Robert Paterson's Weblog

10 reasons NOT to ban social media in your organisation

In the following tongue-in-cheek video, Ron Desi gives 10 "good reasons" to ban social media in your organisation.  

To recap, the 10 reasons in reverse order are

10. Social media is a fad.
9. It's about controlling the message.
8. Employees will goof off.
7. Social Media is a time waster.
6. Social media has no business purpose.
5. Employees can't be trusted.
4. Don't cave into the demands of the millennials.
3. Your teams already share knowledge effectively.
2. You'll get viruses.
1. Your competition isn't using it, so why should you?

via c4lpt.co.uk

What's your excuse?

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It's not the content but the connection that counts - NPR Rocks

One of the Holy Grails of the Public Radio system when I worked there back in 2005/6 was to attract a younger audience. At the time – even though the context of my involvement was the web – the CW on the solution was to add more younger programming – Hence Bryant Park. Of course this failed as what station manager was going to give up the BlockBuster Morning Edition to have an alternative that the mainstream would not like. The CBC has gone full on to find a younger audience by changing the POV of its programs. I wonder how they are doing? They have largely driven me away.

But the guys at NPR are smart and they learn. They went full on into the use of Social Media. New data out shows that their drive into social media – Twitter in particular – has given them what they wanted a new and younger and larger “audience” that have been attracted to NPR’s programming – not because of a content shift but because they made it easier for a younger audience to connect to content on their terms! The secret was in the flexibility of the new connection NOT the content.

In a survey of more than 10,000 respondents, NPR found that its Twitter followers are younger, more connected to the social web, and more likely to access content through digital platforms such as NPR’s website, podcasts, mobile apps and more.

NPR has more than one Twitter account; its survey found that most respondents followed between two and five NPR accounts, including topical account, show-specific accounts and on-air staff accounts.

The data on age is hardly surprising. The median age of an NPR Twitter follower is 35 — around 15 years younger than the average NPR radio listener. This lines up with data we recently found about other traditional news media; the average Facebook user reading and “liking” content on a news website is two decades younger than the average print newspaper subscriber.

Not to put too fine a point on it, the future of news media lies in successful integration of social media to get the attention (and click-throughs) of a younger generation — a generation whose news needs are vastly different than those of the generations that preceded it. (My emphasis)

Of NPR’s Twitter followers, the majority (67%) still do listen to NPR on the radio. But the other ways they access NPR’s content are indicative of a growing trend:

Of survey respondents, 59% said they use NPR.org, 39% listen to NPR’s podcasts, around half use an NPR mobile app and 28% say they access NPR via Facebook. All told, 77% of NPR’s Twitter followers said they get all or most of their news online.

And Twitter followers are more likely to expect breaking news, too, likely because of the real-time nature of the medium.

At KETC we found the same thing when we ran out project to help people find a safer more trustworthy route to help in the Mortgage Crisis. KETC helped many people who never watch our programming and who never will. They got connected to KETC because they found what they needed on the web. It was how we connected that was the key.

When NPR hosted the New Realities Project back in 2006/6 – the intent was to imagine our value in 2009 and beyond. We did this. Most saw that one of the things we had to do was to do a Burger King and offer our content up “Your Way”

The guys even wrote a song – but while some – mainly at NPR really got this – of course as we know today about adoption – most did not and have not and still hope that all of this will go away.

Want a larger and more committed “audience” – let them find you “Their Way” – Integrate the web into what you do fully.

via fastforwardblog.com

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The Left Right Paradigm is Over: Its You vs. Corporations | The Big Picture

For a long time, American politics has been defined by a Left/Right dynamic. It was Liberals versus Conservatives on a variety of issues. Pro-Life versus Pro-Choice, Tax Cuts vs. More Spending, Pro-War vs Peaceniks, Environmental Protections vs. Economic Growth, Pro-Union vs. Union-Free, Gay Marriage vs. Family Values, School Choice vs. Public Schools, Regulation vs. Free Markets.

The new dynamic, however, has moved past the old Left Right paradigm. We now live in an era defined by increasing Corporate influence and authority over the individual. These two “interest groups” – I can barely suppress snorting derisively over that phrase – have been on a headlong collision course for decades, which came to a head with the financial collapse and bailouts. Where there is massive concentrations of wealth and influence, there will be abuse of power.  The Individual has been supplanted in the political process nearly entirely by corporate money, legislative influence, campaign contributions, even free speech rights.

