“Since the start of Facebook real conversations are down 10% and real poking is down 40%” Mark Watson, comedian

Comedy aside, it’s understandable to think that expertise is enough to get and hold onto a job or contract, but sadly it ain’t necessarily so.

Someone recently said to my friend “You’re just as good at your job as [your colleague], the difference is no one knows who you are”. And while the buzz words du jour are social media, making sure you don’t underestimate your online social capital is only half the story. Employers and clients are looking for individuals who can communicate their expertise and change hearts and minds in organisations, using their inherent real-life social skills.

Trouble with being a professional specialist is you’re often far down the food chain or at least brought in late in decision processes, to ‘make it happen’. I often find myself in positions where clients ask me for something I know is fundamentally wrong. I either have to grin and produce unworkable rubbish, wasting their money and tarnishing my reputation, or find ways to politely tell them they’ve got it wrong while not embarrassing them and giving compelling arguments for why my way is better and reassurances it’ll all be alright in the end.

Nick Cochrane is MD of digital recruitment agency Zebra People , has found that as well as professional knowledge, his clients are increasingly demanding candidates with ‘influencing’ abilities, following this very real trend for real-space social skills. To be able to show our professional peacock feathers or communicate our potentially controversial opinions, we have to consistently communicate and engage a variety of audiences.

“When you present, you’ll be trying to persuade someone to alter their behaviour, or attitude. ‘Influence’ is a pretty constant feature of everyday life and work. We’re more emotionally aware than we used to be, and as people become more aware, the dark arts of persuasion need to keep up, like an arms race.” Rob Archer, Bloom Psychology.

The moral of the story is, keep Tweeting, blogging and interacting online for a wide reach, maintain distant connections and build personal brand, but also do the other social things we hairless monkeys are so good at …

- Make sure your interpersonal skills are up to scratch (remember, “Presentation is a skill not a human right”)
-  Capitalise on your strong points and improve your weak points in social interaction – you might want to do one of the many personality profiling tests to help you identify these
- Remember that everyone you deal with is firstly human, then many things after: parent / sibling / carer / manager / director / customer
- Collaborate and share to engender good will, showcase your knowledge and create new relationships
- Stand up and be counted, or the blabber mouthed numpties will climb over you and stupidity will prevail
- Be natural and treat everyone with the same level of respect from the CEO to the cleaner

Be Human.

Er … The Long Dog

I saw recent a Tweet by one of my peers, along the lines of “Broken link on my intranet not my fault, but still getting complaints in droves”. My response was “Inform the owner of that content there’s a broken link, tell them the content will be removed if the link isn’t repaired or removed then follow through with your threat.”

I don’t know if she took my advice.

Having managed and designed intranets and websites for global brands, the last thoughts stakeholders have is often about ongoing maintenance and governance. Trouble is, with no robust ongoing support your beautiful new baby gets ugly pretty quickly.

Websites need to be thought of as rose gardens: careful design, expert creation, then managed by a professional who knows what they’re doing and who is empowered to make decisions about when to allow growth and when to prune back hard.

Also, like a rose garden, the downside of a lack of management is rambling and exponential organic growth, but the knock-on results of this for a website are measurably worse:

- Poor findability of content
- Duplicated or contradictory information
- Poor user experience reducing conversion rates and subsequently reducing turnover
- Lack of trust in reliability of content
- Lowered employee efficiency (intranets)
- Abandonment of tasks / journeys – for a commercial website, this means the visitor may be switching to your competitor.

For a while I ran a global intranet for about 20,000 employees and before I arrived content was rarely removed. After some polite but unambiguous refusals to publish new subsites and the removal of whole swathes of unmanaged or substandard content, people began to value the intranet more, respect its governance and as a result put in more effort or at least seek assistance with new content.

To manage this intranet Intranet Section Managers were created – employees deputised with metaphorical tin stars because of their existing accountability for sections, expertise, or willingness to take on a new challenge. Also the accreditation of intranet publishers was made mandatory and required attendance of a two day training course. In 12 months the benchmarking ranking for the intranet went from 36th out of 36 FTSE 100 / Fortune 100 to 8th.

You want practical advice?
- Work out the ‘how’ and ‘who’ of site management BEFORE you launch … that’s BEFORE you launch … afterwards is like herding cats
-Empower someone as the overall person in charge who can and WILL make decisions about the commissioning, editing and removal of content
- How you structure your governance, central / devolved etc, depends on what will work best in your organisation.
- Build the governance to fit the organisation, don’t try and bend a model that won’t work or it’s cat herding again.

Intranets: Encourage the development of a wider community of practice to support, inform and provide volunteer lookouts for problems and champion your intranet in your organisation. Get the support of heavyweight seniors – otherwise your Intranet Manager is a toothless watchdog.

Overall … while governance is often seen as consuming time and money, in the end it’ll save a load of both and produce a site of much higher quality.

Now … go bring law and order to the badlands.

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