blue shift

Organizational learning and Leadership

As mentioned previously, I  attended the Young Democrats of Georgia Convention by the Sea this past weekend and gave a talk on social media, touching on ideas such as the future of participatory democracy,  and how internal communications can be retailored in the age of information abundance.

One of the observations I made throughout the weekend was that the de facto social network of choice amongst the Young Democrats of Georgia is Facebook.  Moreso then that was the fact that the way in which the younger democrats in University approached Facebook seems to differ from the older young democrats.  A point I made throughout the weekend was that everyone using Facebook is at the forefront of exploring the future of participatory democracy.  I think it was an ah-ha moment for a few people.  For college level democrats it was a wide-eyed "omg, hellz yes!!" ah-ha moment, and fromsome of the elder young democrats I noticed a more puzzled "that's interesting but a bit theorhetical" ah-ha.

I learned a valuable lesson this weekend about why it's so difficult for organizations to adopt social media.  Going into an organization, regardless of what the goal is regarding social media, the bottom line is that the project is an internal communications effort first and foremost.  That is to say that the proper organizational learning structures need to be put in place before social media can be adopted and utilized by an organization to more effectively do whatever it is they want to do.  My realization this past weekend is that what's most often needed in order for this to occur is leadership imperative and knowledge of already existing organizational learning structures.

One of the things I keep hearing from many Young Democrats is that the YDG is pretty much rebuilding from scratch at this point in it's history.  Communications between the many local branches has been either strained or non-existant, and they are now beginning to work towards building a robust communications network.  At this moment there pretty much isn't a learning structure in place for the YDG to adopt social media into their every day practices. 

This may be a net positive. Elections for new leadership were held this past weekend, so the opportunity exists now more then ever for putting these learning structures into place and making social media the cornerstone of their internal and external communications efforts.

This is a stark contrast to organizations with established leadership and established learning networks that are taylored towards indoctrinating it's members into the already existing communications practices of the organization.  This is self-perpetuating and makes it difficult for such organizations to adapt to the new  reality that networked culture and information abundance portends.

Twitter groups already exist!

I've heard people suggest that Twitter is in need of groups functionality.  I thought that would detract from Twitter's simplicity however, and I began thinking of simple ways to focus Twitter messages to specific groups of people.  Say I'm at a conference and only want other people I know at that conference to receive my messages, how would it be done?  I was thinking about applying a tagging tool to categorize your friend network, but using the tags would be too unwieldy on the ground.  Scratch that idea...

As it turns out, this problem has already been solved! Although I don't think most people have realized it yet.  Too Obvious perhaps? (Pardon the pun, I couldn't help myself. I'm getting help.)

The answer lies in using the @username syntax that's emerged from the user base.  This past week I noticed that I wasn't getting any noisy @username messages from anyone on my friends list to anyone else not on my friends list.  Cool, I thought. Everyone in my network spontaneously decided that was annoying behavior!

As it turns out, no one's behavior changed, I only stopped receiving these messages.  Everyone else was still using them!  But what does this mean?

In addition to direct messages (which are private) which take on the syntax of "d username message" we also now have public directed messages (with the syntax of "@username message") which will only be received by friends that the sender and the recipient have in common.

Which means, if I were to create a Twitter account called "Atlanta" (which is already taken btw) and every single Twitterer in Atlanta were to join it, we'd be able to use that account as a filter to direct messages solely to our friends in Atlanta.  So next time I'm at a bar and want to let all my local friends know (while sparing all my friends in New York and elsewhere the annoyance of random and irrelevant messages they can't act on) all I have to do is text "@Atlanta I'm at Manuel's tavern, beers on me for anyone who shows!"

To put this simply, "@username message" let's me message all the friends that the person I'm messaging and I have in common.

Twitter groups already exist, and it's the network! (as usual)

So, here some suggestions for Obvious to implement into Twitter to make this functionality a bit better:

• When I visit someone's Twitter page, on the right hand side, show me friends that that person and I share in common.  That way I'll know who else will see the message when I "@username" them.
• A simple command to only receive messages from people who are also friends with one other person.
• Create a special class of user accounts that don't have a microblog component and automatically accept friend requests.  These become formalized filters that anyone can join to target sections of their network. It would be great to see user accounts show up for citys, conferences, etc. This would be the group feature that many people are requesting. This would also create new public timelines.
• Bonus points for fixing the namespace problem: Perhaps starting these groups off with something like "!" as the first character so we can send messages like this: "!atlanta message" The fact that these accounts can't be used to post anything deincentivizes people from hogging the namespace.  There would be nothing to control!

When SXSW rolls around next year, everyone there will be Twittering "@sxsw I'm at the virtual worlds panel!" or "!sxsw podcasting in ze hallways!!!!1" and I won't get any of it!

Unless of course I want to, in which case I'll add SXSW to my friends list. :D