I heard on the radio this morning that “billions have been lost over the last year through people updating their statuses rather than working”. I’ve heard similar things before and frankly I don’t agree.

A couple of years ago I was asked by Melcrum Publishing to write something about the use social networking sites by employees and I suspect this debate will carry on for years. The simple and credible sounding argument is this: If people are spending time on social networks instead of working, the business is not getting any value from that employee for that time.

Strictly … empirically … it’s true. But it ignores the bigger picture of getting more long term value from your employees by creating more engaging working environments. The fact that jobs and even departments for employee engagement exist is testament to the need for engaging employees. Research shows that money doesn’t motivate in the long term. Being an engaged employee in an agreeable working environment does. Some years ago, studies showed that allowing access to evil employee-time-stealing sites like Hotmail and Yahoo! actually lead to a small increase in productivity in some areas. It was found that, on the understanding that access was only allowed during breaks, people did exactly that – and while they remained at their desks, checking on their evil productivity-leaching webmail, they actually continued to do more work.

Ok, maybe not scientific, but I think the real issue is a management issue: If your employees are spending too much time networking then either you should see their work suffer and this can be addressed, or they just haven’t got enough work.

I once worked at <a global brand that shall remain nameless> that had had all the DVD drives removed from the desktops that staff were issued with. When I asked to borrow the department’s DVD player (oh yes), it was explained to me that this was a security issue (even if staff were using USB sticks to take work home with them), but more importantly to prevent people watching films when they should be working. You’d think you’d notice someone spending two hours staring at their screen, earphones in, and smirking at the funny bits and generally not doing any work, but apparently not. It only made me wonder why my bag wasn’t checked for books in case I might be reading novels at my desk instead of working.

There are reasons (apart from basic human rights) why we no longer work in Dickensian penury, silently seated at desks, fearing the fines and corporal punishment meted out by our employees. Allow people their email, their quick bit of networking, their texts (that’s phones as well as books), their chats over the photocopier and expect them to do the work that needs to be done. If they’re wasting time sort them out or make sure they’ve got enough work to do.

If you employee adults, treat them like adults and you’ll get a grown up attitude to work.

The Long Dog.

PS – This doesn’t count as social networking … this is work.

From the fairy tales of our earliest years to the soap operas, newspapers and box office hits of our maturity, we humans love stories. But it’s not just about adventure and a happy ending. Stories are a medium through which we communicate and mentally store information in a handy recall framework of associated items.

“Stories are the creative conversion of life itself into a more powerful, clearer, more meaningful experience. They are the currency of human contact”. Robert McKee, screenwriter.

It’s easy to dismiss storytelling as something for kids and I wouldn’t recommend starting your corporate presentation with ‘Once upon a time there was a brave little CEO…” but as a technique for engaging audiences and conveying information it’s as good today as it was thousands of years ago.

The fact stories follow a narrative, building up layers of information and associated items (first this happened, then as a result that happened) helps us create a linear mnemonic – one that photographic memory performers use to connect and remember huge lists of seemingly unconnected items.

Used as a communication tool, stories and storytelling allow us to lay out a message in a clearly accessible form that we’re all familiar with.

“Rapport is created between the storyteller and the audience. They feel that they are actively involved, rather than just passively listening”, Lindsey Warnes Carroll, comedian and story teller.

Our brains and basic cultures have changed little since the days of hearing the news, learning about the latest religion/King/invaders and keeping in touch with our community through stories. In fact, traditional storytelling is enjoying a renaissance with storytelling festivals like Beyond the Border, held in the grounds of a cliff-top Welsh castle, on the increase.  And now there are even companies like The Story Tellers who “help business leaders engage their people in strategy, vision, values and change”.

But you don’t have to be a pro who’s spent years learning the art – we tell stories all the time: “Have you heard? She was with HIM last night at the bar and then…”.  Engaging stakeholders, communicating the progress of a project, concepts for design or delivering an unpalatable message, we all engage with this medium without thinking – it’s how we’re taught as children, how we consume news and entertainment: it’s our common culture as a species.

