www.nickhodge.com

Grow­ing up on a farm, as I did, provides a free­dom that never leaves you. My par­ents lived on and immersed dir­ectly in their work: the farm. It sur­roun­ded them, day in day out. I am sure I absorbed this envir­on­ment in a way where I expect little to no sep­ar­a­tion between work and my per­sonal life. From this stems work­ahol­ism and ded­ic­a­tion. A deep prot­est­ant work ethic.

There are sig­ni­fic­ant down­sides to total work immer­sion. Espe­cially in this new world of always-on social media. You tweet a response to a work related ques­tion at 11.32pm, and fol­low up with a tirade against an air­line can­cel­ling your flight. The seam­less meld­ing of what is work and what is your life is one of the beau­ties of social media. We are all connected.

Yes­ter­day, one of the down­sides firmly bit me on the bum. One of my per­sonal opin­ions; a flip­pant tweet has caused an ongo­ing ker­fuffle at Microsoft. This is not the first time I have come unstuck on the social media fron­tier; and sadly I am not alone. Nor am I the last to be bit­ten. There are many bums with bite marks.

Until now, I have res­isted the urge to have sep­ar­ate twit­ter iden­tit­ies. To me, cre­at­ing and using dif­fer­ent iden­tit­ies is the anti­thesis of social media. To be frank, I wish that I could be one iden­tity on twit­ter.; but there are forces in the wider world does not accept the sep­ar­a­tion of per­sonal iden­tity and an employer’s iden­tity. As I found in recent events, there is always the risk that someone will take an utter­ance out of con­text, and use this as a cudgel in piti­ful internal office polit­ics. Or, as oth­ers have found, fod­der for gossip.

The cleav­ing of iden­tit­ies is a topic upon which I have struggled through­out my Microsoft career. Being true to myself, whilst attempt­ing to com­ply with the weight of an employer’s expectations.

As stated yes­ter­day, I have cre­ated a new twit­ter iden­tity @RealNickHodge which is a private, for people only account. Each fol­lower is vet­ted. I am being care­ful not to let in bots and sen­sa­tion­al­ist journ­al­ists. I am also wary of “brand name” twit­ter iden­tit­ies. I fol­low real people; people who are smart enough to real­ise my opin­ions are mine, and mine alone.

My old twit­ter account is now clearly iden­ti­fied @NickHodgeMSFT, with a pro­file stat­ing my pos­i­tion and employer. As at the time of post­ing this blog entry, it has 4803 fol­low­ers. I do not ima­gine the fol­lower count will increase dra­mat­ic­ally. Thank­fully, formal Microsoft accounts such as @MSAU are doing an out­stand­ing job of present­ing a formal social face of the organisation.

Within 24 hours of cre­at­ing the new account, I have about 200 real fol­low­ers, less noise and I trust more free­dom to be real. Or at least the free­dom from guilt in speak­ing as me, being who I am.

I have been on twit­ter since Feb­ru­ary 2007 as @NickHodge. Nearly 4 years. In that time, my account has gathered nearly 5000 fol­low­ers. Whilst I have no accur­ate data on these fol­low­ers: it is fair to say a major­ity are spam­bots or dormant accounts. There is abso­lutely no way I am that inter­est­ing to 5000 people.

Con­sid­er­ing my twit­ter per­sona has been cheeky and some­what icon­o­clastic, even to my present employer; and the con­tent of 90% of my tweets are not related to work — I find it sur­pris­ing to gather so many pieces of moss.

5000 fol­low­ers does put the @NickHodge account into the top 20% of Aus­tralian twit­ter­ers. Being an open (not locked) account, this puts my utter­ances on twit­ter into the fun­nel for social media mon­it­or­ing engines. Their sys­tems will determ­ine my fol­lower count (and retweet count, and other met­rics) puts me into a “must watch” list.

I base this assess­ment on my work use of social media mon­it­or­ing engines. Keywords, key people. Asso­ci­ated, and you are prime bait for engines to watch fil­ter and report to their cor­por­ate stakeholders.

Some people crave this atten­tion. In fact, it is their life blood. I am per­fectly fine with their need for fol­low­ers, read­ers, fans if you will. But this is not for me. The dir­ect asso­ci­ation between my employer and what I say and think is not dir­ect. At best, it is loosely coupled.

