Velocity Made Good » twitter http://velocitymg.com Chart the Smart Course Mon, 11 Apr 2011 15:08:50 +0000 http://wordpress.org/?v=2.9.2 en hourly 1 Key Takeaways from Day 1 of Learning 2009 AND The Power of the Back Channel for Learning http://velocitymg.com/explorations/leveraging-learning/key-takeaways-from-day-1-of-learning-2009-and-the-power-of-the-back-channel-for-learning/ http://velocitymg.com/explorations/leveraging-learning/key-takeaways-from-day-1-of-learning-2009-and-the-power-of-the-back-channel-for-learning/#comments Tue, 10 Nov 2009 06:56:14 +0000 Beth Chmielowski http://velocitymg.com/?p=1707 (Takeaway #1: cell phone does not get a charge off your computer if your computer is turned off.) Wanted to consolidate and expand on some of the great ideas that came out of sessions with Laura Fitton (@Pistachio), Nigel Paine (@ebase), Wayne Hodgins (@wwwayne), and Malcolm Gladwell while it is all still fresh in my mind. Other conference goers – I’d love it if you’d add some of your key takeaways to the comments!
 

Laura Fitton

Laura Fitton, author of Twitter for Dummies, provided some insightful yet general thoughts on Twitter. She did not focus specifically on Twitter for learning, and I’d attribute this to the (lack of) expertise of the audience: the learning field’s fairly slow adoption of both Twitter and social media. (I’m pretty new with Twitter, myself.) For example, a quick survey of the room showed only about 10% were tweeting. But it takes very little extrapolation (if any) to apply her comments directly to learning. Here were some of the ideas that stood out for me:
  • The number of people in the world able to communicate electronically via computers is in the millions, but the number of people with mobile devices tops 4 billion. Takeaway #2: mobile devices and media like Twitter exponentially expand accessibility, connectivity, and dialog.
  • The shortness of Twitter is significant because it's so easy to create and consume content. This is absolutely critical these days, given the pace of business and change.  Takeaway #3: the shortness of micro-blogging lowers the barrier to entry. People can easily offer their perspective, provide examples, chime in with one little nugget or idea, or offer a relevant link, without having to dive into huge detail that they may not have the time or the inclination to explore.
  • Twitter overcomes social isolation. This is huge for those of us who work from home. Both from a personal perspective – tools like Twitter and Facebook become our water-cooler exchange mechanisms – and from a professional perspective: I can find experts, advice, and support without having to be co-located with someone, or even having ever met them face to face. Takeaway #4: the social side of social media drives engagement, access to expertise, and, ultimately, effectiveness.
  • Laura’s two word guide to Twitter: be useful. Her four word guide: listen, learn, care, serve. Indeed. How can you not love this, as a person, or as a learning professional? Takeaway #5: as in so much else in life, authenticity and a genuine interest in others wins out over solipsism. (Ok, not really a surprise I hope, but don’t you just love how she characterizes it?)
  • Twitter lets you surround yourself with successful people (that you might not have access to otherwise).  Or, takeaway #6: from an L&D perspective, Twitter lets you provide a light-weight “mentorship” tool in a profoundly scalable manner. How might it affect retention and engagement at large corporations if execs provided this level of real-time transparency into their thoughts and vision?
The session with @Pistachio was a great start to the day. Sorry I missed the Tweetup this evening!

Nigel Paine

Not to be outshone, Nigel Paine, former CLO for the BBC, led a thoughtful session on what it takes to be a learning leader. Really, he led a session on what it takes to be an effective business leader in the domain of learning. Takeaway #7: we must think and act as business people first, and learning experts second. Here’s a list of qualities we identified as critical for being an effective learning leader in our ever-evolving field and world:
  • Vision
  • Business savvy
  • Strategic thinking
  • Innovation/supporter of innovation
  • Inspirational communicator/executive influence/ courage/credibility
  • Nimble
  • Curious about the business
  • Able to assemble and support a strong team
  • “Customer” facing (internal or external) and multi-lingual – as in, can speak the language of various organizational units (sales, IT, marketing, etc.)
  • Problem solving (able to find solutions from both inside and outside of the organization)
  • Technically astute
As well as facilitating a lively discussion, Nigel had a few great quotes to offer: my favorite (I forget the source) was that leaders define reality, as opposed to letting reality define them.

