Entelechy

The End of Institutional Authority

On a mailing list of which I am a member, a poster asked if Twitter can be used as a broadcast medium. Definitely not a broadcast medium, in my opinion. "Conversation" is a buzz word, but it's a buzz word for something big. My personal take is that these tools are facilitating a paradigm shift that is causing similar change management issues in the nonprofit and for-profit worlds. Specifically authority is shifting from institutions to individuals, and organizations are a little afraid of that, even while hoping to embrace "social media."

In the very recent past, certain boundaries were firm. If you wanted a job reference, for example, you turned to your boss. If you wanted to know what was going on at a local nonprofit, you subscribed to their newsletter, whose content was scrutinized by people "in control" of the messages. If you wanted to do certain research on your job, perhaps you accessed the company's physical library or shared drives. As a customer, you were reliant on the word of a few of your friends - if you even happened to know that your friend used that product or service.

Nowadays, you can connect with coworkers on LinkedIn and use those recommendations (whether or not the company told you to ask for references "only from the HR department.") You can get on Facebook and find that friend of a friend who works at a nonproft; that person might have the scoop that the party line fails to include. Buy a product such as a Mac computer, and you may find hundreds of other customers talking about the product on forums - maybe even forums sponsored by the company.

Certainly there are drawbacks: rumors, gossip. Unvetted material is a problem, but censorship and misrepresentation by organizations have a bit of a check now. People "in charge" have to share the power and the stage.

I think a small, grassroots organization can do a lot with Twitter and Facebook, even without a Web site. The catch is that it needs to be PERSON-centered. Trusted individual to trusted individual. Party lines and top-down announcements and pronouncements fall flat on Twitter and Facebook. Constituents and clients and community members get to respond back; no more whitewashing of the organization's problems or hiding that bad press coverage hoping it will blow over.

If you haven't guessed, I am happy about these changes. I have encountered many managers, in my limited experience more in the nonprofit world than in the for-profit - but definitely in both places, who are a bit more authoritarian in personality type than I am! Those types are usually the ones who want to "broadcast" information and get real nervous about commenting, open conversation, or authentic staff input. I am engaged in some activism online, led by a nonprofit director who is extraordinarily tech-savvy and, evidently, very much interested in sharing rather than hoarding power. She's got blogs, Facebook, Twitter, and uses them all well. It works because she comes across not as "the official spokesperson", but as an individual.

Here's to radical, small-d democracy!

Make the Most of Your Tools

Sometimes, when an organization bows to the pressure to introduce technology, it holds onto the very procedures the technology was designed to eliminate. I recently looked at the new Website a past employer (who shall remain nameless.) They used a Content Management System (CMS) for the upgrade.  A resource library on the site contains about one hundred documents - PDF and Word files!

One particularly strange choice: they maintain an online referral directory of graduates of their certification program. The link for students to update their information in the directory leads to a Word document, which instructs readers to send the new information to an administrator's email address. Updates, we are told, happen monthly. Monthly.

Put simply, the organization spent tens of thousands of dollars to select and install a technological solution that would allow people to enter information, let the system format it, and let an administrator approve it with the touch of a button. Yet they use this the power of this system only to post a Word document while retaining the data entry burden.

Technical fixes work best when accompanied not only by training but also by deliberate attention to operational change management.

Modernizing the Viral Email

Today I received one of those chain emails that always leads me to Snopes, which vets internet and email rumors, as my next click. This one was about the recall of a "pimple ball" toy that has severely injured some dogs tongues. It turns out, this story is true. Chai, a Lab, had to have his tongue amputated after it got stuck in a small hole in this toy. The company took the toy after the market; apparently there had been numerous past complaints.

Fifteen years ago, email was the a pretty sophisticated tool for sending around this kind of information - assuming the people to whom you wanted to transmit it were on email. Today, there are much better ones!

1. Even if you send an email, link to the blog, Website, or news site where you found the item. This saves people having to check the credibility of the story - or simply deleting it because it walks and quacks like another rumor email.

2. Get into the habit of using a site like Google Reader or Digg to compile stories. Again, these provide direct links.

3. Post the links to a social media site, such as FaceBook, MySpace, or LinkedIn, where your friends can read it and actively share it.

4. If you are one of your community's influencers, a go-to person, set up your own blog!

Blasts from the Past

I've spent a ridiculous amount of time this weekend on Facebook, having struck clusters of Rye Country Day School and Stanford friends. Psychologically it's interesting. Friendships that were once private or intimate are revived in public. I keep hearing "there is no privacy anymore," but I don't know that the person(a) that has no privacy ever existed before these tools existed.

In my day-to-day personal narrative my high school and college years, the separate circles of friends I had there, various work lives, and neigborhood friends do not sit juxtaposed. Even time shifts in the online world - of course my high school friends and my college friends are the same age, but it is strange to see us that way, all of us with gray hair or kids the same age or resumes that demonstrate about similar amounts of amassed experience and tag us as members of a particular generation.