Count And Cajole - There Must Be A Better Way To Get Reporters Engaged On Twitter

Ways to encourage reporters in your newsroom to engage in Twitter:

• Ask how many new leads reporters found in Twitter this week.
• Ask how many story ideas reporters found in Twitter this week.
• Ask how many conversations reporters engaged in on Twitter this week.
• Count how many times reporters tweet each week.
• Count follower growth each month.

To get them started, set some minimum requirements:

• Set a goal for minimum number of tweets a week: 7.
• Email reporters a reminder if they don't tweet about their stories.
•  Show them Tweetdeck.
• Make sure their @names are in the email footers.
• Make sure they are following the list of all reporters in the newsroom.

The question is: what's the most simple, clear and measurable win for reporters on Twitter? Something that they can look at and think "Oh yes, that worked, helped my story, made me more productive and saved me time..."

Your ideas?

An Environment for Succeeding

Chris Brogan of Human Business Works  is a tireless campaigner for doing the work. You can have great ideas, you can love what you do and you can dream big, but there's no substitute for doing the work.

He's on a campaign about doing the work right now in his podcast, and here's a post he wrote two years ago on discipline. It's been a long campaign and it always will be, because we're human.

And because we're human you've got to find ways to help yourself and your team stick with the discipline. Brogan mentions Ernest Hemingway's trick, also used by Roald Dahl, for not getting stuck. Basically, only stop today when the going is good, so you've got a great place to start tomorrow.

Next you have to build those tricks into work routines. That's the part Brogan calls "setting up the perfect environment to achieve the goals you have." His example is of a man who can't bring himself to practice his guitar each night until one day he takes the instrument out of the closet and puts it in front of the television. Problem solved.

What's the guitar-in-front-of-the-TV that newsroom managers need to build into reporters' routines to get them to dig in to social media each day?

Better To End The Hour With Twitter

Thought for the day - leave mission creep tasks, like e-mail and social, to the end of the hour...

Time management is one of the topics I always cover when I'm encouraging staff to get started on Twitter.

As a rule to get people engaged in social media I suggest they have to check in frequently, but also that they must be disciplined about getting out before too long.

My worry is that staff will get into Twitter, drop into its endless world of intirguing links, and then not reappear back at their daily routine for hours. I warn them "don't go down a rabbit hole!" By which I mean don't get lost in Twitter and suddenly find you've missed all your deadlines for the day.

How many times have you heard people complain that Twitter takes too much time and they're giving up? That's an outcome to be conscientiously avoided.

So I suggest they check Twitter every two hours, and work on it for ten minutes. I suggest they set their stopwatch when they start and be disciplined about getting out after ten minutes.

But a better solution, and one that I'm going to start suggesting is using negative time.  That is, using the spare time created by finishing one task early and before starting your next appointment.

For example, I schedule appointments at 9 a.m. and 10 a.m.  I finish my 9 a.m. appointment at 9.45 and use the remaining 15 minutes for social media updates and e-mail.

Result: less mission creep, shorter meetings, greater incentive to get stuff finished early, and more social media engagement for the station.

Ancient Wisdom

Sorting through my desk I came across two articles from Fast Company, published in September 2003. They both seemed as relevant today as they did then.

The first was Contempt of Consumer: It's a Real Crime, by Seth Godin. He remembers the days of the Fuller Brush Man who knew how to treat customers with respect. Godin goes on to berate modern marketing tactics that attempt to force products on people who don't want them. "Instead of spamming the globe, market to people who want to hear from you."

The second was Becoming a Soft-Side Accountant, by Marshall Goldsmith. He argues that time measuring the soft-side values in the workplace is well spent. Such as "how often we're rude to people, how often we're polite, how often we ask for input rather than shut people out" and so on. He talks about measuring his own time spent with his children. It's an interesting article because it raises bigger questions about the importance of measuring, and knowing what you are measuring and why. Respecting customers and reading that in the numbers.

Fast Company must have liked these two articles about respect too, as the magazine republished them in 2007. No harm in revisiting ancient wisdom.

Fixing Systems

Everyone fixes systems as part of their daily lives. It's what we do. A part of the human condition. But fixing other people's systems is a much harder thing to do, because they think they've already fixed their systems. Getting grandpa to put the dishes in the dishwasher in a new way. For some reason these things become intensely personal and create family arguments and resentments.

In business people who fix systems get nicknames like "the iron lady." That's because another part of the human condition is that people don't like change. But systems must be fixed and improved. Every day.


Fastcompany last August published an article on Fixing Washington D.C.'s School System. It follows Michelle Rhee, the chancellor of D.C. Public Schools and offers some timely reminders about managing underperforming systems.

