Twitter: Learn to listen and stand out from the crowd

I am becoming more and more frustrated with Twitter. Not the technology but how people use it.

We all have to stop using Twitter just to push out our own content and start using this social platform as a great opportunity to share the knowledge and engage in conversation with others. After all, social media is supposed to be about people! In short, let's learn to listen and stand out from the crowd...

Learn to listen and stand out from the Crowd

Let me give you an example.

I have a number of SEO specialists in my Twitter stream. They have been chosen because I believe they can add value to me and my followers. I want to be in a position to share their experience and knowledge to help foster future relationships.

Today I needed some SEO advice myself. I needed to know if cached pages in search engines had to be manually refreshed if I updated previous blog posts to improve key word optimisation.

So I put a shout out.

I received only one response referencing how they made lots of money off the internet (spam). I sent a similar message again an hour or so later and no responses.

In between these two tweets of mine, one of the SEO specialists in my stream tweeted:

Get FREE SEO services today

...and a few other SEO specialists also pushed out content advertising their services.

If any of these SEO specialists had engaged with me in conversation and responded to my question, who knows where that conversation may of led. Maybe an opportunity for business now or in the future, or at the very least I will remember them as being responsive and extremely helpful and pass on their details to others.

These are missed opportunities.

So here are my top 3 tips for businesses using Twitter:

1. Learn to listen

Your Twitter stream is a valuable commodity, chosen by you because you believe the people you are following can add value to you. Make the effort to listen. I would advise spending a minimum of 30% of your Twitter strategy listening to what others are saying.

2. Engage in conversation

As you begin to listen, start engaging in conversations. Build up a rapport with those you are following and make the time to read and comment on their content. Particularly look out for "shout out's" (people asking for help) and try to help them. If you cannot help them directly, do you know someone in your stream that might? If so, connect these people. This will earn you respect and a great contact to follow.

3. Share the knowledge

Remember the Pie Theorem in my last post:

For every piece of the knowledge pie to share, you will receive two slices in return

Don't be afraid to share your pearls of wisdom when engaging in conversation. This will also earn you respect and a reputation to be proud of, which could lead to potential future business opportunities. Good reputations take time to build but bad reputations can be earned very quickly and will spread throughout your network like wild fire.

Stop with the excuses not to be social

I am asked this question a lot "How do you get executive management buy-in to bring social into the organisation"? The answer is simple - I don't...

This sounds like an arrogant response but it's not intended to be. Let's be honest here, in these particular tough times your executive management won't particularly care about being social in their organisation, they care about increased revenue, better margins and keeping costs to a minimum.

If you can prove that being social in the workplace can have a direct impact on your revenue, margins and costs then you have a good argument to go into that boardroom and sell them the concept.  The problem is that it is extremely difficult to find a direct linkage.

So how can you make being social in the organisation actually work?

The answer is simple - approach it from the bottom up!

Whilst your executive management could try to enforce it in their organisation, it's actually the people on the ground that really need to take advantage of the benefits and it is these people that you have to sell the concept to. Prove it works to them and your executive management will have to sit up and take notice.

But remember, being social in the workplace is an evolutionary thing combining both traditional and social working methods in how we interact and engage with one another. It's about working smarter, being more effective and increasing efficiency, but more importantly than that it is about the change in mindset.

Whilst I was presenting to an executive board recently one of the board members made a great point:

"Social technologies can really help but it comes down to fundamentals of our sales people wanting to share knowledge across the social network. As David said, it's about the change in mindset that we have to address, the technology can only facilitate the process"

So don't get too focused on acquiring executive management buy-in before starting the social movement in your organisation as the chances are they will not understand it or support it. Instead focus on your vision and the benefits that a better socially connected organisation can bring and start building it from the bottom up. You might just be surprised at the reaction and the results...

What's the cure for Infoglut?

I'll be honest, I had never even heard of infoglut until recently when it was voted the winning topic for discussion for our weekly Social Chat event last week. But I now realise I am a sufferer.

Infoglut (also known as "Information overload") is a term popularized by Alvin Toffler that refers to the difficulty a person can have understanding an issue and making decisions that can be caused by the presence of too much information

So what's the cure for infoglut?

Before I try to answer that, let me take you back a couple of years at a time when I first out started on my "social media is about people" crusade and how I overcame, what I now perceive as, infoglut.

In order for me to make the right business decisions to create The Social Workplace, I needed to keep an eye on the market and understand how social media was being used as well as listen to what my customers needed. This is a lot of information to wade through, a lot of infoglut.

It was never my objective to reduce my email traffic in the beginning, but with all this information being directed to my inbox it soon became apparent that email overload was a major contribution of my infoglut and it needed addressing.

These are the various stages, and thinking, I went through to overcome my infoglut (you might recognise some of these stages...):

Stage 1 - Toe dipping
My social network was small, I was reading a couple of blogs a week (receiving notifications via email) and expanding my knowledge and understanding of social media at a slow but manageable rate.