Some principles:

• Beginning THEN middle THEN end. Build up to the ‘big issue’ from the beginnings so your audience can start with simple concepts and add the detail – like Lego.
• Make sure the end has a real end. A joke without a punchline doesn’t work. Make sure your story builds to the main point, deliver that point, then finish or move to a new and different thread. Unless you’re very good, don’t try to carry several threads at once – people will get lost.
• Use a narrative to plan your presentation material (yes, I do mean PowerPoint slides amongst other things).
• Make sure you include details if you’re introducing new ideas. Don’t be afraid to stop the narrative and explain. E.g. ‘for those of you who don’t know what social networking is…’, or, ‘And the sword he held was carved with sigils and signs of a dark and unnatural nature…’, depending on your subject matter and audience.
• Stories can be spoken, written, pictorial or use just about any medium for their production. The importance is in the structure, building narrative and communication of the message.
• Experiment with stories that don’t yet have an ending and allow or use the audience to discover and create as a collaborative exercise. Remember those ‘choose your own adventure’ books? On the internet, a user’s journey through a website doesn’t always follow a prescriptive path, but is … wait for it … hypertextual.
• Enjoy the telling of the story and your audience will enjoy the story too – no matter how potentially dry your subject – believe me, I’m delivered some stats stories in my time that could have bored people into an early grave, without improving the engagement through storytelling.

“And they all lived happily ever after. The End.”

The Long Dog.

Social media frontierswoman, PR pro and MD of PR agency thebluedoor, Abigail Harrison gives us some solid practical advice from the pointy end of using social media in a business context. Just don’t call her Bernard.

LD: Abi? Abigail? What should I call you?
AH: Abigail or @AbigailH would be just fine
LD: You just can’t help yourself, can you.

LD: You work in PR – what are the top 3 three things individuals can get from using social media?
AH: (1) It facilitates conversations with ‘influencer’ audiences about things they care about, (2) Ensures individuals stay ahead of the curve as digital tools evolve and networks develop, (3) Helps test ideas and develop thinking – people sometimes forget social media is great at delivering excellent results, it’s a brilliant research tool.

LD: Tell us about your organisation and what you do – yup, this is the chance to plug your biz
AH: Ahh music to my ears! thebluedoor is a PR agency. Our ’sweet spot’ is understanding the relevant digital tools – what they do or don’t do, and how they can work for different companies, brands and campaigns. Digital hasn’t changed the nuts and bolts of what PR is.

LD: Continental or ‘Full English’?
AH: Neither really – I love a pink grapefruit or a bowl of porridge.

LD: What got you interested in online social networking?
AH: I’ve been involved in online for a while, and worked on the PR for one of the largest dotcom IPOs in 2000 – StepStone, the online recruitment site. It’s a fascinating world which allows us all to work creatively with some brilliant practitioners.

LD: Isn’t this all a bit … well … geeky?
AH: Well, yes and no. Part of the problem is language. We do ourselves no favours hiding behind walls of geek-speak. It’s vital we make digital approachable and normalised. That said, it is crucial we understand the geekiness behind it all – and once you start to understand it, there’s a beautiful, measurable logic about the digital world.

LD: What are your top social sites for work?
AH: It has to be Twitter – the digital rock-star of the PR and online world. I have a separate screen on my desk with TweetDeck running – through this Twitter application we discover breaking news, respond to requests for help and interact with the multiple social communities using it. [LD: That is sooo 'geek chic']

LD: And top sites for play?
AH: It isn’t strictly a social site, but I couldn’t live without BBC iPlayer. It’s wonderful – great for catching up on the world and business.

LD: Pint of beer or glass or wine?
AH: Glass of wine – it’s been a long time since I had a pint!

LD: Favourite online social success story?
AH: The work that we have recently done for SocialSafe has been a real high point for me. Key to cracking online is to identify the ‘influencer’ blogs and sites. We successfully pitched a story to Mashable, and the ensuing traffic (meaningful rather than drive-by) and knock-on pick-up was phenomenal!

