and Track B
• threads from the #ICT4D tag on Twitter. 

The presentation was intended partly as a collection of useful links but for an audience relatively new to the field, and with very specific sectional interests, more abstraction would have helped. I separated out two areas that I think need in depth investigation – the use of mobiles and trends grouped around Open….. and Crowd…..

The digital dimension

Part of the interest for me was comparing our conversation with those I've had in Oxfam GB over the years. In 2002 nobody was much interested in ICT4D, even as we showed how many international partners were starting to use computers. Our work in Oxfam in 07/08 was part of the the development of a Digital Vision. Having seen how much ICT4D and digital activity was already happening, and recognising the strategic implications of what were then the new Web 2.0 trends, OGB set up a series of work streams. The Regional Director for South East Asia, where a lot of ICT4D innovation was happening, took on leadership for OGB. The wheel came full circle in 2012, when an ICT4D coordinator was appointed.  

Before and during the HelpAge workshop a list was developed of current projects using ICT. Without a lot of effort, ten were identified, some historical but many live, many using mobile phones but others integrating radio and video. I think I am right that nobody had seen that list collated before, which is as it was in Oxfam GB when we did surveys in 2002 and again in 2008: there is a lot of innovation within the on-the-ground programmes, most of which is only known about only by a few, directly involved people. It was the same in the University of the Arts, London, when we explored what was going on across the University as part of work to develop a Digital Vision. Lots of innovation, little visibility and less money. One of the College Directors coined the term, digital dimension, arguing that the digital impacted, and could benefit, all of the creative and admin processes within the University. It's a useful concept for organisations like HelpAge  it's not so much a question of where ICT could be useful, but rather starting from the perspective that there is a potential digital or ICT tool or service that could be used in support of all programme - or organisational - aims.

Participants drew a useful distinction between aiming to build from and develop usage of ICTs by older people and ICT use by the organisations. We agreed that, while it’s important for organisations to get good at integrating ICT, which can be a basis for sharing that knowledge and capacity with others, that can also represent barriers to those less well connected or experienced. One of the major issues for older people in many OECD countries, for example, is precisely that ICT based-services and communication is becoming the default, meaning people need to gain control of the tools and channels in order to access services like pensions. That has, in turn, given extra impetus to digital inclusion programmes in countries like the UK. Digital access as a right has traction in such countries but is unlikely to be a priority with older people in most of the places where HelpAge works, was the general consensus.

The bottom line for HelpAge  and other similar organisations, is that this is - will be - an evolutionary process, exploring and adapting ICT tools as and when they fit, and generally staying well back from the bleeding edge of innovation. It will be enough to focus on simply being more efficient - focusing on the Information and Technology nexus, as in the GOAL Ireland project presented at the INTRAC workshop - and recognising that any kind of communication process or project is likely to be able to be access ICT that supports  collaboration, enables more effective communication, builds and strengthens networks and links into existing organisational communication.

Tracking reach, understanding engagement - Social reporting at ICT4Ag

Over the past few weeks, I’ve been busy with the preparation and the coordination of the social reporting team for the ICT4Ag conference in Kigali. I'll blog separately about the process and learnings (actually, a lot!) in terms of both technology and people for a successful social reporting effort.

But if you are interested in discussing Twitter reach and online engagement around the event, please stay with me for a few minutes and keep reading.

The starting point for this conversation is the post that my friend and colleague Pete Cranston published few days back. I’m grateful for the questions he poses, as they couldn't provide a better framework for my reflection.

It’s two million, actually...

On one thing Pete is not not correct though. According to Keyhole, the tool we used to track the conversations around the conference hashtag #ict4ag13 (on Twitter, Facebook and Instagram) the total reach is over 2 million!

Together with the reach (defined as "the number of unique followers that a users has - and so the unique number of people that a tweet could potentially get to"), Keyhole also tracks impressions, number of posts and number of users that have contributed content around #ict4ag13. So if we look at this full picture, the headline figures are even more impressive, with over 12 million impressions, from 11,900 posts contributed by 1,272 users.

(click to enlarge image)

#ict4ag13 real-time tracker with Keyhole - 12 Oct-11 Nov. 2013

So what does it mean to reach these people? And do these numbers really matter?

On the one hand, if I look only at these figures, I am very pleased with the results - and I am indeed including these figures in my report back to CTA! And not just because I believe in ‘vanity metrics’ (in fact I don’t, as you’ll read) but for the reason that these numbers could be enough for me to say that the objective of the social reporting project - in terms of raising online awareness on the topics/sessions of the conference, update the online audience on the conference proceedings and engage them in the discussion - were met.

But I want to move beyond the numbers or - as Pete put it - "avoid the risk posed by pure, refined white sugar."

Keyhole itself provides some useful indicators that go in this direction. Indeed, it gives you insights on the contents that are shared (at the level of domains and individual links). It also provides a useful map that show where the conversation around the hashtag are happening, the demographics of contributors and the share of posts between original posts, retweets and replies.

To me these are already very interesting analytics and they provide a much richer picture of the online conversation around an event - and how users engage with it.

