social media Archives | Susan Emerick

Remembering Robin Carey, founder of Social Media Today

I had the good fortune to meet Robin several years ago when I began serving on the Social Media Today (SMT) Advisory Board to help her advance engagement with Social Business Leaders and extend the Social Shake Up event programing to feature such leaders. It’s hard to believe what she was able to accomplish in such a short number of years. Always on the vanguard of what’s new and emerging in the industry that was coming of age. Robin was not only brilliant; she was fun and incredibly interesting. She was sincerely interested in knowing you, as a colleague as well as a friend.

She loved her boys and was so proud of their accomplishments. She joyfully shared updates on their progress as any doting mother would. She was open about the reality of building a business while balancing the demands of being a Wife and Mother. She had a special knack for helping aspiring women. I was a beneficiary of her generosity, for which I’m forever grateful. She was the quintessential Master of Ceremonies, bringing business leaders together from all over the world to advance the Social Media industry through knowledge sharing and collaboration.

No one could host an event and make it fun like Robin. She would light up a room with her energy and elegance. She knew how to prepare the “run of show”, she owned the stage with her glamorous style. So many times she’d break into dancing to her favorite tunes in between event segments. She embraced good times and welcomed all to join in … and we did. She made you feel special for being a part of what she was building. Always giving with her time and intellect, she was a connector from the heart.

Screen Shot 2015-12-21 at 7.01.42 PM — Robin Fray Carey visits IBM Design Lab in New York

She shared the stage with so many. Not just the event stage, the editorial stage. She wrote incredible pieces highlighting bleeding edge work from brand leaders who were in the trenches making it happen. She wrote this post featuring the work of my IBM team, showcasing how we were using Agile practices to transform marketing as well as featuring the foundational work of the IBM Select program that I championed.

Screen Shot 2015-12-21 at 10.34.46 PM — Employee Advocacy Summit 2014 Left to Right: Jeanne Murray, Constantin Basturea, Tammy Wagner, DeShelia Span, Denise Holt, Liz Bullock Brown, Sabrina Stoffregen, Michael Brito, Susan Emerick, Michael Ambassador Bruny, Chris Boudreaux and Robin Fray Carey

I’m especially grateful for all that she did for my co-author Chris Boudreaux and I. From hosting a book-signing event for our book launch in 2013 to allowing us to share the W Hotel venue to launch the Employee Advocacy Summit in 2014 as a half day pre-opener to the Social Shake Up.

The most moving post she wrote was this one about our book The Most Powerful Brand on Earth. While I was moved by the accolades she included and the hard hitting facts on the integrity of our content … that wasn’t what moved me most. It was the date that it was published and how I came upon reading it that really moved me. You see, Robin had a sixth sense. She knew that my mother was dying and I was her primary care giver. We talked a lot about our Mothers over the years and the kinds of role models they were to us and how we hoped our children would reflect on our legacy some day. So it was … the morning my Mom passed, as I was walking out of her room, a notification appeared on my phone of a new SMT post. When I opened it, this was the post she wrote. It was postmarked the same date my Mom left this world, January 27, 2014. I was overwhelmed with the feeling of Divine Intervention that my Mom was proud of me, while at the same time, so was Robin Fray Carey.

Thank you Robin and the SMT Family. We’ve created a movement, together.

Show me. Guide me. Let me.

An approach to building a training curriculum to improve employee engagement through social media.

Over the course of the last year, I’ve worked with our internal communications & training specialists to lead the develop of an education curriculum to advance employee skills in the area of external social media engagement to benefit our customers and our brand. In this post and several to follow, I’ll share our approach in hopes of helping other brand marketers contemplating building such an education curriculum.

Getting Started

Before you begin creating any materials, it’s important to conduct listening research to understand which venues your customers are most engaged on. Knowing this will help you prioritize the training modules that need to be developed. For example, since IBM’s a large B2B in the tech space, we have specific focus on professional social networks, User Groups, Tech Forums & Communities and Tech related blogs so we’ve prioritized training on these venues. You’ll want to support your employees to advance skills on appropriate venues where your customers & prospects are more likely to connect & develop relationships. Stay away from developing training about the latest tools, there will be several hundred new ones introduced in the next few months and you won’t be able to keep up with them or the enhancements made post release.