LD: Favourite online social disaster story?
AH: Thankfully I don’t have one. But I did send a new business pitch, addressed to ‘Mike’ but was actually ‘Mark’. Naturally he was upset – but we agreed as penance I’d be ‘Bernard’ for time-immemorial.

LD: So … Bernard … advice for someone starting out with social networking?
AH: Get your hands dirty and jump in.  It’s the only way to learn. Follow people on Twitter who use practice – it’s a great way to understand what and how people are using the tools. A key challenges is staying on top of developments, so keep reading. And of course don’t lose sight of the world outside the digital bubble.  

LD: Let’s say I’m a business who’s ’social curious’ – what are the top benefits and risks?
AH: Benefits:

• just taking a step towards understanding the digital world opens up a world of opportunity and possibility
• digital is a real-time barometer about how your audience, customers, stakeholders feel about you – not knowing is a bit like sticking your fingers in your ears and not looking, because it is happening anyway and isn’t going away anytime soon
• engaging online is a great way of qualifying leads and researching potential customers

Risks:

•  the major risk is letting the excitement of online get in the way of rational objective consideration – just because it’s shiny and powerful, it’s vital to understand the medium to ensure it fits in your overall business strategy
• also if you haven’t conducted the due diligence of understanding your current online footprint before you start experimenting you risk tripping over quite quickly and publically

LD: Thanks, Abigail. Want to come to my free social media event in London? Go on – it’s going to combine theatre, art and business skills and there’s a glass of wine in it for you?
AH: Go on then.

• More on Abigail / @AbigailH / Bernard (so many profiles, so little time) on thebluedoor website.

 All I have to say on the matter is…

Must convey offering + personality + everything U know <= 140 chars. #I’veGotSoMuchMoreToTell_Ireallyhave

 That’s it.

Well – apart from saying that I was trying and failing to write and upload a much longer post, from a moving train, on an intermittent mobile connection that properly summed up the need for short bursts of clarity – ‘Needs must when the Devil drives’ (Oh … and this is a metaphor – he wasn’t really driving the train I was on … probably).

Summary: Keep it short and clear, but project your ’self’

The Long Dog

Her wicked sense of humour doesn’t conceal her no-nonsense attitude and she’s a true digital professional, able to move between the often immiscible worlds of tech, comms and business strategy. She’s run intranets for some of the worlds best known brands, is a keen sportswoman and all round fun person to be with. Ok … that’s her ego massaged enough – here’s 60 seconds with one of best Intranet Managers I’ve met:

LD: How long have you spent working with intranets?
CS:Since about 2000. I’ve been an Intranet Manager since 2005.

LD: Do you have a technical, communications background or something else?
CS: Maths! I did Maths at University which then led onto HTML training. For anyone who knows me they’ll know my laugh wouldn’t really suit an accountancy environment.

LD: How many employees has the largest intranet you’ve worked on served?
CS:Reuters intranet served 25000 staff and had about 1.5 million pages. And as all things go, it was the smallest team I’ve had.

LD: Top three key things an intranet must do, to be a success?
CL: (1) Have a staff directory on it, (2) be consistently available (and by this I’m referring to serving all offices and avoiding outages), (3) have at least one tool the staff can brag about.

LD: Top three common points of failure for an intranet?
CS: (1) Intranet builds led by people who only care about technology and not what the user actually wants from it, (2) not getting investment into good servers and even more importantly backup servers, (3)
Wikis – That’s totally un-pc of me to say but I’m not a fan at all: Making it easier for users to add content doesn’t mean they’ll maintain it.

LD: Jakob Nieslen or Jacob’s Cream Crackers?
CS: Cream crackers – is that a description of me?

LD: If you weren’t managing intranets what would you rather be doing?
CS: Pro Tennis player

LD: Did you set out to be an intranet manager?
CS: No! I didn’t really know what I wanted to do. My second job was at Unisys and I was randomly picked within the team to go learn HTML and build the financial services marketing team a website. It was love… [I suspect 'love' to be an exaggeration of sorts - Long Dog]

LD: Top three challenges for running a good intranet?
CS: Buy-in, budget & lack of control. It probably all really comes back to buy-in. It really shows that in the current financial state of the world those senior managers who have seemed to be bought in still look straight to the Intranet team for cost cuts.