However, if you want to understand more about the value of social media for events and where different users position themselves on the ladder of engagement, especially when we look at Twitter conversations, I think different approaches are needed.

Tracking engagement, mapping conversations

While preparing for the event, I spent quite some time researching online for tools that could allow me to archive all the tweets around #ict4ag13, and to do some more analysis beyond the usual suspect metrics. I was looking for a free tool, and after several searches - and testing some applications - the right query string finally landed me to this post by Martin Hawksey, where he presents a way to archive AND visualize tweets, automatically pulling results from a Twitter Search into a Google Spreadsheet.

I am not going into the technical details of how this works (Martin does a pretty good job himself in explaining how to setup and use this script). As for the technical problems I have encountered, this will be in follow-up posts.

Again, I’d like to focus here on the results, and show you how different the picture looks like if you add another layer of analysis to the data available.

(click to enlarge image)

(Note - An interactive version of this visualization is available online but sometimes it may take long to load. You can hover over a node to see a summary of the data recorded in the archive. By clicking on the node you can see the conversations that person had condensed into 30 seconds)

As you can see in the image above, this visualizations shows the conversations between Twitter users around #ict4ag13 - producing a network analysis where the different nodes represent users and the connections between them is determined by the replies and conversations between them - instead of just retweets.

While this is probably not perfect - the visualization for example could be improved to have a more clear picture - I think this is very useful to evaluate the conversation around Twitter. In the case of the ICT4Ag conference, while many users contributed content, not all of them had been engaging in conversations - rather this happens amongst a core, central group of users, while many more remain at the periphery, broadcasting, engaging with the content of the conference but not really exchanging with one another.

Show off but connect the dots!

So while I am definitely using some ‘vanity metrics’ in my report back to CTA I think that a fair assessment of social media engagement around an event like in the case of ICT4Ag needs to look beyond just these numbers. It needs to map the conversations and the contents that are shared. Most important, once you have these information, it is critical to act on it and spend more attention into enlarging the conversation, to making sure that each contributor does not talk to himself but engage with others - or to put it another way, that each dot has at least a line that connects to it.

By Pier Andrea Pirani - Join Me on Google Plus

How to use Social Media time-effectively

'Advice on how to use Social Media effectively in a way that isn't massively time consuming' was the question on an excellent LinkedIn group 'Social Media for Nonprofit Organizations' (54K members). There are two lessons there immediately, and one quandary. The first lesson is that LinkedIn, after a very slow and cumbersome start, is becoming a lot more useful to ordinary members, partly because some of the group discussions are excellent. The best are niche, such as this one or Translators Worldwide, which has 15.5K members. 'Nothing ever happens in LinkedIn', was a standard complaint but its carefully nurtured image as the 'professional Facebook' drove recruitment. That meant that, until now, it has been mainly of use to recruiters who trawled productively amongst all those hopeful CVs. However, groups are increasingly seen as something which might take LinkedIn mainstream.


The second lesson is that social media does take time. To be even minimally effective in any one channel takes at least three to four hours a week - and that is maintenance level effort. To build a presence from scratch - define goals, identify audience, engage and build following etc - takes a lot more effort. And then there is doing this kind of curation task - gathering material to share with other people, learning from the content we browse or skim and 'feeding the web' (so that it will, as the adage has it, feed us back). Content still rules and creating new content is still an essential part of being effective in social media, even if the originality often lies in selecting from other people's contributions and taking a personal stance (well expressed in the content-aggregation site scoop.it which asks you to, 'add your insight' as you tag and share items of content').

That brings me to the quandary, which I shall share on the group: there have been a lot of useful, practical answers to the question from members. Nothing I have seen so far is new, in the sense of something we don't do or heard before but the crowd-sourcing process, triggered by a simple question, has generated a valuable collection of tips in one place. But because, sensibly, it is a members-only group (though open to anyone who wants to join) simply tweeting about it as I did this morning is frustrating for anyone who comes across my tweet, as a friend pointed out, since the resource is unavailable publcly. However, by gathering some of those tips - curating content - I am potentially exploiting people who contribute freely and voluntarily (even if there are promotional opportunities for those who share on such sites). I think the answer lies in following normal publishing conventions, listing sources of the tips below, but it will be interesting to hear responses from group members when I report what I have done.

Time-effective social media top tips:

Tools

• Use a social media dashboard like HootSuite or Tweetdeck to monitor, post and manage and several accounts
• Shareaholic browser extension for Chrome to post relevant content to social networks
• Develop summary podcasts or blogposts and share them widely
• Use Google alerts for keywords relevant to the target audience
• BufferApp as an alternative dashboard for scheduling and getting application specific analytics

Habits

• Schedule your time – and set time limits: nicely summarised in this infographic showing a 30 minute daily timeable
• Develop an editorial and content calendar
• Blog regularly (curate content, comment on other content, contribute original pieces) and promote blogs to all social media channels
• Spend an hour each week finding people to follow and pruning your own follower (friend) list
• Limit the networks you're involved in
• Manage notifications (they're always configurable in each network), limiting them to daily or less frequently

Sources

• Susan Chavez
• David Carr 
• David Somerfleck
• Lee Roberts 
• Sarah Zeldman
• Sue Duris

[cross-posted from Diplo Foundation website]

A Social Media Certificate for development organizations - An essential next step?