 

Wayne Hodgins

I was lucky enough to sit in on a number of sessions led by Wayne Hodgins. I could go on and on about how engaging and thought provoking he is, but I’m a bit biased, having the incredible good fortune to work with him as a colleague. So I’ll just say, if you missed him today be sure to catch him talking about the “Snowflake Effect” and “Mass Personalization” on Wednesday morning at 8:30 in Durango 1.


Malcolm Gladwell

The day wrapped up with an awesome keynote from Malcolm Gladwell, best-selling author of Blink, The Tipping Point, and Outliers. Rare to find an author whose talks are as engaging as their books.  There were a lot of tweets about his presentation, so I’m going to scrape some that came through most often to synthesize key takeaways from Gladwell:
  • Malcom Gladwell @ #l2009 defines success as the opportunity to engage in meaningful work. (via @tinac)
  • Malcolm Gladwell: culture trumps genes in explaining social phenomena. #l2009 (via @da5idm)
  • Company Cultures hit you in the face the moment you walk in the door (via @bmosh )
  • Overconfidence is the disease of the expert. Ignorance is the disease of the novice. -Malcolm Gladwell #L2009 (via @johnjambrose)
  • World-class expertise requires more than 10,000 hrs of deliberate practice (approx 4hrs/dayx10 yrs) @Gladwell #L2009 (via @johnjambrose)
  • Expertise: the ability to crunch data in seconds in the unscripted moment. -M. Gladwell. #L2009 (via @randomdazzle)
  • Excellence is not a permanent trait, you need to fight for it everyday. Gladwell #L2009 (via @DerekCunard)
And finally, having these kinds of notes provided by many bright colleagues and so nicely compiled and at my fingertips, ready to grab out of the ether, leads me to the bonus topic promised in the title of this blog post…

The Power of the Back Channel for Learning

Those of you who have followed conference hashtags before are likely thinking, “well, duh!” so please bear me with for a moment while I get all gooey about the novelty of it. Having a conference-focused twitter stream running throughout the day was great on a number of levels. First, I was able to check in on highlights being captured from other sessions, which is the next best thing to being in two places at the same time. Next, I found it to be a really valuable way to take quick notes on ideas that caught my attention in the moment, and then read back through them later when I had more time for reflection. Greater still, my own thoughts were augmented and at times echoed by other people’s notes, helping me catch nuances that I otherwise might not have. At content-packed conferences like these, ideas can quickly slip away, tumbling over one another, fighting for attention, and disappearing down the echoing halls. The back channel lets us capture these illusory snippets, refer back to them when there’s less going on, and integrate them soundly into our long term memory when and if we so choose.  It lends an intimacy and a congruity to the reflection process that is invaluable.


There’s also a comfort and a sense of belonging in being able to check in on and participate in the chatter. Sharing and reposting thoughts with other tweeters makes me feel like a much more active participant at the conference this year than I did last year merely floating from session to session and asking the occasional question – almost to the point of feeling a sense of ownership over the experience. Driving buy-in at that level does wonders for retention and application.


Plus the banter is just really fun.]]> http://velocitymg.com/explorations/leveraging-learning/key-takeaways-from-day-1-of-learning-2009-and-the-power-of-the-back-channel-for-learning/feed/ 6 To get Twitter you gotta Tweet! http://velocitymg.com/explorations/leveraging-learning/to-get-twitter-you-gotta-tweet/ http://velocitymg.com/explorations/leveraging-learning/to-get-twitter-you-gotta-tweet/#comments Tue, 06 Oct 2009 12:45:17 +0000 John Hathaway http://velocitymg.com/?p=1565 It's always tough to try to explain the value of Twitter to people who have never used it. "It's updates from people in 140 characters."