Outline clear learning objectives

Once you’ve prioritized the venues important for employees to engage in, you’ll want to map out a curriculum that can accommodate various skill levels from beginner to advanced and begin segmenting the skills each module will deliver. For example:

Blogging 101: The Basics

Learning objectives:

Identify the basic features of Blogging and its terminology
Select a hosting platform for your blog
List techniques to create compelling blog content
Describe the guidelines and policies for Blogging specific to your brand

Blogging 201: Intermediate – How to Plan, Maintain and Optimize your blog

Learning objectives:

Identify the need to schedule blogging on your calendar
Demonstrate how to create compelling content
List techniques to optimize your blog for search engines to grow your audience

Blogging 301: Advanced – Differentiating and Promoting your Blog

Learning objectives:

Identify how to differentiate your blog and promote your expertise
Grow your blog followers and connections
List tools to help you measure your influence

Training Approach: Show me. Guide me. Let me.

We use a progression of simulations under the framework of Show me. Guide me. Let me. This approach gradually helps learners develop the skills they need to engage in social media on behalf of IBM. More specifically:

1. Show Me (Demonstration): Video simulations demonstrate the steps of procedures to learners, while also showing text that describes the process. Audio is often also provided to explain the steps to learners.

2. Guide Me (Guided Practice): Learners participate in the simulation by clicking the tools they would use in real life, but the tools are simulated. Throughout the simulation, text or audio guides learners through the process within a safe environment where learners can make mistakes without interfering with actual customer information in a live system.

3. Let Me (Assessment): Learners click through a series of steps within lab exercise to achieve desired results, but no guidance is provided during the exercise. Learners rely on their knowledge attained in steps 1 and 2 to complete the simulation. This is the most effective way to know whether learners understand the process.

Training delivery methods

It’s not always feasible to host on-site training. This was the case for us because we’re a global brand, so we use web based collaboration tools like IBM Connections and Smart Cloud to deliver the training. Hosting a series of community based lunch & learns in which the presentation was shared by the trainer during the first 30 minutes and then was opened up for questions and discussion the last 30 minutes. Throughout, participants and moderators are actively using text chat to provide input and ask questions or provide answers. We also recorded each session and made the modules available on our internal intranet portal called the Digital IBMer Hub. Employees to access the modules on demand at a time that is convenient and replay as many times as they like.

Given the quickly evolving nature of social and digital media, you will need the ability to quickly create and distribute training or education to your people—especially as new channels, best practices, or policies emerge or fade. This approach could easily be used to train employees who are active in social media and also to keep them continually equipped with the latest information about your brand.

Performance Guru Advocates the Human Side of Social Business

Martin Packer describes himself as an “IBMer, Mainframe Performance Guy and zChampion, who gets to think about lots of other stuff.” And if you’d follow him on Twitter, friend him on Facebook or read his blog, you’d soon realize that characterization fits him to a T.

Martin’s involvement with social media began 25 years ago, when he first joined IBM and was introduced to its VM forums. Used by the technical community to talk internally about VM operating system issues, Martin quickly discovered two things. “Firstly, I could get discussions going on technical topics and, secondly and perhaps more importantly from a social perspective, I could find like-minded people in the company,” he says.

The forums provided Martin with a vehicle to grow professionally and gain stature as a mainframe performance specialist. They also gave him the impetus to establish his own voice within his community. “In 2005, I became aware of IBM’s internal blogging site called Blog Central. I guess I was a late adopter of blogging as a technique, but I took to this one quite readily and that really was where I got started with blogging and then with micro-blogging through Twitter and a lot of other social applications,” he says.

Today, Martin’s principal social applications are: IBM developerWorks, his Mainframe Performance Topics blog that’s open to IBM and non-IBM developers alike; he’s on Twitter @martinpacker, where he has close to 1,300 followers; LinkedIn where he continues to grow his professional network with those who share common a interest in mainframe performance topics and Facebook, where approximately 50 percent of his 300-plus friends are customers, IBM developers, consultants and other people in the field.

How does Martin make use of these different applications?

“Well, it’s horses for courses,” he explains. “I got heavily into Twitter because a lot of what I had to say was very brief. I didn’t want, for example, in a blog post to develop an argument over several column inches just to deliver a one-sentence payload. So, for me, Twitter works very well. It’s not as rich a medium as Facebook, so where the richness of medium is required, I think Facebook is better.