I participated in a roundtable on social media as tool for engagement in international cooperation, organised this week by the Brussels Office of the World Bank. It gave us the opportunity to discuss and interact with Jim Rosenberg, Head of Online Communications and Social Media at the World Bank, and Mike Krempasky, General Manager for Digital Public Affairs at Edelman, the world's largest public relations firm.

Social media at the World Bank 

For the last couple of years the Bank has been doing some serious work with and around social media. This fits into their bigger open development agenda and allows the organization to "meet and interact" with its beneficiaries and stakeholders where they are.

Social media creates new feedback loops that can inform the future work of the Bank. Even if Jim admitted that at the moment there is not a very structured system to collect and reflect on the feedback received and act upon it, there are some good examples of how the World Bank is opening up and creating more opportunities for engagement and participation. For instance, researchers involved in writing the next World Development Report have organised a series of live chats, in 4 different languages, to interact with stakeholders and beneficiaries about the content of the report.

Operationally, the World Bank has adopted a decentralized approach to social media and Jim suggested people should think of "social media as your embassy, while your organizational website is your home country". This seems a good approach for the Bank to engage with its users in the over 100 countries where it works, and across the issues it covers.

Efficient coordination and communication are essential to make this work. It also requires skilled staff, conversant with different languages and platforms, and who understand how different cultures interact with the new media. Staff capacity building is therefore crucial in the Bank strategy. While they had been offering internal trainings to staff in the past, they have now made what I think is a bold and very positive move. In the coming months, the Bank will be rolling out a digital literacy program for all staff, providing social media certification. The aim of this is to empower staff to understand their role and responsibilities and develop a minimum understanding of social and digital media.

Leadership, expectations and value

Mike Krempasky added to the discussion some very interesting points from his experience working with Edemol.

According to Mike, social media in the organization should be integrated into organizational strategy. In other words, the whole organization has to become social if it wants to be effective in using social and digital tools.

This means that organizations have to change the way they work and operate. The first ingredient that is needed in the recipe for success is leadership, according to Mike. Having leaders in the organization that are engaged in social, or at least see the value of it for open and transparent communications, is a critical factor for the success of digital programs.

Edelman tries to involve senior leaders in number of different ways, but training is definitely a cornerstone of their strategy. An interesting and effective way to go about training is the the 'reverse mentorship' model, where junior staff are partnered with more senior staff.

The second element to address, according to Mike, is expectations: there need to be a clear and practical set of expectations that define what social can accomplish and what not. Digital is not a panacea for every problem and don't worry, something will go wrong somewhere down the line - so you should plan for it and learn from mistakes, to improve.

Finally, social and digital programs need to have a clear concept of value. If you are not measuring your programs, you are not adding value to your organization, and you will have no evidence to defend your program. A high attention to Monitoring and Evaluation, including results tracking, is a key component of successful social and digital initiatives.

Some personal notes

As it was a while since I was last in Brussels to work or chat about social media, it was very interesting to see how the social media scene had changed in Europe's Capital in the past few years. Many of the people sitting around the table had social media as part of their job title. On the one hand, this clearly indicated how social media has matured over the past few years and large, bureaucratic organizations are finding different ways to make it work from them.

On the other hand, the discussion revealed that there is still quite a significant gap in terms of knowledge of social media tools and in general 'digital literacy' amongst staff at large. In this sense, I think the move of the World Bank to introduce social media certification for staff is a great step forward and I'm curious to see how other organizations will take up this practice, too. 

Equally, the reverse mentorship methodology used by Edelman looks very interesting and I would be keen to test it in the work we do with our clients.

Finally, I think the discussion revealed once again that more conversation is needed between international organizations to exchange good practices and compare notes on how each of them is putting social media to work in their own context. We know that sharing examples of what works and what doesn't helps to create synergies and a shared understanding of what impact social media can have in development.

About Pier Andrea Pirani - Join Me on Google Plus

Evaluation of CTA web2.0 and social media trainings 2008-2010

One of the most interesting piece of work we carried out in 2012 was an evaluation for CTA of its web2.0 related capacity building events (2008-2012). The goal of this study was to learn from three years of this web2.0 and social media training programme; to understand which demographic is the most enthusiastic adopters of web2.0 tools, and the impact that digital tools have in terms of personal development and institutional changes.

CTA Web2forDev Training Opportunity - Photo credits: Web2forDev website

Today, a blog post on Web2forDev summarises the main findings of the study:

• Between 2008 and 2010, CTA delivered 20 web2.0 related capacity building events, reaching a total of 510 trainees from over 20 ACP countries, mainly in Africa
• Not surprisingly, trainees under 36 are more likely to adopt web2.0 applications, except for online social networking, which interestingly was not affected by age;
• Female trainees have higher adoption rates than males for almost every web2.0 application;
• Trainees working for NGOs and national and international organisations are more likely to adopt web2.0 tools than those in educational and research institutions;
• Nearly 90% of trainees have improved their capacity to search for, access and share information;
• The use of the iMark module is the preferred way chosen by trainees to introduce colleagues and co-workers to social media;
• Bringing about systematic adoption of social media in institutions is much more challenging.