According to the article she has her ideas written out clearly for everyone to see, she loves data, she hates inefficiency, she wants simple evidence of better performance, and above all she takes risks and decisive action.

In difficult times decisive and often painful action is difficult to take. For news organizations it's hard to imagine there's every been a time when it was more important to take decisive action.

Those who take action and succeed will be remembered. Those who take action and fail will be reviled by some and respected by others for having tried. Those who try to keep things going as they are will be forgotten.

Reinvention Means Real Change

Every manager in every news organization would do well to read Josh Benton's thoughts on what it means to reinvent yourself as an organization.

Everyone knows this has to be done, he says, but reinvention means a whole lot more than laying off staff and cutting your budget.

Then look at the Nieman's list of the top fifteen newspaper Web sites in 2008 and ask yourself: a) how many of these institutions have appeared in the news recently for being in financial trouble, and b) how many of these organizations are doing anything more than moving deck chairs around on the Titanic.

The answers are not encouraging.

Appreciating Appreciation

This article, The Problem with Problems in BusinessWeek caught my attention. It makes the case that an alternative to "deficit thinking" is "appreciative inquiry".

That is to say, if you always look at the glass as half empty, you'll forget that it's also half full. And it's the half full side that's going to carry you forwards.

Of course looking at the news business in the United States the glass is looking a lot less than half full. But there's still something in there, and we should be careful not to cut whatever little we have in the glass in an attempt to save the news. If there's nothing left in the glass, there'll be nothing to save.

Ruining The Workplace

This American Life's episode 370, "Ruining it for the Rest of Us" starts with an interview with Will Felps, an academic who's been looking at bad behavior in work groups and asking if one bad apple can ruin the barrel.

Felps says bad apples exist and they fall into three personality types:

1. The jerk, who attacks or insults others.
2. The slacker who does less than he can.
3. The depressive pessimist.

Apparently any one of these personality types can undermine the productivity of an entire team off workers.

As usual with management issues this seems so obvious that it's hardly worth mentioning. But it can be hugely damaging in a work environment and can't be tolerated if management really wants to get stuff done.

Groups with a bad apple are 30 to 40% less productive, according to Felps, they stop communicating and it's not unusual for other group members to start adopting the jerk, slacker or depressive pessimist behavior.

Summing up, Ira Glass, host of This American Life, says it all comes down to the worst person in the group. "The teams with the worst person at the bottom. Those teams will perform the poorest."

Felps is apparently currently working on a project trying to find out whether a good manager can counteract these behaviors by asking questions and getting team members to listen.

Going over this in your head you'll probably be thinking of Jack Welch's policy of terminating the worst performers in a group as a matter of course. An idea that looks less harsh in the light of this research.

In the interview Felps offers no solution for this issue. Managers will have to turn to HR departments for that.

Christensen on Christensen

Clay Christensen, a leading author on innovation, talks on the Harvard Business School Ideacast Episode 122: Reinventing Your Business Model. (It's not on the page yet, but you can subscribe to the feed, or the file is here.)

Christensen has an amazing ability to encapsulate his ideas in fairly short sentences, and the podcast is worth hearing just for that. He goes over the core ideas of his writing on innovation and draws examples from business today, including the plight of newspapers.

Early Flight

What's more astonishing: Twitter's extraordinary capabilities for distributing information, or news managers' reluctance to recognize its power?

When describing a digital media phenomenon to old media staff it's useful to look for an old media analogy. I describe Twitter, as being like an old AP news printer, sitting in the corner of the newsroom, spitting out news all day long. Except it's written by the people you choose to follow.

And there's more. Unlike the news printer which only delivered you information, if you want to you can follow stories back to your sources and see who they were talking to about whatever it is that interests you.

But even after my analogies, my bubbling enthusiasm for Twitter, and my "see, I can see what people who do my job are saying all over the country," I'm still often met with those "whatever makes you happy" smiles.

Which leads me to another analogy. Perhaps the Twitterati, and other news people experimenting with digital media tools are a little like the early aviators.

In the years before the First World War there were very few of them. They were flying planes, building new planes, talking about planes and constantly trying new ideas. I've no doubt they were totally obsessed with flight. Are two engines better than one? Will monoplanes fly faster than biplanes? How about using metal for the wings?

But for everyone else, planes probably seemed fun, but dangerous and of no real interest to them. How would planes ever impact their lives? Besides everyone else had better things to do on carts and trains. And those crazy aviators; well, good luck to them.

Times have changed. No one thinks twice about flying today. No one thinks about whether the plane will have enough fuel or what makes it stay up. Flying is just a part of life, in spite of the fact that the general idea of a flying machine has really changed very little in a hundred years. It still has two wings, a body and a tail. It's just more refined and developed.