There is no quick mech­an­ism to com­pletely delete all your fol­low­ers, and who you are fol­low­ing in twit­ter. As an imme­di­ate solu­tion, I have sus­pen­ded post­ing from the @NickHodge account and cre­ated @RealNickHodge. I am being strict as to whom I fol­low; the account is locked.

For me, it is back to feel­ing free to com­ment without the fear of caus­ing col­lat­eral damage.

I hope you found this useful.

Only the para­noid sur­vive. Even the para­noid have enemies. And the list of para­noid quotes goes on.

Within the last 18 hours, I’ve had two exper­i­ences with twit­ter that are worth shar­ing. If only for twit­ter brag­ging rights.

Firstly, whilst ABC1’s Media Watch was shown last night – what I con­sidered a long “advertorial” piece about tab­let devices and their impend­ing saviour status for news­print. I tweeted:

Someone should #mediawatch#mediawatch for 15 minutes of “Apple iPad” advert­ise­ment. NOT F***KING HAPPY MARK SCOTT

Within an hour, the host of Media Watch, Jonathan Holmes, respon­ded:

@NickHodge ah! U work for Microsoft! Wondered why u were SO upset!

Oops, sprung. Well almost. My twit­ter bio is clear about my employer. As I had already respon­ded to the iPad shills, I respon­ded sim­il­arly to Jonathan. The ABC must be above spruik­ing products; it is a part of their edit­or­ial policy. I will admit that my tweet is tain­ted with the per­spect­ive of my present employer: for sure; no-one is truly inde­pend­ent from their source of income. But I do expect all com­mer­cial organ­isa­tions: includ­ing Microsoft, to be treated equally in terms of pub­li­city on our ABC.

A thankyou, Jonathan, for being con­cerned about your show and look­ing at “the stream of conversation.” This shows you care.

Second incid­ent. Only a few hours later, in response to Tony Abbott appear­ing on ABC TV’s Q and A: a prom­ising TV show that has fallen below my expect­a­tions. Tony, in response to a ques­tions on Cath­olisism men­tioned that another leader, Kristina Keneally – the NSW Premier, being not so har­angued about her faith. My tweet:

ooh, @KKeneally is at least a ser­i­ous Cath­olic as @TonyAbbottMHR ..#opusdei !!!

Very early this morn­ing, 5:47am Sydney time, the Premier responded:

@NickHodge hi Nick this is an old and false rumour. I’ve never been a mem­ber of opus dei. My area of interest is fem­in­ist theo­logy. Cheers

Oops, sprung again. My response to her was a pub­lic, hope­fully grace­ful mea culpa. I doubt that I would vote ALP in the next State elec­tion – but that fact that Ms Keneally took time out to respond to mine – and other ques­tions on twit­ter shows a level of care. And she spelt rumours correctly.

So, two fam­ous people respon­ded to my rather cheeky, spe­cious and snarky tweets. In both cases, apart from the indi­vidual tweets these people do not know me. Nor the some­what satirical/childish nature of my tweets.

In the con­text of “social media” for organ­isa­tions – can per­son­ally respond­ing to indi­vidual tweets like mine scale? Whilst NSW has 6 mil­lion res­id­ents, only 4000 fol­low her on twit­ter. If twit­ter goes main­stream like Face­book, one could expect a Premier of NSW to have up to 2 mil­lion fol­low­ers (30% of Aus­trali­ans are on Face­book) . No one, magical per­son can respond to them all.

Here at Microsoft in Aus­tralia, a few product groups have been exper­i­ment­ing with social media mon­it­or­ing tools. Watch­ing the con­ver­sa­tions, and respond­ing where appro­pri­ate in a formal way. This also involves an escal­a­tion pro­cess for response to quer­ies that include PR, Cus­tomer Ser­vice and Evan­gel­ism. I know of other organ­isa­tions doing sim­ilar for their products and ser­vices – Inter­node, for instance.

So, be care­ful out there. You are being watched. And if your com­ment is not satir­ical, hope­fully respon­ded to. Personally.

For vari­ous reas­ons, I am on another sab­bat­ical from Twit­ter. This is not my first, and I dare say not my last. Dur­a­tion, unknown. Frankly, I am bor­ing myself and slowly stick­ing my foot in my own mouth. To fill the now empty space, I have spent more time think­ing and writ­ing. So, for instance these are some raw num­bers from the last few days. This is by no means scientific.