This may not be a brilliant insight, but it is surely an overlooked one. It is now an Individual vs. Corporate debate – and the Humans are losing.

Consider:

• Many of the regulations that govern energy and banking sector were written by Corporations;

• The biggest influence on legislative votes is often Corporate Lobbying;

• Corporate ability to extend copyright far beyond what original protections amounts to a taking of public works for private corporate usage;

• PAC and campaign finance by Corporations has supplanted individual donations to elections;

• The individuals’ right to seek redress in court has been under attack for decades, limiting their options.

• DRM and content protection undercuts the individual’s ability to use purchased content as they see fit;

• Patent protections are continually weakened. Deep pocketed corporations can usurp inventions almost at will;

• The Supreme Court has ruled that Corporations have Free Speech rights equivalent to people; (So much for original intent!)

None of these are Democrat/Republican conflicts, but rather, are corporate vs. individual issues.

For those of you who are stuck in the old Left/Right debate, you are missing the bigger picture.

via ritholtz.com

Bang on - this is the arena where we have to take back being human - it is a war to the death for corporatism has no interest but its own.

Now I am not saying that all who work for them are bad. But once inside it is like the Matrix. They can't see any more that they live in an illusion.

Take the Red Pill and join Neo

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Why we need a new media model - Complexity!

Are you frustrated by how our politicians cannot seem to get anything done anymore? I am mad as hell! I hate how they just seem to score political points off each other? Don't you?

Does it worry you, as a consequence, that we cannot seem to make any progress on important issues such as energy, education, health, global conflict and now immigration? Does it seem to you as it does to me that each issue seems to about only competing slogans and yelling and name calling?

If you share my concerns, do you wonder why our political process is so polarized into conflict?

I suspect that the answer is that how our media works is big part of this.  They live by headlines and by circulation. This is their model. So fear making and conflict is how they make their money. Conflict sells papers and pulls in eyeballs and ears.  So they offer all of us - politicians and us - a view of what is going on that is binary - Us against them - Me against You. 

Maybe this worked better in a simpler world where our problems were in our community and we could all experience the context. Then a headline was OK because we we the local experts. We knew and experienced what was going on.

But now we live in a such a hyper connected world many of our problems are outside of our experience. How could you know that the noble idea of "Bringing democracy to Afghanistan" is an insane idea? What do you know of the place - you have no context. No we can have a furious debate about this with no one knowing anything real about the context. Such debates can never end.

What do you know about the pressures that have driven millions to risk their lives to cross the border to work in terrible conditions? You and I don't and we can't - so instead we can take sides in an artificial debate about legal or not - secure border or not - racist or not - and never come close to understanding enough to make a valid decision about what to do.

What do you and I really know about oil reserves and how much time we really have before there never will be cheap oil again. What do you and I really know about how our food supply depends utterly on cheap oil and how we might starve if this is not available? We cannot - so we engage instead in a furious and futile debate about whether there us global warming or not.

So if the media only gives us headlines - if it always drops a story when there is no "News" - if it never helps us find the context what then?

Don't we need to find a better way that can help us understand the complex issues?

What would this mean? What would better mean?

This is a "no-context" storm - this image shows us how it feels to be In the storm of "no-context". We just get tossed about. We are helpless. We get scared. 

But this is the Pattern - all hurricanes look like this if we can find the right perspective. As you can see from this POV there is structure, order and meaning. We can't stop them but we can work with them because we know how they work.  

We can also know the tracks that they take - not precisely - but we can mitigate the damage that they do.

No meteorologist will ever tell you that she can predict the precise actions of a complex system like a hurricane but we can learn how to live with them. We can do a lot to redice our risks because we do understand their pattern and their habits. 

Now imagine if your media could help you see the patterns in our complex challenges? Surely we would do better than we do now? Would that be a project that would excite you?

THIS is what we are trying to do at KETC in our project on the most binary topic of our time right now - Immigration. A topic that gets us all easily into name calling and so into a dead end where NO progress is possible.