The article has generated some interesting comments and discussions, both on the Web2fordev website as well as in Web2forDev community on Dgroups.

A follow up post will soon be published to presents some of the recommendations included in the final report.
About Pier Andrea Pirani - Join Me on Google Plus

WBI social reporting apprenticeship programme on innovative procurement reforms

We're in South Africa this week for a new, exciting collaboration we have started with the World Bank Institute (WBI). It's about social media, ça va sans dire, but this time we'll be working with quite different types of development professionals and on a very specific topic.

Indeed, for the next four months we will be working with the WBI to facilitate an apprenticeship programme in Social Reporting on Innovative Procurement Reforms.

The rationale for this apprenticeship program is that innovative procurement reform initiatives are happening around the world, including in Fragile States. These efforts can offer powerful insights about what drives procurement reform. However, they are infrequently well documented and shared as practitioners don’t have tools or the support to document their work, leading to a missed opportunity to bring visibility to their work and share with peers.

The programme seeks to address this knowledge and capacity-building gap.

The WBI has identified innovative procurement champions committed to advancing public procurement reform, transparency and efficiency and we'll be kicking off the programme with a 3 days face-to-face workshop in South Africa. In the workshop, we'll train participants in the use of web 2.0  and social media  tools to capture and share their experiences.

One of the excellent features of this programme is that it goes well beyond the more usual social reporting training events. At the workshop, participants will agree the activity(ies) that they will explore and the colleague(s) with whom they will collaborate for the remaining months of the apprenticeship following the workshop.  It will be up to participants to identify and agree upon activities. These could include examples such as:

• documenting their own experiences of what works, 
• identifying  and documenting common good practices across countries or regions, 
• developing training materials which describe the stages of a process or 
• reporting on a deeper follow-through on the implementation of a specific activity.  

We'll support the apprentices with coaching throughout the duration of the programme, through online webinars, email discussions and virtual conferences.

All knowledge generated will be shared with a global community of practitioners for further learning and uptake - mainly through the Pro-Act platform.

In the video below, Marcela Rozo (WBI) introduces the Apprenticeship Program, its objectives and process.

About Pier Andrea Pirani - Join Me on Google Plus

Content Objects - Nectar for busy social media bees

Online content on its own, however interesting, informative or attractive, is as static as a poster on a wall. It will attract attention from people who pass, who might tell other people, but the impact of the work you have put into developing and posting your content - often quite a lot of work - will be a fraction of its potential unless you put as much effort into promoting and spreading the word. After our first social media training workshops at FAO in July 2012 we developed a new metaphor to try and communicate both how this can happen and the value of the random connections which fuel social media communications and very, very rarely, make content go viral.

An iris in Oxford's Botanical Gardens 

During the second workshop at FAO last week we introduced the new idea, using a natural metaphor since, as ever, nature got there first. With some trepidation, to an audience composed mainly of scientists, we talked about the role of bees in pollination. It was an excuse to show nice pictures of flowers - always good after lunch - which can represent an individual content object - a photo, video, blog or tweet. Flowers have evolved a variety of mechanisms to attract the insects they need to reproduce - colour, shape, smell, location and their structure, making it easy for bees and other insects to visit, collect nectar and pass on. In the same way, content needs to use all the tricks of the trade to stand out from the crowd. As well as the normal techniques for making the content communicate, these days that means ensuring that 'share this' buttons, or the equivalent, are prominently displayed - like the landing stage of the flower (see the bottom of this blog post).

A bee visiting an iris, already carrying pollen

The second element in the metaphor is the pollen that collects on the bees as they go from flower to flower. Randomly, unaware of their central role in passing on genes, the bees transmit the pollen from one flower to another. The parallel with social media is, we hope, obvious: the famous - and very shaky - claims that a tweet reached n1000 people operates on the same principle. If someone re-tweets one of my tweets then all of that person's followers will see it and, in the random way that tweet-viewing works, a tiny fraction of them might spot something in the second that it scrolls by and pass it on, and so on.

To enrich the metaphor, bees go back to their hives and communicate the location of the flower. I was startled that this amazing piece of scientific decoding wasn't universally understood. At the risk of stating the obvious, as these pictures below show, patient scientists observed and decoded the movements of bees returning to hives and recognised that they were communicating direction and distance through a precise set of dance moves (well, sort of dance moves, of a bottom waggling kind). Other bees set off to the same spot, and so the cycle continues. Again, we hope the link to social media is clear: adding a link to a tweet, or mentioning people in a blog, or tagging a photograph is doing the same thing as the bee dance: telling our hive - followers, friends, readers - precisely where this good smelling, tasty, bright content object can be found.