Stage 2 - The RSS Reader
As my social network grew and I was reading more blogs and listening to podcasts, my email inbox began to overflow like a blind barman pulling his first pint.

I needed a way to segregate the various bits of information to digest at a more convenient time so I started to use an RSS Reader (www.feeddemon.com allowed me to monitor information inside and outside my company's firewall) which helped me to structure my information flows and to separate it from my day-to-day email traffic.

Stage 3 - The power of Communities
By this time I was becoming better socially connected and whilst that was the goal it did mean that there was more demand for information on socialnomics and social technologies. The more email requests I received the slower I was to respond, and the slower I was to respond the more requests I received asking why I was slow in responding (oh the irony!).

The accessibility of an employees tacit knowledge is a highly under-valued commodity in most businesses and I wanted to tap into and utilise this expansive knowledge network to reduce my infoglut level. By introducing a couple of Social Business Communities (one focused on the business aspect of social media, the other focused more on social technologies) I was able to channel all requests into these online communities. This resulted in a significant reduction in my email traffic, allowing the communities to become self-sustaining (over time), and prevented me acting as a bottleneck of information.

Stage 4 - Working with Workspaces
This redirection of information to a social platform reduced my infoglut considerably and allowed me to refocus my energies on my "social media is about people" crusade once again, which is where I began defining and driving new projects and initiatives to create a more socially connected enterprise. Introducing online workspaces to work collaboratively with users on these new projects and initiatives was a really effective solution until.....

Stage 5 - Defining Favourites
I now had over 30 active workspaces. Workspaces to work with my team on identifying and managing their fiscal objectives, workspaces for managing projects, workspaces for team meetings, workspaces for task force meetings, even a workspace for sharing large files....so I started tagging my favourite workspaces and my favourite blogs, choosing to prioritise my time and energy.

Stage 6 - The Supermarket Scanner
Having worked so hard to have all this really useful information at my finger tips, I'm not willing to discard it but I don't have the time to read everything. So I now scan, choosing the key bits of information to respond to within the permitted time frame. And I have become an effective scanner, absorbing information at a fast rate (though I don't go beep once finished).

So what's the cure for infoglut? Is it to reduce the amount of information flows?

Sadly, I haven't found a cure to-date but...

"The objective is not for me to reduce the amount of information flows I'm connected to, but instead evolve how I manage them, whilst maintaining my productivity levels"

And I realised this is exactly what I have been doing over the last 2 years, constantly evolving how I choose to receive my information flows and how I engage myself and others with them and not becoming a slave to the data.

So next time you feel inundate with too many emails and overwhelmed by so much information from different sources, take a step back and assess how you are managing your own infoglut level and find a suitable solution to ease your suffering. Do this regularly and choose to be more productive.

How are you preventing you own infoglut suffering? What actions have you taken and what positive results have you seen?

OIC 2009 Presentation & Cheesy Video

Thank you to everyone who attended our session at the Online Information Conference 2009 this week. It was good to see such a good turnout, and I hope our talk on adoption gave you some food for thought.

If anyone would like to contact me directly for support and advice on adoption within their business then feel free to use my contact details on the left.

The video we showed and the presentation can be found below....

Disclaimer: The products represented here are for illustration purposes only to display the Web 2.0 concept and are not a true representation of Oracle's E2.0 products.

Download Presentation: Social Media: Winning the Hearts and Minds

Thank you again for your attendance and feedback.

Online Information Conference 2009

Come and see us at the OIC 2009 at the Olympia in London on Dec 1st, where we will be presenting on the social media adoption strategy we are applying in Oracle EMEA.

Date: Tuesday 1st December 2009
Time: 12:15pm
Track: The social web: Transforming the workplace
Topic: Social Technologies: Winning the hearts and minds
Whitepaper: Click to download

The presentation will focus on:

A. Individual adoption – Early Adopter Plan
How to develop and deliver a plan for introducing early adopters to social technologies, and a framework for them engaging with other like-minded individuals.

B. Team adoption – S.L.A.M Programme
How to develop and deliver a programme remotely, that focuses on the "change in mindset" required to embed adoption to a new way of working, without increasing headcount.

In this session we will also cover:

• Social Business Communities – the pillars to delivering a successful adoption programme
• Case Studies – helping the social technology buy-in of sceptics
• Solution Finder – a user generated solution helping individuals to find the right social tools(s) based on their role or specific activity
• Social Cycle of Innovation – utilising the "wisdom of crowds" concept to solve key business challenges

The learning points of this session will be:

• How the Oracle EMEA Roadmap to Social Adoption is changing the way its employees connect, colaborate and innovate
• How to use the collective intelligence of your employees to identify and overcome the change barriers to social technologies
• How to develop a scalable adoption programme for your own business
• That social technologies is about People…

Feel free to download our OIC 2009 Exhibition Whitepaper.

Hope to see you there.....