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.

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!