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Social Networking

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The Mind Map and the Creative Process

 

We had a great session at Govcamp recently where Laura documented the discussion using a mind map. The question was : what it takes to develop a public engagement strategy. With the advent of social media enablers and the reticent policies of the Government this question defies a clear answer, or does it?

If I revert back to my Quality training, I view this as a problem solving challenge and this means that there is a process ( us engineers love process, not only does it mean that there is logic to follow but also it gets to the solution faster and more effectively – saves lots of time and money). If we adapt the quality based approach then we can use the tools and techniques to get to a solution.

The problem that is being faced is complex, has many facets and crosses many departments with potential for any number of viable solutions, some of which may be specific to only one group or applicable across many. As an outsider, many of the conversations I participated in or overheard, faced the same issues around the role social media can play in engaging the citizen in debate and contribution.

Rather than trying to answer the global question i.e. one answer fits all, the approach would be to start with a specific issue or problem, see how that can be addressed, and then apply the solution to a broader perspective. This process can happen in many different areas and can result in a multitude of viable solutions, but the critical part will be the sharing of these results across the communities. This becomes the challenge of the different groups to communicate. However this is not the purpose of this entry, what I will outline is the basic process that gets people working together to come up with a series of potential solutions.

The first step is of course after identifying the fact that a problem exists (Problem identification) what is the problem that needs to be resolved. The first adaptation is to start using the term “issue” versus “Problem” which has  a negative connotation. The process remains the same.

In our Govcamp session the issue really came down to “What is the process” not how to solve the question of public engagement. Implementing the process that we came up with will ultimately address the question.

Context is always a critical element as it provides the anchor to the discussion. So each group that embarks on this process needs to establish context for their specific situation. For example if you are in the Public Health area, needing to establish public engagement on a specific issue such as Fetal Alcohol  Spectrum Disorder (FASD), then this establishes the context for the problem definition.

Finally we get to the creative process and where the Mind Map methodology fits in. First a bit about the creativity tools – these “help people to visualize, organize and analyze new ideas that lead to solving problems, developing new products and improving processes” ( The Creativity Tools Memory  Jogger). There are a lot of variations and uses for these tools, but the fundamentals hold true for all of them:

  • Open
    • Brainstorm the ideas, get as many as possible (Classic Brainstorming, knowledge Mapping)
  • Narrow
    • Group and identify common ideas ( Affinity Diagrams)
  • Close
    •  Prioritize and assign a prime to the top prioritized items (Multi voting)

The rules for brainstorming are simple:

  1. Good ideas are not praised or endorsed. All judgment is suspended initially in preference to generating ideas.
  2. Thinking must be unconventional, imaginative, or even outrageous. Self criticism and self judgment are suspended
  3. To discourage analytical or critical thinking, team members are instructed to aim for a large number of new ideas in the shortest possible time.
  4. Team members should “hitchhike” on other ideas by expanding them, modifying them or producing new ones by association.

Brainstorming technique Juran Institute. Juran’s Quality Handbook by Joseph M. Juran

For the social media engagement issue, the statement needs to be restated in a more meaningful and manageable statement. The original statement is far too comprehensive an issue to realistically come to any conclusion other than it is overwhelming. There are several tools that can help in restating or refining the issue – Knowledge Mapping, Purpose Hierarchy and Problem Reformulation, Heuristic Redefinition.

As a start this is where the mind map approach can be used as it is easy to understand, doesn’t require a lot of structure and generates ideas fast. Mind mapping is a variation on a more formal method called Knowledge Mapping. Knowledge Mapping is a method that graphically breaks down  a broad goal into increasing levels of detail to better understand the existing knowledge about it.

A mind map is a tool that helps people to show graphically what the brain does naturally. The brain structure and resulting thought patterns are tree like and the branches are the connecting ideas that help us make sense of the world. The ideas are recorded on lines around major ideas and linked to other ideas. Any idea expressed in any way is appropriate. The best art of this approach is that it can be used effectively in teams or by an individual to generate connecting ideas.