Bees dance, communicating direction &  distance in relation to the sun

And in the wonderful way of the world, bees also turn the nectar into honey, which is harvested across the world by animals and humans. Without being too fanciful about it, this can be seen as analogous to the way that learning and knowledge spreads and is shared, where other people's ideas and learning help us manufacture something that is both new and made up of millions of ideas from other people, places and times.

It's always good when you arrive at a point and see the marks that show someone else has passed this way. I learnt that Peter Casier has developed a similar metaphor in his work for CGIAR on social media strategy. Peter uses the metaphor of candy and shops, where the research item is the candy, the site the shop, and the social media task is to go out and spread the word - through tweets, blogs etc. We must both have a sweet tooth.

Learning social media online - UNITAR ICfD course

When Euforic Services approached me last year to facilitate an online course on social media, I didn’t imagine I would have so much fun. Last year I had participants from many different countries and regions as well as professional backgrounds and levels of knowledge. This definitely made for a good mix of people and certainly their contributions were inspiring. This year, I’m having the privilege to facilitate the course again along with a colleague based in Nigeria, Johnson Opigo. I’m still enjoying it very much!
 
The online course Innovative Collaboration for Development (ICfD), jointly developed by UNITAR and FAO has a unique approach to teaching and learning that is hands on and focuses on knowledge sharing. Six different modules (one or two weeks in length each) build up on concepts and skills gained throughout the course. Besides having interactive lessons, there are many online resources that help reinforce the concepts and tools reviewed. Activities and exercises help participants familiarize themselves with a wide range of tools and approaches to social media. For busy professionals, this course is ideal as all is needed is a computer and internet connection. People are able to fit the exercises, assessments and evaluations within their own schedules. We all are based in different parts of the world, and we don’t need to be connected at the same time!

“This course has been an eye opener for me. I've always seen social media as a tool that business and for profit organization could leverage but I've never considered how it could be used for non-profits, particularly those at the community and grassroots level. I'm really glad I had the opportunity to participate in this training as it has caused me to think differently.” – Summer 2011 participant 

The emphasis is not on the tools available, but rather on how an organization can choose and use the tools effectively to achieve specific goals according to their needs. Therefore, at the end of the 6 modules, each participant designs a social media strategy for his or her organization with clear objectives and measurable outcomes, giving them the opportunity to take something concrete back to work. 

"The knowledge gain will definitely be an asset to me and my organization. I plan to put these skills gained into practice as soon as possible.” – Summer 2011 participant 

Furthermore, this course concentrates specifically in the not for profit sector, with examples, case studies and stories that are relevant, so participants can relate to similar challenges and opportunities and they can adapt strategies that suit their requirements.

What makes a difference in this course is the participation of all the people involved. It’s definitely not a linear contribution facilitator-participant, but rather a collective collaboration where participants are encouraged to share their own experience and provide insights and recommendations to fellow colleagues. We all learn from each other. 

“It was really great meeting all these great minds for you all where great inspiration to me. Thank you all for your contributions and dedication to the course.” – Summer 2011 participant 

Following the success of the previous online courses, UNITAR and FAO are launching the Innovative Collaboration for Development (ICfD) course again this fall from 15 October to 14 December, 2012. Registrations are now open and applications must be submitted online until 28 September.

More information can be found on the course introduction and application page. There is still time to be part of this exciting experience!

by Rosamelia Andrade - Euforic Services Associate

Social media peer exchange session with FAO senior managers

Social media and other collaborative web 2.0 tools are now firmly embedded in the mainstream of information, communication and knowledge sharing processes, both strategic and everyday. However, in our experience running social media training workshops in organizations over the years we have often seen how difficult it is to translate the enthusiasm of participants learning to use new tools into changed work functions and processes.

Sometimes, this has to do with the lack of management buy-in, resulting in little or no space for staff to try and experiment with social media on a daily basis - let alone the integration of new tools to support existing processes.

After the social media workshop we recently held at FAO, we had organized a two-hour session for Senior and Middle managers. This session, structured as a Peer Exchange, was meant to addresses three questions:

1. How can social media enrich communications and knowledge sharing activities, bring communities of practice closer and facilitate the flow of information and knowledge?
2. From an operational perspective, what is the most effective way to mobilise and manage resources to support these processes in teams, programmes and across projects?
3. Over a three to five year time-frame, what are the most effective strategies for maximising the impact of knowledge sharing and communications through building up and integrating the use of social media and other digital tools?

After a quick run around the table to introduce participants and collect the questions they had brought to the session, we kicked off with a presentation on the relationship between social media and information, knowledge sharing and communication. In particular, we looked at two case studies from other agricultural development organisations illustrating how social media can enhance information, knowledge sharing and communication activities. 

The first case study, prepared by our colleague Vanessa Meadu, highlighted the experience of the CCAFS programme and how they used social media for communications and outreach during the Rio+20 event. The second case study instead presented the work of the ILRI KMIS Team and how they have been integrating social media in everyday business processes.