LD: What do your friends and family think you do for a job?
CS: It varies, I’m not sure anyone really gets it! I try and tailor my answer and obviously stop talking as soon as they glaze over. I have been known on occasions to say I’m a PA just to avoid further questioning! I have several friends who refer to me as their clever friend, very flattering. I think maybe it translates as we don’t understand what you’re saying so it must be clever.

LD: Who should manage an intranet: IT, Internal Comms, HR or someone else?
CS: I think if you’ve got a person leading it who has both IT knowledge and comms/strategy knowledge then you can run it from IT or Internal Comms. My advice to anyone though is never never run it out of HR. Ideally if you have a company strategy team the Intranet would sit within it.

LD: Top three survival skills for intranet managers?
CS: (1) I bake cakes and give them to IT – it’s definitely helped me get a few databases built faster or for free! (2)
The ability to stop, clear your mind and try to imagine how a certain user would deal with something or want something, (3) Patience …

LD: What do you look for in someone working for you, on an intranet?
CS: Drive and personality. You’ve got to be able to talk to anyone and everyone if you’re going to succeed in such a cross functional team. I think drive is key to delivering and keeping the customer happy. I want people in my team that I can send to a meeting on their own and know they will represent the team at the same level I would.

LD: Software or information architecture - which is more important?
CS: Ooh that’s a hard question! I guess if you’re IA is great you can kind of cover up for useless software but if your IA is bad it doesn’t matter how good your software is.

LD: Best or worse intranet story
CS: We were clearing old sites off the intranet by backing them up onto an external hard drive and then deleting them. Highly technical method obviously. We managed to deleted a site which turned out to contain a buried folder with the sales figures database in it. This was their daily reporting tool and held everything!!! I found out the next day it was missing, had that moment where your blood runs cold, re-uploaded the site and looked at the data. Only to find the data was miraculously up to date, to the minute … we never did figure it out …

LD: Finally, any tips for struggling intranet workers or managers?
CS: Go out and see as many intranets as you can. And don’t be afraid to say no to a senior manager

More about Claire on her Linked In profile.

The Long Dog

Working out where we’re stacked in the great deck of life’s Top Trumps is difficult, and exploiting our strengths and shoring up our weaknesses (I refuse to say ‘areas for improvement’) is only easy if you’re sure of what these are.

Socially extravert people often seem to get along easily in life, whereas those less forthcoming can sometimes be overlooked. But … to get along in life as an extravert means you also have to be interesting. Just putting yourself about and getting in people’s faces isn’t enough, there has to be some value for the other person – fun, attraction, gaining new knowledge, personal advancement, whatever – otherwise you’re just a party bore with too much to say for yourself.

I heard recently (sorry – no source to reference) that the young people who were most sociable on Facebook were also the most sociable in real-life. To gain followers on Twitter or new friends on Facebook you have to have something to offer. Twitter’s definitely about quality, not quantity. Along with many others, I can’t stand the messages from allegedly interested followers who tell me they know the secret to $10000/day earnings (not to mention offers by Amlene242 and her ‘hot housemate’) – it’s an obvious scam. Sure there’ll be numpties out there who’ll go for it, but for us norms it’s just more spam.

Then why bother mixing in this world of get-rich-quick, appendage enlargement, tedious old school friends (there’s a reason we’ve not been in contact for the past two decades) and other social fluff?

For me two: playtime and work.

I won’t bother you with why and what I like to waste my time doing with online chums (though I do have a surprisingly large zombie army on Facebook), but I do want to talk about work…

Once upon a time there was a freelance web, digital and communications professional (‘Me’, for those slower on the uptake) who went to an interview for a short contract. The brave professional donned his suit and buckled on his A3 portfolio of valiant previous work and journeyed to the Big City to seek his fortune. When he arrived at the Palace of Digital Marketing, the person he met took one glance at the still valiant portfolio case and said “Oh, you won’t be needing that, I just want to know if you think this project is feasible and if you want to do it”.