“But I’ve returned to blogging this year because I’ve realized there are some things I want to explain and discuss in much more detail and blogging is the right medium. … I think it’s a case of you use the tool depending on what you’re trying to do.”

On mixing personal and professional

Martin is not averse to mixing in non-technical discussions and comments. In fact, he sees it as a way of bringing his community closer together. “We get to find common ground,” he says. “For example, it might be taste in music or movies or books we’ve read, or maybe personal philosophy. So I have found that it’s really helped in getting to know customers and other IBMers and consultants in the industry much better and, hopefully, the same has worked the other way around.

“Other people have been able to get to know me better, to build common cause with me better, and that’s the way it seems to work.”

This eclectic approach of just being yourself is what Martin calls ‘authentic voice’ — “talk about stuff you want to talk about in ways you want to talk about it, using the media you want to talk about it in.” And it appears to have served him well in advancing his credibility and social eminence.

For example, when he speaks at conferences or visits with customers, “I’m seeing more and more people say to me I actually read your blog article on this very subject the other day,” he says.

Advice for beginners
Martin recommends that people find the medium that works best for them — “it’s probably several media” — and determine where the community they feel most at home with resides. Once people get started, he says, they’ll figure out how much time they want to devote. “I don’t really schedule time for social networking,” Martin says. “In fact, I regard it as interstitial. It’s stuff I do on and off throughout the day and maybe the night, as and when the mood takes me.”

Techie Uses IBM developerWorks to Build Social Eminence

Nigel Griffiths eats, drinks and sleeps Power Systems. Around 15 years ago, this IBM performance guru located in the United Kingdom authored a free utility he called nmon (short for Nigel’s Monitor), which can be used to monitor and analyze performance data on AIX and Linux systems.

While never officially supported by IBM, the tool captured the attention of performance specialists throughout the world to the point where today, Griffiths estimates, it has between 20,000 – 30,000 users. As nmon’s popularity grew, Griffiths was faced with a problem: how best to support this burgeoning community. “And so to communicate with them better, rather than e‑mailing them all,” he explains, “I started to get involved in developerWorks …” Thus marked the beginning of Griffiths’ journey into using developerWorks and its extensive social media capabilities.

A growing awareness of users’ needs

Griffiths first step was to create a wiki which he used to provide documentation and downloadable binaries for nmon. From there, he started a forum to answer questions from users directly and get answers to them fast. But he soon discovered that he was also fielding questions about Power Systems performance in general, and he noticed that many users were confused about how the machines work and how to get the best out of them, “Everyone wants their machine to go faster”.

And so Griffiths began blogging on developerWorks to allow others to benefit from his AIX and Linux expertise. He even made a few embedded videos. “I have the luxury that I work in advanced technical support, so I work on new things that are happening, new machines that we are bringing out with the latest technologies,” he says. His rule of thumb in deciding what to blog about: when he comes across content of interest to him, chances are that lots of others will be interested too.

The reader reaction and comments he’s generated from his blog entries have helped Griffiths escape what he calls “expert blindness”. He points to IBM clients just starting out and how they often struggle with things that he thinks are blatantly obvious. “That makes me rethink the way that we’re putting these things over and it reminds me that … there’s always some new guys that need a bit of help,” he says.

Griffiths has also found that customer tech people value interacting with IBM tech people and are impressed when contact is made, which helps increase brand awareness and purchase consideration among IT decision makers.

Griffiths is now using Twitter @mr_nmon to get the word out about his blog postings and to follow other leading performance experts. Currently, he follows 12 other techies inside and outside IBM whose knowledge he respects. “I usually find maybe one or two things a day that I think, oh, that’s useful, that would take me ages to work out. Or, I’ll file that one away, that could be useful in a project in the future,” he says. He also likes to re-tweet those items to the 400 or so people that are on his Twitter list, so they’re aware of the good stuff that others are doing.

Finding your own way

Griffiths’ advice to others considering social media: “Find out what approach to social media works for you.” For him, it’s about spending a few hours each week sharing expertise so people don’t have to find things out the hard way.

While leery about becoming too well known, Griffiths acknowledges that his reputation as a performance guru has grown considerably since he started blogging and tweeting. And his moderated use of social media shows that you don’t have to jump in with both feet to be really effective and make a contribution.