It's like describing this painting by Chuck Close by saying "it's got all these little blobs of color". True, but doesn't really capture the experience.

The value of the painting doesn't come from the individual blobs of color, which on their own are pretty uninteresting, but from the way they come together to form a portrait of a person. Similarly, a single Twitter update (aka tweet) with no context may be uninteresting, but if you see many tweets from someone you follow over several days you start to see a picture of a person emerge. You will never appreciate this by just dipping in and reading random tweets, but only by following some people for at least a few days.

But to really get Twitter, you can't just read what others have to say; you have to tweet yourself; you have to interact. Using Twitter as a read-only medium is like using the telephone as a listen-only medium. Do you get more value from passively listening on a conference call or when you're actively engaged in a conversation?

Robert J Moore recently posted some interesting statistical analysis of Twitter user behavior that supports this.

The likelihood that someone who tweets once will tweet again is just over 60%. But by the time they've hit their 10th update, they're very likely to continue. It seems that by that point they've had time to see the value for themselves.

So if you still don't understand the value of Twitter here's my recommendation: follow at least 10 people for 10 days and tweet at least 10 times.

(BTW, if you want to make me one of your 10 people, I'm at http://twitter.com/johnhathaway)

]]> http://velocitymg.com/explorations/leveraging-learning/to-get-twitter-you-gotta-tweet/feed/ 9 Death by Twitter http://velocitymg.com/explorations/death-by-twitter/ http://velocitymg.com/explorations/death-by-twitter/#comments Sat, 18 Jul 2009 17:14:35 +0000 Jon Lloyd http://velocitymg.com/?p=598 I'm starting to wonder how many other people feel like they are being Twittered to death? Not just from the hundreds of tools out there to Tweet, search Tweets, or receive them, rather just the constant overload of articles, how-to's, and incorporation of Twitter into just about every topic across the board. We even have Twitter posts here at VMG Explorations.

Don't get me wrong, I think that Twitter will continue to evolve as it has so rapidly from what Lance Armstrong had for lunch into an interesting play for marketing, learning, communicating... well, until it doesn't. Much like Monster was once the best alternative to finding jobs and getting hired, it has now evolved into another black hole. Ads in the newspaper never used to actually produce much in the ways of jobs - it simply announced the opening, and the network took it from there. Very few people actually were hired cold. Monster made it easier to find jobs by a searchable, tag-able, online mechanism. For awhile, I think that you could actually be successfully landing a job cold from Monster. Now? No way. Monster has continued to evolve and now has a variety of services, and recently launched a talent management suite. Time will tell how that turns out.

Twitter has evolved at a much faster rate. My friends at a small software company use it to communicate with their customers to understand what they want in the next release or feedback on a current release, to announce a presentation at a conference they are attending, to pull customers and prospects into a booth demo at a specified time.

From a learning perspective, Twitter can be used in a social learning context to get help on the fly. I've seen Sales Engineers to get immediate assistance at a customer site - instead of physically calling out to teammates asking for help to design an implementation, a quick Tweet while you are in a meeting can get you critical information to make the sale. Of course there are other ways in forums and wikis to do this, but for a near real-time poll of SMEs, it has produced some interesting and successful results. From my own research, we have found (not unsurprisingly) that what technical people want more than anything, is more access to more knowledgeable resources within the vendors' ranks. As close to real-time SME access as possible. Think context-sensitive 'live' help. Beth has some other great examples too.

I used Twitter as a bit of a joke in early 2008 delivering a talk at an LMS vendor's conference, at the same time hedging my bet saying that Second Life and Facebook would have never been thought of as a corporate collaboration tool the year before (and they still might not be, ha). Evolve or die.