It turns out that the nice man at the digital recruitment agency had given me a glowing reference. The client had checked out my profile on the business networking site Linked In. They called over a colleague who’d worked at somewhere I’d worked at a few weeks earlier and that colleague made a call to his old work buddies and asked “This Jason Buck, he any good?”. Thankfully, I’d done a good job and been nice enough to work with, so … unless I’d turned up drunk or naked, I’d already got the contract before I’d walked through the door, all on the basis of social networks, online and real-life and making myself a sociable enough person.

Story number two – and trying to avoid self adulation – is about a remark made by a respected comms professional who referred to my participation on a forum as being valued by people who felt they had quality information when they had a ‘Jason Buck answer’. It seemed I’d built a reputation just by contributing to something that I found interesting.

This isn’t about me blowing my own trumpet (if I could do that, I’d be in a circus – ba-boom-tish), but more to demonstrate why I really do value les enfants terribles Twitter, Facebook, Linked In and this li’l ole blog. Gossip and tittle-tattle maybe, but it puts food on my table.

This week’s advice is simple: In a time of economic uncertainty, budget cuts and redundancies go out and mingle with your species.

- Make friends and enjoy yourself. If you’re doing good work, that’ll be remembered, but so will you as an individual
- Offer value for your professional friendships
- Treat online relationships in the same ways of sensibility and playfulness as real-life
- Be gregarious, but be yourself
- Check out my article I just don’t get Twitter (and the comments!)
- Enjoy … life is not a dress rehearsal.

The Long Dog

“The hardest part of a thousand mile journey is the first step” traditional Chinese proverb

Over the last four years most of my clients have been in London. Friends and colleagues balked at my one and a half hour train journey, but now I’ve really moved to the countryside and my journey’s even longer: A 280 mile  (450km)drive + 40 minutes on trains round trip weighing in at roughly nine hours all in.

Why do I do it?

Because I only do it one day a week. The rest of the week I work from my cottage in the rolling English countryside.

In this age of household broadband, social media and good quality mobile phone reception, there are few reasons why I need to be in an office, except for occasional face-to-face or kick off meeting. Thankfully my current client is enlightened, so I can work from home, avoid unnecessary travel and food bills (never mind the money I’m saving on razors) and work surrounded by home comforts. The client’s basic requirement is that I do the work they want me to, to the standard they want me to and trust me to get on with it.

UK employment law now says that employers need to consider flexible working arrangements and with a young child and a partner with ongoing health issues, for me flexible working is a necessity and not just a luxury.

But … for anyone hoping to spend their working days lolling on the sofa, languidly wafting their fingertips near their laptop and watching Jeremy Kyle / Manga / Frasier reruns (delete as appropriate) there is one vital (but often overlooked) thing you need to get grounded in reality … you still need to do the work you’d do, if you were sat at an office desk.

Some less fundamental, but equally important considerations:

Can you do your work remotely?
Not all jobs can be done without regular face-to-face interaction. If home working’s your goal, make sure you do the sort of job that employers or clients are happy for you to do on your own.

Recall distance
If you do need to suddenly get into the office, how long will it take you? The only reason we didn’t move to a perfectly lovely lighthouse keeper’s cottage on the remote, but internet connected Scottish Isle of Raasay was the 6 hour round trip to Inverness or three DAY round trip to London. The more flexible you can be, the more relaxed your employer / client can be. Also, as I write this, I’ve had a call from home to say that my partner’s unwell, so I’m rushing back home to help and look after our son. Long journey, but it does mean I’ll be there tomorrow as well (and I’ll only charge my client for half a day got today. See … flexibility).

Tools
Make sure you’re kitted out for working remotely. I now use skype for audio calls and as soon as I can find my camera I’ll be using that as well (although I suspect this is more about my client wanting to have a nosey round my new house), I have a broadband connection at home and a mobile dongle so I can move around and work anywhere. As well as the ubiquitous email, I use a lot of social sites for communicating with my peers and doing research, primarily Facebook and LinkedIn.