One day soon we'll be in Twitter's age of commercial flight. Everyone will take micro-blogging for granted, and wonder what life must have been like buying newspapers for news, or looking at one of those old televisions. "Remember those," we'll say, with a smile.

Learning by Doing

Hal Varian, Google's chief economist says the company gets its competitive advantage from "learning by doing," reports Steve Lohr in a recent article in the New York Times.

Lohr describes Google as a "finely honed learning machine."

The article goes on to talk about network effects and the importance of co-opting not coercing. These are both, obviously, important in the networked world, but I think the easiest goal for any media business facing tough times is to take note of that first idea, and to do whatever it can to make itself into an equally finely honed learning machine.

Later in the article Varian explains how Google is "constantly evolving" to improve quality, and says fixed rules can get in the way of that sort of progress.

In news organizations, and probably in all organizations, those rules are not often written down. But they are understood and everyone knows them. They seem to carry as much weight as they would if they were carved in stone.

That "we do things this way" has to get out of the way if these businesses are going to change. That inherited knowledge is the antithesis of the learning machine.

Equally unproductive is the "my idea is a good idea and I'll keep doing it until it works" mindset which also seems prevalent in some organizations.

Perhaps one of the most attractive aspects of learning by doing, is that its very nature acknowledges ignorance. It banishes pride.

And the good news is that everyone has statistics. So the objective is simple. Get hold of the statistics. Try to understand them and make changes from what you learn.

Then do it again. Keep evolving. Learn by doing. How hard can that be?

The Fastest Path

David Glazer, Engineering Director, Google, was quoted in the March 2008 edition of Fast Company saying:

"When in doubt, do something. If you have two paths and you're not sure which is right, take the fastest path. What's true in physics about objects in motion is true when you're creating a product. It's easier to keep moving and change course than when when you're sitting and thinking and thinking."

Drucker

Peter Drucker (reading one of his many books last night) says business energy is like any other energy. It starts with a bang and then dissipates.

When you start a business it’s all about opportunities. When it dissipates it’s all about problem solving.

But problem solving does nothing to create new opportunities, which is the 10% of your work that creates 90% of your profits. Problem solving is 90% of the work in a dissipated system, yielding only 10% of the benefit.

So why not define the stuff that comes across your desk each day as either an opportunity or a problem solving issue? Then sink your time into the opportunities. Every day.

Better or Different

Mark Fuerst of the Integrated Media Association (IMA) is fascinated by the process of innovation and how management deals with it, and he's fascinating when he talks about it.

Recently he was talking about how people fall into two groups when it comes to innovation: those who want to do things better and those who want to do things in a different way. Call them the betters and the differents.

Apparently you're either one or the other. And if you're a "better" doing a job that needs to "different" you won't last long.

As he's saying this I immediately think of a character at my office who is clearly a different, who's doing a better's job. And he's not happy. So I'm inclined to think that there my be some truth in this.

I'm the Boss, What Can I Do?

1. Acknowledge Your Ignorance: Most of the frustration Web managers face comes from the fact that their bosses think they know better than them, when they clearly don't. So step one, if you're the boss, is to acknowledge ignorance. This is hard. You're used to having everything your way, and, yes, you probably do know everything about radio, or TV or newspapers. But that doesn't mean you know anything about the Web. The first step is to just acknowledge that to yourself. To recognize that you either need to get involved and learn, or if you don't have time for that, you need to check everything with someone who knows what he/she is doing. Fortunately the person you hired to run the Web, the one who's half your age and seems to be on Twitter all the time, can help.

2. Listen: Recognize that you hired people to know about the Web. When they tell you that you're not quite on the mark, or they offer an alternative to your plan, or they start pointing to the stats to suggest that your idea may not be the best. Stop for a moment and listen. Remember, they're being polite because you're the boss. When they appear to be hinting that something may be wrong, they may well be thinking that something is really wrong. Listen to them.

3. Get Input into Senior Management: Senior management groups often lack someone who knows about the Web. This means they are making decisions in the dark. Does that mean you have to break up the management structure of the organization? Maybe. But the critical immediate issue is to get some knowledge into the room. Either senior managers have to learn about the Web. Or, when Web issues come up, they need to get a Web person into the room. Not so the senior managers can tell him/her what they think, but to listen to what he/she has to say.

4. Make Your Web People Feel Valued: On a bumper sticker, the main reason Web staff feel frustrated, is they feel their knowledge isn't valued. They come to meetings where they offer their best advice, and it is promptly ignored. The company hired them to implement a Web strategy. The company hired them for their special knowledge about the Internet. Why does management ignore what they have to say? Why do managers get angry when they offer a new point of view? Why doesn't the senior management that hired them, support them? If you're the boss, and you care, you'd better get out there and support them.