Immigration is a topic that the media don't even pretend to offer us a pattern. Here is the Pattern of Patterns that will show you the nature of a problem and how you solve them.

Cynefin Dave Snowden

The curent media is stuck in the Simple. It pretends that we and they live in the "Known Realm" The Simple Realm (Laying Bricks or Stacking Wood) where cause and effect are directly linked. They don't even go to the "Knowable" or Complicated Realm (Designing a Jet Engine)

They operate in the Simple Realm when nearly all that confronts us is Complex or Chaotic. Using the rules of the Simple to deal with Complex and Chaotic leads to confusion and disaster. 

Nearly all our challenges are in the Complex or Chaotic realm. These are the realms nature herself. So for example this is how Hurricanes are structured. They are Complex. In the Complex Realm we have to get enough perspective to find the hidden and inevitable order in the patterns. These patterns are the same but different. They are predictable in how they operate but only in a general sense. For instance all turbulence of a certain type for instance looks like a hurricane. The water going down your plughole and a galaxy all share the same pattern. They have internal rules that are consistent that enables us at least to understand them. Whereas if you are in a storm, all you can do is hang on and hope. 

Chaos is even harder to "see" but it too has patterns and order that have structure but they are very hard to "see" as a lot of time has to pass before the pattern emerges.

In Chaotic Realms, small things have to iterate over time until a shape is settled. So, think of a seed becoming a small shoot, then a plant then a sapling then a tree and then a copse and then a wood and then the full ecosystem of a forest. At each stage the shape changes but you can only see the complete pattern at the end.

That is how Chaos evolves into a knowable pattern. All acorns have the potential to become not just a tree but a forest. 

If you only saw an acorn and did not know it could become a forest, you would have to wait for a thousand years to see the connection. You still might never see this. Most only see the obvious end state as a tree. But that is not the real end state. The Climax Forest is the end state.

But now we know the pattern, it will always do its best to reach its potential. We can help an acorn become a forest by helping it have the best environment for each stage of its development along its trajectory. So we cannot control it. We cannot be assured that it will reach its potential but we can give it a very good chance. It is like this with our children.

Seeing the patterns then is the way to understand Complex and Chaotic system.

So then how can a media organization do this? Well first of all it has to know that this is the work. Not itself a small thing when all the real media lives in a different mindset!

This is what we have decided to do at KETC. Call us mad! Most called Columbus mad. No one would finance his voyage to the west for decades. Everyone knew that the world was flat! It took a Queen to make the investment. Columbus also did not have a lot of fun along the way either. This is not fun being out there on a limb with everything at risk. But it is maybe our destiny. We sure can't turn back now.

So sorry about the lecture but I don't know how else to show you our context.

This is where we are at KETC.

I would like to show you an example of how we are using "pattern seeking" to make sense of immigration. If we can do this then maybe we can make sense of a lot of other things.

Mea Culpa - We have not cracked this.

We are very much still finding our way and do not claim to have solved this. We feel like Columbus must have felt weeks into his voyage as the supplies were running out and the crew getting scared. I think we have seen the odd gull and a few logs in the water. We sense we are close to land but not sure. And we still don't know what to do if we get to land.

You can help us by telling me more about how we might improve this process. You will see things that we can't - please pile in and help!

Here is the process that has emerged from our work - with no prior plan. It has just emerged into our own vision this week! It is offering us a pattern for rooting an issue into pattern of its own that has structure and so meaning.

1. We go out to the community in St Louis and ask people in the street what they know or think about an issue - In this case the Dream Act - we do this to find out where we are starting from - do people have a view, do they know much anyway, what is the local temperature? We start with our local reality and experience with the issue. We let them speak not us. 
2. We go out to an expert - who does know a lot about what ever is the issue - in this case an immigration lawyer in St Louis - she provides her professional opinion of what is the context. We find out the facts from a person who knows a lot more than we coud ever know. We let her speak not us. 
3. We go out to a person who is directly affected by the issue and get her experience. We find the impact of the issue not from a pundit but from a person who is affected. We let her speak and not us
4. We mine the web for the related national stories on the topic - This is where I am using Darwin to help me find patterns globally on the web related to Immigration This link will go deeply into the help that this tool is providing in seeing patterns in the chaos of the web - a whole new kind of search based on pattern emergence. We extract the larger patterns from the chaos of all the headlines. We let them speak and not us.