Using Social Media to communicate online and share knowledge from Euforic Services

The discussion that followed covered a range of interesting issues, some specific to FAO and some more generically applicable:

• FAO, like other organisation, already  has  20 years of experience in web communications: it is important that with social media typical mistakes from the past are avoided (which in a way was the aim of the session, to share learning and experience!).
• There is a trade off for FAO programmes and projects between doing more social media and diverting resources from other activities, especially as resources are limited. Having social media strategy templates would help managers decide where and how it is worth investing resources.
• Strategies are not enough, clear work plans are also necessary - and having example templates here also would help managers in their decision-making.
• With social media, the goal is engagement, it's about dialogue and conversations.
• The Communication and Partnership team of FAO is developing a new version of FAO Social Media Policy to ensure that social media is used consistently across the organization and FAO projects itself as one single organization across the social media landscape. Therefore, Facebook is being used centrally and there is only one official FAO Facebook account. The 'one account policy' is a sensible approach followed also by other UN agencies.
• The different teams and departments need to provide the Communication team with content and they will take care of disseminating it through Facebook - however, these content objects  need to come with the right metadata and descriptions. A description of this work flow is being developed and will soon be shared within the organization so that staff is made aware of this.
• It is important to realize and understand that the shelf life of individual content objects is longer than one of individual websites set up for specific programmes and projects.
• In some FAO divisions, there are already several early adopters and innovators. Their talent and enthusiasm could be leveraged by asking them to produce content objects that work well across social media channels such as Facebook; example of these include quizzes and 'did you know' type of questions.

Overall, it was a fascinating session - even though only five managers were able to come on the day (it was mid-July in Rome!).

We'll continue these conversations at the second and third FAO social media workshop planned for October and November.

FAO Social Media Workshop

Last week both Pete and I were in lovely Rome for the first of three social media workshops with FAO staff. It was great to facilitate again a workshop together - as we work together almost on daily basis, but virtually. It was also great to be back at FAO and work with our good friend and colleague Gauri Salokhe.

However, I must confess I was a bit nervous as we were getting closer to the kick off of the workshop... 

Well, it certainly was not our first social media workshop, quite the contrary...And we were well prepared: we had spent quite some times over the weeks prior to the event to design the workshop and produce slides and training materials, counting also on the excellent collaboration of Vanessa Meadu (CCAFS and Euforic Services Associate, who will co-facilitate in the next two session) and the useful feedback from Gauri. 

However, this time around we had opted for a complete new methodology and we were very curious and excited to see how it would be received by the participants. 

[Workshop participant Uwe Barg reflects in what he learnt in the Social Media workshop]

 
Over the years, we had learnt the lessons that social media tools are fun to use and you can get training participants very enthusiastic when they put their hands onto things like Google reader and Netvibes, or when they practice to edit and upload a video online. The question remains, however, on how they will adopt the different tools in their daily work practices, and if they will be able to incorporate social media in the tasks they are required to perform at the workplace. Even more so, as you consider that these people are probably the middle and late adopters of social media. 

So how did we go about it?

 

Start from the business functions, not from the social media tools!

Quite simply, instead of starting from a standard set of tools - the typical social media toolkit of a knowledge worker in development - we started from the business functions this worker has to  perform. The KS Toolkit provided to be an excellent starting point, with a quite comprehensive list of example contexts and specific tasks one may need to achieve. From this long list of functions, we boiled them down into three main areas:

• Project management
• Collaboration
• Communication and promotion.

For each of these, we identified a set of specific sub-functions. Through a pre-training survey, participants indicated the work processes and functions that were most relevant for them and on the basis of the results, we matched functions and tools; better yet, we bundled a set of core tools around each of the specific functions that were chosen in the survey, excluding the tools that were already known to participants. At the end of the first day of the workshop, we 'negotiated' with participants and together selected the tools that we would practice with (hands on) or simply demo and introduce (in speed geeking session) on the second day of the workshop. 

Overall the agenda setting was very flexible and 'democratic', and we tried to accommodate participants requests as they emerged. Still, three sessions were 'non-negotiable':

1. A stakeholder assessment - This in fact was the starting point of the workshop: you need to have clear who you want to reach and engage with, before you look into the how social media can help you doing it.
2. A session on 'personalized listening dashboards' (i.e. Google reader and Netvibes - and yes, we do need a better title for it...) - We strongly believe that being able to read the web through RSS feeds and mastering the tools to do so is fundamental in today's personal information management and to avoid information overload (or filter failure, according to how you see it)
3. A closing session on strategy - From our experience, getting participants to start thinking strategically how they would put social media at work in their context is a key component of an effective workshop, something that participants can go back to their desk with and start implementing immediately.

So how did this work out?

Positive feedback...but there's always room for improvement!

Personally, I had the feeling the overall methodology worked well: starting from the business functions put the whole workshop in a complete different perspective. Moreover, the fact that the ultimate choice of tools to explore came from participants themselves put the ownership of the event in their hands. The personal feedback we received from the participants also confirmed these impressions, as well as the overall score of the online evaluation we asked them to fill in after the workshop. 