You need to apply the brainstorming rules to ensure that the ideas keep coming until they are exhausted. Then the next step starts – making sense of what came out. To be continued.

Peter de Gosztonyi is a quality practitioner and has led numerous groups through the idea generating process. He is an active member of the local American Society for Quality (ASQ) in Ottawa and has certifications as Manager of Quality and Organizational Excellence, Quality Auditor, and Quality Engineer.

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Building the Foundation for a successful Social Media Marketing Initiative

by Peter de Gosztonyi

I don’t know about you, but this entire social media wave has at times completely overwhelmed me, the pace at which this whole trend is moving and changing is breathtaking. Yet as a business owner I know that one can’t ignore this and it certainly is not going away, so you have to get on the train or you will be left at the station wondering what happened.

Being a very logical and process oriented individual (OK I admit I am an engineer) , I approached this whole social media thing in a logical, one step at a time, process. What I quickly learned that this is not a linear process, in fact at first glance, anarchy and chaos seemed to be a fitting description of the way things happen.

Of course the most frustrating part is the “all you have to do is …..” recommendations, Even the first step everyone seems to recommend of setting up a “listening post” for your organization or  a Google alert for your key words is not trivial for the first timer. Unless your key words are so unique that they rarely show up, you can expect having thousands of alerts to go through on a daily basis, similarly if you are following lots of tweets and news feeds (RSS) the volume can become unmanageable. Finding and setting up a common feed can also be confusing, so a good social media adviser is a huge time saver. If you are under 30, you’re probably wondering what all the fuss is about, however those of the boomer era are techno immigrants – we didn’t grow up with this stuff so it is sometimes harder to comprehend why one would do certain things. I digress.

After a lot of web cruising and blog reading plus reading books by the thought leaders of our time (Trust Agents by Chris Brogan and Julien Smith is one of my favourites) an underlying theme actually did start to emerge – quite a relief to a logical mind.  This may not be an epiphany to most people but it put everything into context for me.

Essentially your website is the focal point of your marketing efforts; consider it as the hub and social media as well as your traditional marketing as channels bringing interested people to your website. These channels include search engines, links from other sites and thousands of mentions of your organization in the mediasphere.

Of course managing these channels is a challenge and it requires discipline and time management to ensure that your day is not totally caught up in just monitoring the social media channels to the detriment of your business.

What this does mean is that the time has passed when all you needed to do was to put 90% of your efforts towards making your website work well, now you should spend 75% (leaving 25% to your website) of your marketing efforts on building communities of interest, and awareness of your organization in these different spaces that will bring interested visitors to your website. In order to retain their interest and keep them coming back you need to also build a dynamic content rich, collaborative web space.

At the moment, the common belief is that you also need a blog to build relevant content as well as a website which provides the means to convert visitors to customers. This is the foundation that needs to be in place before you really get your social media activities going.

How then do you know if your current website is capable of meeting your social media needs? Perform an audit – have a close look at your organizational objectives and tie them into what you expect your website to deliver to meet these objectives. Then you should analyze your visitor behaviour by looking at your web traffic statistics – assuming that you are not already managing your website through critical business metrics. This establishes your benchmark for comparing the impact of your social media efforts.  There are also a number of other tools such as which websites are linking to yours (backlines), traffic ranking and so on which add competitive information to your arsenal.

What is interesting is that you really don’t have to toss out the old and completely redesign your website, after all a successful organization has built a lot of assets into their websites and customers recognize that value, so it is important to determine what those assets are ( e.g. content) and dispose of those that don’t bring value to your customers or you. That is why a good comprehensive audit is necessary at the onset.

The other key element is to establish effective business measures. These are based on the web statistics ( visits, duration, pages viewed etc) and other inputs ( calls, inquiries, orders, etc)but only the relevant ones are identified as key performance indicators ( KPI’s). These of course need to be linked to your overall organizational objectives. You don’t need many but you need to make sure that they are sensitive enough and relevant to identify trends and patterns so that further investigation can be taken to understand why certain trends are happening so you can take action ( the most important criteria for a metric – will it result in an action that improves your ROI).