Twit­ter

Aver­age Tweets per day: 100
Aver­age size of each tweet: 100
Total Words: 10,000
Estim­ated Per­cent­age valu­able (ie: valu­able con­tent): 10%
Words of Value = 1,000

Blog­ging

Aver­age Tweets per day: 100
Aver­age size of each tweet: 100
Total Words: 2,765
Estim­ated Per­cent­age valu­able (ie: valu­able con­tent): 90%
Words of Value = 2,488

So, the ques­tion remains: are the con­ver­sa­tions on twit­ter worth 2.5 times the pub­lish­ing via blogs?

On my Soap­box, I have been some­what neg­at­ive (and some­what vit­ri­olic) on blind group twit­ter accounts. My argu­ment has been that no-one talks to brands; humans tend to and would prefer to con­nect with rather human. There is a per­spect­ive I missed: where organ­isa­tions want people to rep­res­ent them, and the indi­vidu­als see them­selves are dis­tinctly sep­ar­ate from the organisation.

My par­tic­u­lar job is unique; not all organ­isa­tions invest in weird people who name them­selves a Pro­fes­sional Geek and describe them­selves as Icon­o­clastic and Mer­cur­ial. As a daily part of my job,  I becone a light­en­ing rod in a small com­munity for a large and his­tor­ic­ally face­less brand. At one end of the daily con­tinuum there is kudos/whipping for everything that brand does; and the other I attempt to be whatever “me” is at this moment.

This is some­what OK for me, but some­times risky for the brand when I fly off the handle. As as wise man at Microsoft coun­selled me earlier this week, we are all human. Social media will mir­ror this human­ity. Whilst fraught with mis­in­ter­preation, it is bet­ter than bland corporate-speak, any day.

Liv­ing the organ­isa­tion you work for is a leg­acy of my on-farm upbring­ing. You live in the work envir­on­ment. There is no escap­ing large or small jobs. That, or I have a form Insti­tu­tional Stock­holm Syn­drome. Ulti­mately, I am doing what I am paid to do.

So how do indi­vidu­als rep­res­ent the organ­isa­tion, ser­vice or product they work for when there are mul­tiple indi­vidu­als in the team where the indi­vidu­als see them­selves dis­tinct from the organ­isa­tion? There are valid reas­ons why a solu­tion needs to be sought.

Lower latency con­ver­sa­tional medi­ums such as twit­ter, there is no time to review a tweet by a group before tweet­ing on behalf of the said group. By the time the group has agreed, the con­ver­sa­tion has moved on. l’esprit de l’escalier en twitter.

Enter The Mul­tiple User Twit­ter Conun­drum. I’ve seen a recent innov­a­tion on twit­ter which I sup­port. It is a good com­prom­ise between my ideal­ism, and the hard-nose mar­ket­ing ori­ented “brand is everything” divide.

Let’s review the Microsoft Bing team’s Twit­ter Pro­file page. It shows the five people who twit­ter on that account/address, with a name and caret (^xx) under­neath the pic­tures of the humans. xx rep­res­ent the ini­tials of each indi­vidual. Tweets such as “SteveB at D (video incl. Bing at All­Th­ingsD) http://twurl.nl/zorfia ^betsy” indic­ates Betsy, or ^BA tweeted this nug­get. I now can identify a human behind that tweet, that con­ver­sa­tion from the group twit­ter account.  This caret-xx only takes three pre­cious char­ac­ters out of 140.

As a fur­ther step to my ideal­istic people con­ver­sa­tional mode of social media, it would be cooll if each indi­vidual should put their per­sonal twit­ter id on this pro­file page. Or email address: ideally some mech­an­ism to double check the iden­tity of the per­son to stop twit­ter spam-bot miscreants.

Maybe in the future all we will just have twit­ter ids. They will become more valu­able than ego URLs.

But then again, I am pos­sible step­ping back up to that very small plat­form of a soapbox.