However, as always, there is room to improve the workshop, and we're already working to incorporate the lessons learnt in the next sessions:

• The group (15 participants) was a mix of communication officers, programme officers and technical officers. This meant that the entry level and the knowledge and practical experience with social media was very different amongst the different participants. We'll try to have more homogeneous groups in the next two sessions.
• Across the workshop, we repeatedly stressed on the concept of 'content object': we wanted participants to understand that being online today is not just about uploading a report online on your corporate website. Increasingly, it is about creating different content objects around it, or different products for different audiences. These objects ought to have 'legs' to be able to travel across the web - and to be share-able so that your audience can pass them on to their own friends and followers and help you disseminate what you do. This concept worked out well but we need to have more graphics and diagrams to make it even clearer, especially to a beginner audience.
• We had a conversation around FAO social media policy on the last day of the workshop - right before participants had to develop their own social media plans, for their programme, project or team; for some participants, this conversation should have happened up front at the beginning of the whole workshop, so that they would have a clear idea what they are allowed and encouraged to do. We're still discussing where this session would fit best.

The next two sessions will be in October and November, there are already quite some FAO staff that have expressed their interest in participating - and hopefully there's some positive buzz in the building after last week training and both sessions will be fully booked.

By the way, did I mention we also had a very interesting peer exchange session with some FAO senior managers? Well, stay tuned, we will be blogging about it soon!

Seven principles for middle and late adopters of social media

We are meeting different people these days when we talk about and work with social media, more of the massive numbers in  the middle and latter portions of the classic adoption curve.

Presenting and facilitating at three very different events - the eDiplomacy day at the Instituto Publico in Rome, an ICARDA/ICRISAT programme inception workshop in Dubai and an informal chat with a group of international development consultants in Oxford -  I heard similar things from people who are only now feeling their way into how they can engage with the online mainstream:

• there are many  from the ‘early majority’: people who have became enthusiastic and skilled users of several social media or collaborative platforms and who want to integrate them into their everyday work, as well as evaluate some of the less-well known tools
• there are probably more from the ‘late majority’ who are involved in one or two platforms, sometimes uneasily or by default: 
• 'I am on Facebook to follow the kids' is something I've heard around the world; 
• the logistics information, agenda and reports for the Dubai workshop were on a wiki, which for many of the  participants was their first real exposure to anything other than Wikipedia: they had no choice;  
• 'I kept being invited to LinkedIn so I eventually joined'
• and there are some classic late adopters checking out the space: 'everyone tells me I need to be on Twitter, do I?' to which the answer is, 'it depends'. I don't like the term 'laggards’. It is loaded and   inaccurate: it implies everyone will - should - adopt,  eventually. But there is, of course, no reason to join any of these platforms unless it serves a purpose. 

And what is the mainstream? As an illustration I listed for one of the groups the tools that I use regularly, not because I am a model but because they are also typically used by many other early adopters I know.  The list is at the bottom of this post. 

 

Seven principles for those late into the social web

It’s hard to come up with general principles for the majority, since it includes all human variation and possible sets of interests. And in 2012 there are many, many mature products on the market which can be adapted to suit an individual’s needs. For a long time in our training we have used business functions within organisations as the basis for assessing need and interest. It's an approach that can be extended to individuals. For example, promotion and collaboration were the two functions which generated most interest amongst the group of consultants. Here are some  notes from our discussion, elaborated later of course, which is the right of the blogger. 

1. As ever, start with your aims: why would you want to use one of these tools? For example:
• Promotion: what is the audience you want to reach, where do they hangout online? Research, join and start to engage. 
• Collaboration: are your colleagues already using a tool? How good is their Internet access and how confident are they using social media? Select an appropriate platform (see below) and invest the time in learning how to use it well, so you can support them. Note that if you choose a wiki they will probably find it surprisingly difficult.
2. Engage with people: the essence of social media is that it is, well, social. That means personal conversations, linking people to people, sharing information, ideas etc, joining important lists and conversations on other people’s sites. These are not platforms for broadcast messages. Crucially, it also means keeping on top of the exchanges, for example, commenting on comments, thanking people for linking to your work or RT your tweets. 
3. Feed the web and it will feed you back. For example, linking to other people’s content, RT in Twitter, liking in Facebook or slideshare and commenting in blogs will get you noticed, connected and - if your content has meaning - shared in turn
4. Use groups of tools, linking and integrating: many social media tools are designed to one thing well but they are all designed to interact and exchange data (to be mashed up, as they say). For example, I echo tweets into LinkedIn (via the Hootsuite client) and selectively into Facebook (you simply have to link the two accounts and use #fb). I tweet about content I generate - Blogs, videos, photos, slides;
5. Always share and record your work online somewhere public, for example slides on slideshare, project progress on Blogs or Twitter
6. Be yourself: authenticity scores over slickness, although manufacturing 'authenticity' earns PR firms and political spin merchants a good living. 
7. Have fun: Good social media practice has a lot in common with being a good party host: introduce people to people, provide interesting titbits, circulate regularly, help people have fun.

 

So what social media tools do you use?