The Twitter evolution is spinning at light speed right now. I think that Twitter the app could just as easily be dead in a year as other collaboration technologies incorporate a deeper solution set into their products, making a more transparent collaborative environment with LMS products and the like.

At VMG, we don't think about the technology, but rather about optimizing human performance that improve business results. The 'concept' of Twitter might just be one little piece of that puzzle, in the right context.

]]> http://velocitymg.com/explorations/death-by-twitter/feed/ 0 The Power of Twitter is the Hashtag http://velocitymg.com/explorations/leveraging-learning/the-power-of-twitter-is-the-hashtag/ http://velocitymg.com/explorations/leveraging-learning/the-power-of-twitter-is-the-hashtag/#comments Thu, 18 Jun 2009 16:08:20 +0000 Beth Chmielowski http://velocitymg.com/?p=559 I finally get it. I signed up for Twitter more than a year ago, have dabbled with it a couple of times, attempted to follow both people I know and people I don’t, and quickly gave up on it each time. Though my work often involves questions on how social media can be used for learning in the workplace, I just couldn’t wrap my head around Twitter; its value eluded me. Then came last Friday’s election in Iran and the #IranElection Twitter-stream that told (and continues to tell) of its aftermath, and all that changed.

Though I’m not an early adopter, I’ve been a user and fan of other social media and networking tools, such as LinkedIn and Facebook for a while. But with Twitter, the lack of context threw me. In Facebook, people post status updates within the confines of a 140 character limit, just like with Twitter. But unlike in Twitter, with Facebook everyone I follow and who follows me is someone I know and have explicitly given access to my updates. In contrast, Twitter is an open post to the world, if anyone stumbles upon it or bothers to read it, that is. Maybe that model makes sense for a blog, I thought, but something so short? Why bother? What good can come from random thoughts being broadcast to strangers? I tend to be impatient with small talk. And bad at it. I’m the kind of person who goes to a party, finds one or two interesting people, and talks to them all night in the kitchen. A never ending flow of inconsequential tweets (see, for example, #haveyouever) seemed to me like something straight out of a Sartre play.

The nomenclature doesn’t help. It’s messy and confusing to new users: RTs and @names and DMs that don’t actually use the M – what the…? There are plenty of blog posts such as this one describing the basics of Twitter, so I won’t go into that here. But buried in that nomenclature, which has emerged more from the community than from the product design, is something very powerful: the hashtag. Including #topic in a tweet makes it possible to aggregate all the tweets with the same tag, and create immediate, unfiltered, and un-prescribed community dialogs. In the case of #IranElection, it provides access to a minute-by-minute stream of what is happening there with an immediacy and perspective that can’t be found in traditional media. Sure, there is a lot of noise to filter, and yes, we should always question the veracity of tweets. And, look at the ability it provides for people to share their experiences and stories, link out to pictures and video, express differing opinions and dissent. And the ability for people everywhere in the world to find and follow that real-time dialog, and to join in. And the stream is also a permanent, searchable record, available for future review. This is not just random small talk we’re talking about.

So now I’m a convert. And the implications for corporate learning, I am finally realizing, are huge. Yammer is a Twitter-like tool restricted to people within the same company. What could you do with that to enhance learning at your company? For starters, how about:

  • Creating class-level communities using #coursename_date to enable a dialog between participants before, during, and after a course
  • Letting emergent and short shelf-life content, such as competitive knowledge, come from the people closest to it by aggregating #competitor_x or #competitor_y encounters and insights from sales reps in the field.
  • Capturing #best_practices and #lessons_learned in a live and searchable feed (rather than just at a post-mortem meeting where often they are noted, filed, and never heard of again).
Okay, so you’ll want shorter #names to save on your character limit, but you get the idea. What other ideas do you have for leveraging Twitter or Yammer for learning?]]> http://velocitymg.com/explorations/leveraging-learning/the-power-of-twitter-is-the-hashtag/feed/ 5