A quick look at developerWorks

Since 1999, IBM developerWorks has been the IT industry’s most comprehensive source of technical content for the developer community, focusing on IBM software products, as well as open-standards technologies such as Java, Linux, XML, Web development, and more. Four million IBM and non-IBM developers, IT professionals, and students in 195 countries use developerWorks each month to learn about advances in IT and open standards, develop and showcase their experience and skills, solve problems, and work collaboratively with experts and peers.

Today, the platform provides an extensive and well-managed set of social capabilities specially designed for business, which include wikis, blogs, forums, bookmarks, groups and profiles. Recently, developerWorks received the Forrester Groundswell Award and the AMI SMB Social Media Award in recognition of its effective use of social media.

Master Inventor Extols “the Unedited Voice of the Individual”

This past May, Tony Pearson had a problem. He was visiting with a group of customers in Australia — nearly 8,000 miles away from his home base at the IBM System Storage Executive Briefing Center in Arizona — and needed to know if the IBM XIV Storage System would work in a particular competitive environment. And so the master inventor and senior managing consultant posted his question on Twitter and waited.

Within 30 minutes, he received return tweets from the two non-IBM hardware manufacturers involved letting him know that they both support the proposed configuration.

“I got my answer without even knowing who to call or who works in those companies,” says Tony. “I just put it out there saying: I have this question. Does anybody have an answer?”

Tony’s story is just one more example of how he’s been able to use social media to benefit IBM and build his personal brand as a system storage expert and go-to guy.

How it all began

Back in 2006, Tony was asked to create a set of podcasts to explain and promote IBM’s renaming of its disk and tape products under the IBM System Storage product line. Thinking his voice was unsuitable for a podcast, he decided instead to blog about the changes. A year later, when he was transferred to IBM’s Executive Briefing Center, he continued to publish his blog, changing its content and readership to support his new organization and job responsibilities.

Tony’s philosophy on blogging stems from a book he read early on titled Naked Conversations by Robert Scoble and Shel Israel. “They had a very crisp definition of a blog. It’s the unedited voice of the individual,” he says.

So what does he talk about? “I talk about new announcements. I talk about how to use the products. I don’t talk about conversations I have with clients, but I might say: ‘These questions come up fairly frequently at briefings … so I thought I’d clarify this position or how IBM feels about this.’”

And every now and then, he’ll write about something personal — a vacation he’s taken or his volunteer efforts.

Tony believes his blog also helps open up IBM to the outside world. “IBM in the past has been seen as this impenetrable fortress,” he explains. “And I tell everybody … if you have a question about storage and you don’t know who to ask contact me and I’ll find the right person.”

His passion and commitment to his “Inside System Storage” blog have helped make it one of the most active blogs on IBM developerWorks. “People know who I am and they can trust what I say versus someone else who they’ve never seen or heard from before,” he adds.

Tips for success

Tony likes the progressive, open approach IBM has taken regarding the use of social media by employees. “One of the things that IBM did well is develop a very robust, simple-to-follow set of social computing guidelines,” he says. He cites “don’t pick fights” and “identify who you are” as two of the guidelines that can help people starting out avoid common mistakes.

And he encourages all of his colleagues to find their voice in the blogosphere, express their opinions on Twitter, share their presentations on SlideShare.net or post photos, graphs and diagrams on Flickr.com. His recipe for social media success rests on four essential ingredients:

Stick to your expertise. “I saw a great quote that I used in one of my blog posts that said that the food in museums was as bad as the murals in restaurants. It was a good reminder that you should focus on what you know.”
Do your homework. “People should read before they write. You’re more credible when you can say ‘I’ve read everyone else’s writing first, and here’s my opinion’ as opposed to adding little or no value to the conversation.”
Devote the time. “There’s a lot of work to create a blog post … gather the research and do all the stuff so you make a complete quality post. It’s not going to happen with10 minutes a day.”
Keep active. “One person told me a great thing: blogging is like jogging. If you don’t jog daily or weekly, and only jog every now and then, it’s not going to be of any value.”

He also warns people to avoid perfectionism when blogging. “I think people are worried … that they’re going to say something that makes them look like they’re not the experts that they claim to be,” says Tony. “Just like in real life, you can edit the blog and say ‘I made a mistake. This is what I meant to say.’”