Even if you already manage your website this way (congratulations! you would be surprised how many organizations large and small don’t) and knowing that your website will deliver once the word gets out is critical in making your marketing efforts worthwhile. That is why an audit and strategy review is an essential first step – even if you are well on your way with your social media plan, it is a smart move to ensure your website foundation can support your objectives.

 If you have built a solid foundation in your website, then you can turn your efforts in bringing the right traffic to your site and keeping your visitors coming back and building that ever so important relationship.

Peter de Gosztonyi is a long time quality practitioner and web strategist. He spent many years in a customer focused environment which translates well into today’s customer driven websites. His analytic background combined with the customer comes first philosophy yields some interesting insights on what drives visitor behaviour on websites. He is currently a senior associate with Web-Insight.

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Measuring Social Networking Performance

The new direction today is Web 2.0 and Social Networking. You now need to be on Facebook, linkedin, twitter and a multitude of other networks. But how effective are they? Can a business benefit from these channels and which ones should you try?

First of all dismiss the perception that these social media tools are just for the kids, these kids will become customers, and as Obama said you have to be where your constituents are, and this is where they feel the most comfortable, the techno natives as they are sometimes referred to.

What about us techno immigrants  (those who adopted technology later  in life) to say even less about those techno luddites (all technology is evil). We have issues with privacy and sometimes don’t even see why anyone would want to use these tools or what reason. The bottom line is that if there is a valid application then the tools become an enabler.

So one needs to look at an application such as collaboration with clients and team members (wikis) or getting to where your customers are (facebook) or disseminating bits of information to a broad base quickly (the blackberry phenomenon) – critical for election campaigns, or keeping in contact with a mobile  work force.

It doesn’t take much to find the right application, as long as you have defined objectives for your organization. Look at what you are trying to do then see if there is a match to the Social Media tool kit and try out some of the tools that are available for that application. Most important at this stage is to identify why you need this tool and establish some metrics to see the impact. This can be increased visits, participation, downloads or whatever is important to you. Using Google analytics for example is a useful tool to help in this area.

If you follow a defined process such as the one’s Zanka Consulting uses, you stand a much better chance of selecting the right tool that will make a difference in your organization.



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Impact of Social Networking on your website redesign

Website redesign usually means a complete review and reworking of your website. For complex websites this can be a formidable undertaking with many people involved. Getting started is like getting an ocean liner moving, it takes a lot of energy and effort to go from a stand still to full speed, but once it gets going changing direction and stopping it, is not easy at all. So if you find out that you are going in the wrong direction it becomes very costly and time consuming to alter the course. To avoid that one has to carefully plan and understand why and to whom your website is targeted to.

Many of our customers when facing a redesign come to us to ask what about web 2.0? Our response is what do your customers want? This of course is the point where they hesitate and start to hum and haw and refer us to their marketing team. When trying to implement any new feature or flavour of the day application, the bottom line is what do your customers need and expect.

So where do you start? The most obvious place is of course with your customers, now it becomes an issue of user segmentation – or does it? One of the most effective ways of understanding your user requirements is to develop personas for your main target users. Usually only two or three main personas are required, even though there may be many user segments. This is because you can’t design a site for all users and the subgroups each represents, the variables are too many. However if one takes a different approach by looking at the goals or objectives of your users, then a common pattern will emerge across your user segments.

For example if you are promoting adventure travel, a common user segment would be by age, but you will encounter difficulty when the senior traveler may well want to rough it whereas the youth may want to do a luxury tour, so the more logical approach would be to cater to the adventure traveler and within that group offer different levels of difficulty which would appeal to the different age groups. It is then easy to develop a primary persona with one or two sub personas to accommodate their goals.

Similarly with integrating social networking features within your web redesign, if your users do not fit the profile, then it is not necessary to implement these features unless it fits into your overall corporate strategy. So by understanding the objectives of your users as well as that of potential customers, one can design a website that will appeal to both groups.

Marketing to your target audience will also be impacted by this understanding of what appeals to your users and where they go. You need to be where they are.