Please look at what we have done behind the links.

In part 2 of this post I will offer up the pattern that I have seen - but for now - what do you see if anything?

 

My Gangsta!

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Tony Curtis - The Shell Scene - RIP

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Raj on the Value of Nothing - Brilliance in 3 Minutes

 HT Charles Frith

This is the pathway to our future - we go this way or we go nowhere - and you only have to invest 3 minutes to hear the ultimate in coherence - a masterpiece of compression and story telling - I am aghast at how thoughtful he is.

What America needs now - True Leadership in Politics and the Media

The issues that upset the Tea Kettle movement — debt and bloated government — are actually symptoms of our real problem, not causes. They are symptoms of a country in a state of incremental decline and losing its competitive edge, because our politics has become just another form of sports entertainment, our Congress a forum for legalized bribery and our main lawmaking institutions divided by toxic partisanship to the point of paralysis.

The important Tea Party movement, which stretches from centrist Republicans to independents right through to centrist Democrats, understands this at a gut level and is looking for a leader with three characteristics. First, a patriot: a leader who is more interested in fighting for his country than his party. Second, a leader who persuades Americans that he or she actually has a plan not just to cut taxes or pump stimulus, but to do something much larger — to make America successful, thriving and respected again. And third, someone with the ability to lead in the face of uncertainty and not simply whine about how tough things are — a leader who believes his job is not to read the polls but to change the polls.

Democratic Pollster Stan Greenberg told me that when he does focus groups today this is what he hears: “People think the country is in trouble and that countries like China have a strategy for success and we don’t. They will follow someone who convinces them that they have a plan to make America great again. That is what they want to hear. It cuts across Republicans and Democrats.”

via nytimes.com

I think that Tom Friedman is on the money here. I would like to add that a related problem that we have to solve is leadership in the media.

In a vain search for ratings and readers, the media has become obsessed with headlines and in a vain search for authority it has also been obsessed with "balance".

The result is that our complex problems have been reduced to slogans and polarization. Because no challenge is shown from its context and roots - no solution can be found. Often the truth is put in balance with the lie. For instance on immigration - no beheadings, total undocumented is 5% not a wave - crime is down - jobs are not taken away - all these are lies designed to make headlines by their perpetrators and swallowed by the an uncritical media a legitimate side of the debate.

Most of the media has no interest in helping us understand what is going on and drop a topic if it is no longer a headline. On their Olympian perch, they refuse to offer up a path for resolution but keep the wound open.

This approach plays into the political system that Tom talks about. The easy votes come from fear. Fear sells papers and gets viewers - so fear is what we get. So paralysis and decline is what we get.

Some of us have to do our best to do better in the media.

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The war of the sexes - The eternal Struggle

 

The Higgins POV - Followed by Eliza's

 

Time to Re-Invent the Food Bank Model?

A shortage of supplies at a food bank in eastern P.E.I. has volunteers worried they won't be able to keep up with demand.

Lawrence Power, a volunteer at the Southern Kings and Queens Food Bank in Montague, said the shelves are half bare.

"This is the first time we ever had to ask the people to give a little more, which you hate to do, because they're pretty generous as it is," he told CBC News.

Power said supplies are the lowest they have been in several years. The food bank is especially low on cereal, canned meat, fresh vegetables and items like pudding for children's lunches.

"The people are trying, but you don't get as much for your money any more, with the price of groceries going up, so I think that has a lot to do with it," he said.

Power said demand for the food is also increasing, with one or two additional families needing the services each week.

The Montague location used to serve approximately 175 people each month. That number has climbed to about 250 every month, Power said.

via cbc.ca

I have always found the Food Bank Model odd - those who are more fortunate donate crap food such as KD. The outcome - more dependency and a diet that is bad for you.

What I am seeing in places like Detroit - where there is no one to donate in large areas - is a shift away from dependency to groups starting to grow their own food. This is what happened in Cuba during the terrible period after the oil was cut off.

I am not saying that growing your own food is THE answer. I am saying that depending on gifts of tinned tuna and Sugar Smacks takes us no where but down.

Is it not time to rethink Food banks on PEI so that they help people in need and also lift them out of the poverty food trap?

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