Setting expectations
Be clear about how you want to work, and understand what you employer / client expects of you. There’s no point arranging one day a week, to be instantly called in for an extra two days. Conversely, you need to compromise – remember, this is about getting the working conditions YOU want, so give a little to gain some more.

How do I find it overall?
On the day I get up at 4:30am to do my nine hour commute – knackering. On the other days it’s relaxing, inspiring, less stressful and I get to collect the eggs from my chickens and see my son grow up.

Signing off in uncharacteristic tranquillity,
The Long Dog

“If you don’t ask, you don’t get” – trad proverb.

One of the greatest attractions of the web and internet technology is the ability to interact with others and widen one’s network of contacts, for business or simple pleasure.

In the first days of the web, physics students and the socially inept could publish their knowledge and inner thoughts to grey-backgrounded, courier-fonted, image-free webpages of interminable length. Even before the World Wide Web, online bulletin boards attracted hackers and phreaks sharing information and arranging real life meet-ups. If you don’t believe me, check out the bizarrely true story of early hackers that inspired the film 80’s film ‘War Games’, in Michele Slatalla’s melodramatically titled book “Masters of Deception: the Gang That Ruled Cyberspace”.

These early worlds of techies and geeks using their specialist knowledge has given way to services expected by most users of the internet, but each tool has a subtly different flavour. When the guys at creative design agency 0404 created the local and wild food brand River Cottage Community site blogs, forums and question/answer tools combined to give community members a range of ways to interact, but it’s important to see how these tools differ:

Blogs

Personal commentaries – like this blog – where individuals publish knowledge and opinion for others to read, with the ability to reply by posting comments, vetted before publication by the blog’s owner. Factoid … ‘blog’ is a contraction of ‘web log’ – a personal journal published to the internet
Good for: Freedom of opinion; building personal or brand reputation; speed of publication; moderating responses; being shared and forwarded.
Bad for: Not great at interaction as often passively read.

Forums

These are areas for debate and discussion. A question or opinion is published, often within a topic structure or taxonomy and members can respond in a ‘thread’ of discussion.
Good for: Starting debate and garnering opinion; encouraging multiple individuals to interact and respond.
Bad for: Forums can be cliquey with popular or long standing contributors and can lead to unpleasant behaviour and ‘flaming’; posting questions for quick and/or brief responses; can be intimidating for new members to join in.

Q&A services

Similar to forums, but often less structured and less formal. A question is posted and is open for respondents. The business networking site Linked In offers this ability, along with the choices of allowing anyone to view and answer your question, selecting contacts from your list to send the question to, or both.
Good for: Quickies (e.g. How do I do ‘this’?), garnering quick opinion from previously unknown sources
Bad for: Can collect repetitious answers (although this could help by weighting opinion); lack of visibility of question.

Why bother with any of these at all?

The obvious answer is for getting answers to your problems. However, asking a question is in itself a communication and can improve an individual’s or brand’s reputation through exposure, willingness to interact and implied knowledge and involvement with topic areas. For example, a company that blogs or asks questions about environmental issues implies a knowledge and care for such, improving the perception of their social conscience. Geddit? It’s like being chatty at a dinner party and instead of telling everyone else about ‘you’, asking about ‘them’ instead – by your questions and your answers people will be able to form opinions about the ‘real’ (or at least ‘perceived real’) you.

Go on then … what more do you want to know?

The Long Dog

“If you’ve got the time to do it badly, why haven’t you got the time to do it well?”, Gerry McGovern

Intranets are great. Believe me, I’ve worked on a few, and I think they’re the unsung heroes of a company’s digital paraphernalia. Great for providing a portal to a company’s own online services; great for providing virtual spaces for collaboration; great for broadcasting news and announcements across the globe; great for internal branding; great for supporting employees’ day-to-day tasks.

But … and this might sound like heresy … they’re not that good for internal communication.