Photo by bootload/Peter Renshaw

The Opera. Stages filled with ladies singing in a gruff ger­manic or romantic lan­guage, and men pran­cing around in col­our­ful sol­dierly uni­form. Stor­ies so simple yet obscured by lan­guage; thank­fully the Play­bill™ details the plot. Plots of love lost and fam­ily betrayal, have remained unchanged in some instances for cen­tur­ies. The audi­ence silent in the stalls, listens and applauds at the appro­pri­ate places. It is all scrip­ted and fol­lows a well worn path.

Strong scripts, strident soar­ing songs and stand­ard­ised char­ac­ters are repeated year after year to an audi­ence that dresses up to show off their cul­tural status. Baby boomers, once the bas­tions of cul­tural icon­o­clasm, now flock to the safety of the opera. The safety of the known story provides suc­cour in a troub­ling and con­fused world.

The Opera is an appro­pri­ate mir­ror of a slowly declin­ing, old power struc­ture: stand­ard­ised stor­ies with a strong cul­tural under­stand­ing of expect­a­tions. There are few sur­prises, and the act­ors faith­fully rep­res­ent the char­ac­ters as writ­ten. To stray from the cul­ture will res­ult in review rebuke, and poten­tially fin­an­cial ruin. The utter­ances are known, and everything fits into the story.

In the mod­ern, hyper­con­nec­ted world where every­one wants to write their own scripts; to merely ape an old opera is stale. It no longer res­on­ates, nor does it excite. The worn path may provide tem­por­ary com­fort: but does not provide long term sustenance.

At the opera, the generously-proportioned female singer has begun her last stanza.

The Cir­cus. I remem­ber the cir­cus arriv­ing in our small coun­try town. I, and the hoard of kids and teach­ers tramped down to the town’s foot­ball oval to oggle. The anim­als we eyed were from a dis­tant con­tin­ent. Lions, Tigers, Bears and Ele­phants. It was like a zoo, but the anim­als were smel­lier and close. Eat­ing and stomp­ing close.

Tra­di­tional cir­cuses such as these are now rare. Cir­cuses with the animal mena­gerie are rarer, as they have been houn­ded out of our towns by animal lib­er­a­tion­ists. A tra­di­tion, as cul­tural as steeple­chas­ing, has van­ished into the mist. The anim­als are happier.

Mod­ern cir­cuses are about people. The anim­als have been sequestered and retired to zoos and forests. Cir­cuses such as Quebec’s Circ du Soleil give a medi­eval com­media dell’arte a mod­ern fla­vour wrapped in a bright coat of 21^st cen­tury glob­al­ised com­mer­cial­ism. Com­pletely com­prised of people, fran­chised to a cul­tur­ally flattened world; there­fore stand­ard­ised to high­light human per­form­ance. These cir­cuses are for people, about people and make a point of break­ing the third wall to stretch the entertainment.

In more tra­di­tional cir­cuses, clowns would reg­u­larly break the third wall. Throw faux water, in the shape of con­fetti, into a faux sur­prised audi­ence. The cir­cus enter­tains, as the sad clown provides a reflec­tion on our mixed up, com­plex lives.

This forest we are nav­ig­at­ing through: Social Media, is like a cir­cus. It is a human cent­ric insti­tu­tion, wrapped in new tech­no­logy zeal with a hoard of clowns, mum­mers, so-called ring lead­ers and high-wire acts all scream­ing for your atten­tion, laughs and money. Dif­fi­cult to ignore when they are in town; and they can be smelly at the approach. Bright Lights! Shows! High wire acts with stars hav­ing incon­gru­ous names. Social Media has it all.

A true cir­cus extends out from the focus on the tent and the high­wire of show night. The can­vas rig­gers and animal train­ers trans­form into the spruikers of side-show alley. Crafty games of shoot­ing, prowess of strength and pre­ci­sion take a fool from their money. Fairy floss, candy apples and for­tune tell­ers return a future of rot­ten teeth and rot­ted minds.

In a sim­ilar way, Social media has a pleth­ora of spruikers. The games they advert­ise remove you are after your gold. Some of these games have a large pay off; sadly many don’t.

To really enjoy the cir­cus, you must exper­i­ence the whole show, not merely snack on the fairy floss and candy apples.

