Communication – Page 18 – The Consulting Artist

Making Your Mark

I attended a conference recently at which I’d also been asked to speak. The brief was very clear – each speaker had been allocated a half hour slot in which to deliver a talk for around 20 minutes and then take Q&A. I don’t know about you, but I appreciate that kind of clarity – it helps me prepare.

The first guy on stage was someone I’d been looking forward to hear from, and although he spent a little too long at the start telling us about himself (yawn – we care about this bit far less than you do Mr Speaker), his talk started to follow an interesting path. The 20 minutes passed quickly and it became clear to me that he was going to overrun. Someone at the back of the room was busy deploying the classic ‘shut up and sit down’ sign by rapidly drawing their hand across their throat, and the presenter sailed on. And on. And on.

The half hour concluded with a fire alarm test (we had been warned earlier) and despite the repeated klaxon sound, our presenter carried on. He fought his way bravely through the alarm and persisted for a further ten minutes. As his talk rumbled on a few tweets appeared along the lines of ‘yeah yeah, we get it already, get a move on’. Someone tweeted from beyond the room ‘I’m sure no one will mind Mister X overrunning, he’s such a compelling speaker’, which prompted a few choice replies. Here are two of my personal faves:

“fire alarm announcement, and wailing – at last some insight”

“I have a slide deck and you are going to see them all regardless”

Mister X stretched a twenty minute talk out to forty minutes, left no time for questions and threw the whole schedule out of whack. He made a powerful mark – and not in the way he intended. Note to the conference chair – next time, please intervene and stop the torture.

Subsequently – Mister X chose to blame the fire alarm for him overrunning, conveniently ignoring the fact that he was supposed to have been done and dusted before said alarm even started. He got short shrift from the Twitterverse on this point and has not been seen since (well he probably has – it’s just that we’re not looking anymore).

The day carried on in fine form and the rest of the speakers were informative, enjoyable to listen to and on time. At the end of the event, there was a generous chunk of time put aside for a panel Q&A. Normally I hate these – and I had to be coaxed up to participate, sorry about that. I was wrong to be reluctant, the audience had loads of questions and the discussion bounced around the room freely and usefully.

At the close, the conference chair did a quick who’s who type run through, starting with Mister X who had long since departed, presumably to screw up someone else’s schedule. This is what the chair said. ‘First we had Mister X (loooong pause), he overran.’ That was it – the sum total, the full stop under Mister X’s appearance. He overran.

You will have an opportunity to make your mark today, how will you choose to do it?

Johnny Rotten or Beethoven?

Last week I picked up on a tweet from someone via a conference which said ‘Social HAS to loose the anarchist tag – will never go mainstream otherwise. Need to move from punk rock to classical. #e20s’

I thought this a somewhat narrow minded view so I retweeted and said so. Shortly after I received a reply saying ‘You’re welcome to your opinion #e20s’, and perhaps rather bluntly I replied ‘Ta – I don’t particularly welcome yours, punk and classical, we can have both’. In quick succession I then received ‘I’ve no problem with challenge or criticism Doug. I’ve dished out enough of both! #e20s’, followed by ‘I don’t particularly enjoy being hashtagged all the time though’ and finally, ‘I just find the hashtags a bit #naff and #petty Doug’.

I tried to respond with ‘If you can’t stand the tweet heat – stay out of the kitchen’, but the person had blocked me, so I couldn’t. Of course we’re free to follow, unfollow and block whoever we choose and I couldn’t help but feel the final response and subsequent and immediate blocking of me was perhaps, in the tweeters own words, a bit ‘#naff and #petty’.

Leaving aside our squabble, I think anarchy sometimes gets a bad rap. As well as being ‘A state of disorder due to absence or nonrecognition of authority’ it is also defined as ‘Absence of Government and absolute freedom of the individual, regarded as a political ideal’, and I’m sure you’ll find other definitions out there too. There are times when people question how much help Government is (regardless of its political hue), and despite all the challenges the concept of absolute freedom of the individual does at times have an allure to it, doesn’t it?

Of course there is an element of rebellion about social media. I expect Starbucks would rather people hadn’t hijacked their #SpreadTheCheer Twitter wall at the Natural History Museum and tweeted ‘Pay your fucking taxes’ right across it, but the mood of the day turned against them, and they got a taste of a ‘State of disorder’. I think this is more a case of recognising that you don’t own and control hashtags and the responses to them once they’re out there, rather than outright anarchy.

I found a few other examples of the Dark Side of social media (you’ll doubtless have plenty more), which I shared recently at the Workplace Trends Social Media for Business Conference. This was an interesting opportunity for me as in the main; I have a very positive experience of social media. Nevertheless I went searching for the dark side, and I found myself in the sewer soon enough.

I found plenty of examples of disjointed organisations proudly displaying their silo mentality for all to see, including a fine one courtesy of Qantas. As Qantas launched their #QantasLuxury competition to win a pair of Qantas pyjamas, what their marketing department failed to consider was their current public image following the decision taken to ground the entire fleet during an industrial dispute. The online furore that followed was of Qantas’ own making, and you can’t help but feel that a bit of good old fashioned talking between departments beforehand could have saved a lot of embarrassment.

We delved into the tragic tale of Sandy Hook from the perspective of Ryan Lanza. Ryan Lanza, estranged brother of the gunman Adam Lanza was incorrectly named as the killer by CNN News. Fox and CBS quickly followed suit while Ryan continued to work at his desk in New York City, until his social media feeds lit up with false accusations and his world changed.

We then considered Mary Beard, the sometimes controversial Cambridge Don who was vilified on social media following an appearance on BBC Question Time. In this case – the attacks were more about her appearance rather than her intellect, and I wondered, if Mary had been male, would such a thing have happened? As she reflected in an interview with The Independent, Mary Beard said:

“I think we’re still in the process of learning how to deal with all that. I suppose I feel, perhaps naively, optimistic that we’re just not yet quite clear about the rules of how you communicate online publicly. If you do respond, and say quite calmly, ‘I don’t think I actually said that,’ quite often you get a real response.”

Is she right? Watch this space.

My journey took me to some dark places for sure, and in summary this is what I was reminded of:

You don’t own hashtags so use them by all means – at your own risk
Despite the open nature of social media we see loads of businesses still completely siloed inside. When is business going to understand that it’s all about the conversation – not just in silos, but across and beyond the organisational boundaries?
Check your facts

People can be and are hugely irresponsible at times, and they certainly don’t need social media to achieve that.

Perhaps more importantly – there was a brief aside to the squabble I referenced earlier when another contributor said (re: punk v classical), ‘how about New Romantic?’ How about it indeed. In fact – why not a bit of each and every musical genre (except maybe Phil Collins)? If the culture of social can’t be an inclusive, broad church, then it’s not a culture, it’s a cult.

Size Isn’t Everything…

…but sometimes it helps! A huge thumbs up to the team at Target Field, home of the Minnesota Twins, for granting us access to their massive jumbotron screen for the Thomson Reuters Project Management Unconference this week. Have you ever seen a bigger twitter wall?

More to follow soon – right now though my jetlag has knocked me straight out of the ballpark!