5. Recognize the Scale of the Task: This requires some knowledge, or some listening. It's much harder to make good Web content than it is to make good radio. Sure anyone can publish their thoughts on a free blog. But that doesn't mean making good Web content is easy. It takes time and hard work, and there's a lot that can go wrong, and a lot that will need testing and perfecting. So if you hear yourself starting a sentence, "can't we just..." think again.

6. Remember, Only Senior Management Can Change Culture: It doesn't matter how much your Web people campaign to do things in new ways, and to change the culture of your organization: without the General Manager's and the senior managers' support, it isn't going to happen. Why? Because the Web guys are the new team on the block. Without senior management embracing what the Web team has to say and actively getting out there to support it, nothing in your organization is going to change. And the Web guys know in the end you'll blame them for that. But wake up. You're the boss. Who's really to blame?

Master and Commander Management

What films should we take managers to see to help them with management? I can think of key lessons in many movies which come straight out of the management books. While a few of those books have been very helpful to me, going to movies has to be both cheaper and more fun.

Watch Patton for strategy, planning and logistics. There is a wonderful scene when the trucks are rolling by, heading for the front, and we see Patton standing by the road watching. This is the culmination of his leadership. Months of planning have brought him to this point. Not heroically battling his way across fields of fire, but standing by a road watching his plan play out. He doesn't have to do anything, because the logistics have been so well planned.

Watch Master and Commander for a discussion of the qualities of leadership. The courage, when things are bad, to pick the lesser of two evils. The endurance to keep going. Respect for good work and knowledge, but the flexibility to adapt to circumstances. The assurance to make decisions quickly. The perspicacity to see opportunities even under the most dire circumstances. The curiosity to find and recognize new ideas. The ability to negotiate the relationship between following orders and knowing when not to follow orders. The strength to have power, but not to let it corrupt you. The integrity to command evenly, firmly, and with fairness. The intelligence to find the right words at the right time.


Doing all that with no script to follow is the lot of the manager. That doesn't sound so easy.

Building Capacity

A mistake a lot of old media people make, is to think that they can rescue their organizations with a clever app. That if they have bells and whistles on their site the users will come.

They aim to do this by hiring a Web staff that has little interaction with their editorial team and getting them to make the bells and whistles.

But that is not going to help the organization in the long run. Change for old media organizations has to be systemic. Every member of the the radio station or newspaper has to understand the the goal is not to make a newspaper, or a radio station. Building capacity is what is needed.

To understand this idea, listen to Randy Frescoln in Act II of the This American Life show 336: "Who can you save?" He describes why you don't hand our high-tech equipment when a country is starving. You start at the bottom, building capacity. You hand out shovels and seed. Maybe some watering cans.

That's where most media is now. We need to build capacity

Ford on Research

Henry Ford apparently thought people don't know what they want until a brilliant person shows them. Asked if he had carried out research before he invented the Model T Ford, he replied: "If I had asked people what they wanted, I would have built a faster horse."

(source... ?)

Continuous Partial Attention

Linda Stone has been talking about "continuous partial attention" for years. Here's an article by her from 2008.

Stone says there's a difference between multi-tasking and continuous partial attention. Multi-tasking is when we do one low-brow activity and a high-brow activity at the same time, like eating lunch while reading the paper.

That's different, she says, from doing two or more tasks that require a high level of mental engagement at the same time. Talking on the phone, skimming an email and trying to write a report at the same time. This requires rapid, repeated focus on each item for a short time. This Stone calls continuous partial attention.

The opposite of continuous partial attention is focus. Shutting everything else out and concentrating on one item of work, or anything else, for a sustained period of time.

There's no question in my mind that the latter beats out the former in terms of productivity. We all know that interruptions can make a short task that requires concentration take far longer than it should.

So: raise productivity by reducing interruptions. Time for tasks should be scheduled and sacrosanct. Switch off your email and your phone for the duration of the task and make sure staff and colleagues understand there are borders which can't be crossed.

Stone makes it clear she thinks continuous partial attention is a good thing, but like all good things, should be used in moderation. Sounds good to me.

Links:
- Linda Stone at lindastone.net
- Word Spy Continuous Partial Attention
- Tom Friedman Cyber-Serfdom (NYT 2001 - Word Spy's first sighting.)

Adaptive Change

Prof Ron Heifetz distinguishes between "technical Change", in which an organization deals with problems using existing skills and knowledge, and "adaptive change", which requires people to shift their attitudes, habits or expectations.

Adaptive change inevitably causes distress by requiring people to give things up.

Distressed organizations look for scapegoats within, enemies without, and slip easily into denial. They will do anything, in fact, to avoid the hard graft of adaptation.

(source..?)