Social net­work­ing is more than the latest crazes of Twit­ter and Face­book. In fact, it pred­ates blogs. And the WWW, even if you could hand-code HTML. Even before the inter­net escaped from the uni­ver­sity cage and it’s train­ers, there have exis­ted “social medias”. Email, Bul­letin board sys­tems, Talk-back radio. Small news­pa­pers and magazines; tele­graph wir­ings and Morse code; pamph­let and book pub­lish­ing. All add to the social dis­course. In fact, since the demo­crat­isa­tion of com­mu­nic­a­tion that began with the print­ing press: where thoughts in the form of words could be etched and pro­duced enmasse; a social dis­course has existed.

What is dif­fer­ent is the con­nectiv­ity we all enjoy. We all are a few steps away from the human­ity that encom­passes the planet. At once in one large, multi-cultural cir­cus. No one mono-culture can exist. Gen­er­al­iz­a­tions break down as indi­vidu­als assert their indi­vidual char­ac­ter­ist­ics, sub­vert­ing the propensity for tra­di­tional hier­arch­ies to clas­sify, box and bucket.

The impact of this indi­vidual yet share instant exper­i­ence is being being felt now across busi­nesses and gov­ern­ments. Unre­lent­ing forces for change are singing strident tunes from the opera, whilst the cir­cus clowns laugh in mock humour at the futil­ity on the grave of the generously-proportioned female vocalist.

I love throw­ing words and ven­acu­lar phrases together. This stems from the power of Split Enz to cre­ate visual imagery from com­mon say­ings. An extreme example: Another Great Divide (Judd/Finn/Rayner/Gillies)

Now how can I fig­ure this equa­tion, if multiplication’s the rule /
You keep sub­tract­ing me from you, and it just doesn’t add up at all

It should be fur­ther noted that there is always a Finn song for every occa­sion. Thanks @mediamum!

In the instance of Off My Soap­box of Self Right­eous­ness, relates to battles and dis­cus­sions that rage daily. Like all fam­ily dirty laun­dry, the exact nature will remain confidential.

But on a lar­ger scale, it is my opin­ion that social media (whatever that is) is being mis­un­der­stood; or worse, mis-used by vari­ous less Cluetrained people. My fear is that the forces of old­skool will water down the poten­tial for massive change that is blos­som­ing. There are skir­mishes being fought daily. The wider com­munity does not see nor hear of these.

Sadly, those on the internal fir­ing line are also cop­ping friendly fire. Just sayin’

The strange­ness is made more fic­tional when I have an internal voice that is shout­ing, not whis­per­ing, you’re also doing it wrong. There is a high-wire act going on in my head, and the fin­gers of san­ity may be slowly let­ting go.

“The greatest chal­lenge to imple­ment­ing social media within any organ­iz­a­tion is the will­ing­ness for that organ­iz­a­tion to accept the cul­tural change that will ulti­mately occur. And occur dra­mat­ic­ally and at a rapid pace. Social media holds a mir­ror up to an organ­iz­a­tion from the external customers/clients/constituents that shows an authen­tic, and some­times unex­pec­ted, face.”

You are a Mar­ket­ing Man­ager. Your budget has been cut dra­mat­ic­ally. Solu­tion: look for a mech­an­ism to get your “advert­ise­ment” shown to as many people as pos­sible, without pay­ing for TV placement.

Enter: video viral mar­ket­ing. Copy an idea, write a short script, film with act­ors. Pop onto You­tube, ini­ti­ate the viral campaign.

The only dif­fer­ence from tra­di­tional TV advert­ising is the cost. Pro­duc­tion out­lay, and that is about it. ROI: easy: sav­ing hun­dreds of thou­sands of dol­lars on TV (and poten­tially radio) advert­ising. In the case of xxxMan (not going to provide too much juice), nearly 45000 views I would con­sider as epic fail.

On the face of it, if you present this advert­ise­ment as a bit of fun; make it slightly obvi­ous it’s not real. Cool.

But this is not social media. Or pos­it­ive in a shar­ing cul­ture. There is no people to people con­nec­tion between the com­pany and it’s cus­tom­ers. Sure, it may gen­er­ate both pos­it­ive and neg­at­ive com­ments in You­Tube and the inter­net. The agency may respond and behalf of the cus­tomer. This is not social media nor a shar­ing culture.

People trust and like to speak to people. Put the best people in your organ­isa­tion up front, and sup­port them.

Viral is not Social, it is just a Virus.

Oh, by the way: Laurel is right on this mat­ter.