For the record, and because we believe in transparency, here is the list of tools I regularly use, ranked loosely by how often and how important they are to my work:

• Twitter (via client software - hootsuite [web client] or tweetdeck [dowloadable client])
• Delicious (it's always surprising how few people who work collaboratively with others around the world use Delicious or one of the competitors like Diigo) 
• Dropbox (probably the most straightforward collaborative application since it requires no social media experience and, carefully managed, can serve as a common repository for collaborative projects. Importantly, it doesn't require users to change their favourite tools, like MS Office or the Mac equivalents
• Wiki (e.g. euforicweb; platforms I use include mediawiki [free, open source: clunky, the original, and still the Wikipedia platform]; wikispaces; pbworks) Note that a lot of people find learning to use a wiki quite difficult: for example the 'edit' function, also a basic essential for blogging, flummoxes people who haven't had a lot of experience)
• Google docs (tends to be easier to understand for new users, since the applications 'feel' similar to MS Office packages that people use already. It does require good Internet access, although there is offline access to documents. Candidly, I have had more problems that I expected with offline Google docs)
• Facebook
• News and other feeds, through Google Reader; we suggest using an iGoogle Home Page as an introduction to the value of filtering news through feeds, or  netvibes, which allows users to share and publish a common home page, as in this great example from Stephanie Psaila of Diplo Foundation
• Blogs (writing on our own blog; for communication support, for example the Diplo Foundation blog, from where I cross-post here or from events,  such as those we support for GDNet. I always quote John Naughton as my favourite blogger, partly for interest and partly because he does it so well; Tim Davies is another superb digital-artist)  
• Slideshare
• LinkedIn
• Scheduling tools (for example Doodle for diaries; eventbrite for, er, events)
• YouTube (we use Blip.tv, as it syndicates content to other sites; Vimeo is used by many people for video quality reasons)
• Flickr for pictures and images (see again euforicweb for how we easily the content can be shared and displayed; many people also Google’s platform called Picassa)
• Mindmeister, for collaborative mindmaps
• Yammer, which works as an internal Twitter

There are several platforms I want to explore a bit more

• Tumblr, and easy to use and flexible blogging and aggregation tool
• Google+, Google's 'social network', which is apparently used by more people than Twitter, but still has to convince me
• Pinterest which enables people to collect and link to images from across the web and I communicate best through images

The states of eDiplomacy

After a long, competitive selection process we are then told we know nothing and can't use the knowledge and skills we bring with us', said an exasperated new foreign diplomat based in Rome from a diplomatic service which lags a long way behind the mainstream in its adoption of social media and the other tools of eDiplomacy.  It was especially surprising to hear of such myopia in Italy where 73% of the online population are on Facebook (approx 37% of the population), making it Facebook's 11th most active market. The majority of the approximately 80 participants at the eDiplomacy day held at the  Instituto Diplomatico in Rome this week told more positive stories about how their own Ministries are engaging with the digital landscape. For example, Ambassador Bernardino Regazzoni, introducing the evening expert panel session, described how the Embassy of Switzerland in Italy employs the experience of younger diplomats in their drive to engage online.

In a time of constrained and reducing budgets, resource issues were understandably high on the agenda. Few countries could match the three staff working on communication at the US Embassy in Rome. Yet, like the Italian Instituto itself, most are creatively redeploying and retraining staff to be able to engage with what the majority recognised as essential tools for public diplomacy. Stefano Baldi, the Director of the Instituto illustrated how they are using all kinds of technology from video streaming to blogging, as can be seen in this impressively rapidly turned around video from the Italian Ministry (up a long time before I could complete this blog!).

   

Twitter, Facebook, YouTube, Flickr (or a similar photo-sharing application) and Blogging have emerged as the standard set of tools used to implement the kind of multi-channel communication strategy shown to be effective by those leading the band of eMFAs into the next phase of the digital age. Put on the spot, a narrow majority of the participants at the evening session agreed that Embassies should engage with at least three such channels. To sceptical looks from those struggling with budgets, participants from several Embassies told stories illustrating how, beyond an initial learning period, integrating different social media channels is an economical use of time, relative to the returns in term of closer engagement with the different audiences with which MFAs aim to connect.

In reviewing the eDiplomacy Hype Cycle, which we in Diplo have been discussing recently, participant's accounts of progress and good practice within their own institutions suggests that there are micro-cycles within an overall cycle which are applicable to national contexts. MFAs like the US, the Canadian and the UK FCO have been using social media tools for over three to four years and they have learned how to maximise returns from investing limited resources. Other later adopters are engaging with enormous enthusiasm but are likely to experience something of a backlash - a descent into the Trough of Disillusionment - as longer-term resource commitments become clearer, along with the typically slow build of a new online profile in a digital space which is becoming more and more crowded. As for what next, during his opening remarks to the panel discussion, Ambassador Carmel Inguanez from the Embassy of Malta in Italy invited participants to an Innovation in Diplomacy conference which is to take place in Malta on the 20^th and 21^st of November. The digital space changes so rapidly it will be fascinating to see what will already be history in six months time. Jovan Kurbalija reminded us that Diplomacy has always struggled with the acute tension between continuity and change, a tension screwed ever tighter by the imperative to adapt policy and practice to the new digital seas in which we all swim. (cross posted from Diplo Foundation site)