By now any comms professional worth their salt has realised ‘newsletter comms’ doesn’t cut it. Broadcasting static information, voluntarily digested by mute, time-starved audiences only answers a small proportion of issues (see where I’m going?). Trouble is a lot of managers (some comms pros) see the intranet as The Answer –whack up the content, email a link and voila, communications done. Sadly, they don’t see that being digital doesn’t make it any better than a printed newsletter. All the printing and global distribution costs are cut, sure, but if the comms isn’t working, why not save even more money and just not do it at all? Hey, you could even do the comms face-to-face – now there’s an idea.

While it’s true an increasing workforce of generation Y-ers expect digital tools and unbounded internet access there are an lot of clever and experienced people spending an lot of clever and experienced time and money making sure their digital services survive against their competitors and provide what people want. Plugging new technology into an intranet then waiting for objectives to be met and the ROI to roll is unlikely to work.

One of the reasons networks like Facebook and Twitter work is they mimic real-world social interactions and their rewards but also their risks. Not everyone wants to interact through a digital medium: I work with an experienced digital consultant who hates the very idea of social sites, let alone Luddites who object to IT in general. On top of this organisations are often nervous about letting their little darlings loose on tools of free speech and the employees are often nervous about speaking freely for fear of ridicule or retribution.

Yes, intranets are great, but lazy managers can sweep communications tasks under the proverbial carpet and employees are often too busy to read lengthy web pages or, worse, PDF announcements *shudder* which they might liked to have kicked back with and read in print at their desks with cup of something steamy.

Intranets are often the solution cart put before the communications horse. Think of them as one of many channels, use all the good stuff they can do (global reach, real time publishing, feedback, audience tracking etc), but don’t forget they’re just one tool in the professional’s toolbox.

Some ranty reminders…

- Tailor your communications to the needs of your audience as well as your business (horse THEN cart)
- Don’t try and make a social networking playground unless you want people to treat it like a playground: the ‘in crowd’, the bullies and those who lurk in corners and solitude
- Your intranet is only one channel in a suite that can provide effective internal communications

The Long Dog

C-3PO: Sir, the possibility of successfully navigating an asteroid field is approximately 3,720 to 1!

Han Solo: Never tell me the odds!

How do the heroes of Star Wars succeed against impossible odds? Why does Mowgli make it to the man village without being munched, crushed or descending into beatnik monkey decadence? Leaving artistic licence and the need for a happy ending aside, one explanation is that it’s the mix of characters – of personalities.

In the workplace it’s just as important to understand the different personalities in a team, to be able to articulate the way people operate or for communicating the needs of others.

‘Insight profiling’ is a system of identifying different personality types, their behaviours and attitudes, so you can understand how you and others interact and avoid potential problems and personality clashes. I briefly covered Myers Briggs personality profiling in my post “We are all individuals … I’m not!” and while Insight Profiling can be as deep and subtle it can also be used in a quick-n-dirty way to reduce personalities to four broad types and their opposites.

I recently attended a client away day, hosted and facilitated by Colour Works, including some great Insight Profiling action. This post is unashamedly inspired by that day and is a VERY brief taste of Insight Profiling, by using Star Wars heroes and Jungle Book characters to illustrate how it works.

There are four main ‘colours’ of personality and traits peculiar to each. Choose which seems best to suit you, or predict which suit colleagues and friends:

To better understand how these work and interact, it’s possible to have a full profile done to see how each colour is represented (e.g. 40% red, 35% green, 10%yellow, 15% blue), so we can understand where our strengths are, but also how we complement or contradict others.

As a snapshot, it’s also useful to understand opposite ‘colours’ where we’ll find clashes or where we may need to rethink our approach to people (e.g.whether someone will make a good or dreadful presenter or leader). The colour wheel image shows the colours with their traits and which colour is the opposite (reds / greens and blues/ yellows). To help understand this and for a bit of fun, I’ve allocated heroes from Star Wars and some of the major Jungle Book characters to the wheel.

For those of you who’ve already or are about to ask the questions, the answers are:

- Yes, King Louie is a Yellow
- Yes, Darth Vader would be a Red and Obi Wan Kenobi would be a Green, in direct opposition to each other
- No, being an Earth Green doesn’t stop you from raining down righteous Jedi lightsabre retribution

The Long Dog (a Sunshine Yellow, but not a Jedi)