Social Media Strategery

I’m giving a presentation, “New Media to Reach New Markets” at the California Association for Coordinated Transportation’s (CalACT) Annual Conference & Expo on November 6 out in Monterey, CA. I’ll be giving a presentation followed by a panel discussion on how social media is changing public transportation. My other panelists will be speaking about how they’re already using social media and showcasing some of their success stories. Because I’ll be the only one there NOT representing a transit organization, I wanted to think of something that I could discuss with the conference attendees that they could actually use.  One of the things that I both like and dislike about conferences is that you’re exposed to so many new ideas, but more often than not, you’re left to your own devices to figure out how you can actually do similar things once you get back to the office.  So, I’ve decided to focus my presentation on how to get your organization started in social media.

Every organization is different, but after doing it myself (the terms “social media” and “Booz Allen” were never found in the same sentence three years ago) and after seeing many successful (and many more unsuccessful) implementations of social media initiatives, several common features emerged. If you decide that you want to be the social media change agent within your organization and start blogging, creating and editing wikis, uploading videos to YouTube, etc., here’s my nine step playbook:

1. Read Voraciously - You’re not a social media expert. Guess what - no one is. Social media as an industry is changing rapidly - new tools, new resources, and new methods are always emerging. The best that you can hope for is to build a solid fundamental knowledge of the principles of social media and use the tools and relationships that you’ve built to stay on top of the latest trends. Start by understanding what social media/new media/Web 2.0 is.  Read the ClueTrain Manifesto, Wikinomics, Groundswell, Now is Gone. Bookmark the blogs on my blogroll found to the right. Read the blogs that you find on those blogs’ blogrolls.
2. Play with Everything - Don’t try to talk to your leadership about the need to create a Twitter account if you don’t have one. You have to understand how these social media tools work, not only from a technical (which button does what), but more importantly, from a cultural perspective. Yeah, you can regurgitate what you read, but it’s much more powerful if you can show how you’ve actually used these tools and what they’ve done for you.
3. Commit - At this point, you will have to decide how far you want to take this idea of yours. Chances are good that all of your social media ambitions will take a back seat to your actual job. When I first started Booz Allen’s social media practice, I used to say that I worked 9am-5pm at my client site, and then 5pm-9pm on building our social media capability.
4. Be a Champion - I also like to call this one “Be Annoying.” You have to talk the talk too. If there’s an All-hands meeting coming up, ask to give a presentation on social media. Lunch with the boss? Bring one of the above books and float some of your ideas. Have a new hire coming on-board? Direct him to your del.icio.us bookmarks instead of sending him an email. People will get annoyed with you - they’ll start calling you the “crazy wiki guy” (that’s me), or they might start asking if you ever tired of talking about social media. The answer, of course, is NO! More often than not, leaders are intrigued by passion. I had one of our VPs email me ask me to help him start a blog - he said to me, “I don’t really get why I should do this, but you’re obviously very passionate about it so I think I should at least give it a try.”
5. Get Leadership Buy-in - Find someone, anyone, above you who can be your advocate. Start small by getting that person to buy in to what you’re trying to do. From there, branch out and start briefing other leaders on what you want to do. It’s a hell of a lot easier to convince that manager from Legal to start blogging if you can point to your manager who is already experiencing success with it.
6. Take Risks - Sometimes it’s easier to ask for forgiveness than for permission. If you wait for review/approval of absolutely everyone, you’ll never get anything done. This is why Step 4 is so important. Get the support of your manager, and start taking some small risks. This goes hand-in-hand with Step 2 as well. Chances are, there will be some sort of policy against using some of these tools - you’re going to pick and choose your spots where you take a risk in using them. This step is a lot easier if you’ve got the top cover.
7. Integrate - Every failed social media initiative that I’ve seen had one thing in common - they were’t completely integrated into the organization’s existing strategies. The absolute worst thing that I’ve seen is one public affairs office that had NO idea that their organization even had a YouTube page. No matter how cool you and your boss think Twitter is, unless you can show how that’s going to help accomplish your org’s communications, engagement, and/or customer service goals, it will fail. This is why I HATE when people ask me to do a social media strategy. That doesn’t work - you don’t start a blog or a YouTube account just for the hell of it. Show how it can help enhance your organizational strategy.
8. Get Others Involved - Once you’ve started to gain some traction with your social media initiatives, start identifying champions in other parts of your organization. Get Legal, IT, Public Affairs, training, etc. involved. Understand that you can only do so much yourself. Behind the most successful social media implementations are very diverse people from IT, public affairs, internal communications, training, etc. Don’t be afraid to let some things go and realize that social media can’t be “owned” by any one part of an organization. Over the long-term, you’ll be more successful if you can bring these other people on board.
9. It’s About People - This last one isn’t really a step in the process inasmuch a mantra to remember as you’re going through the other steps. The tools of social media can and always will, change. The fundamental principles you read about in step one won’t. Remember not to get too caught up in the technical nature of some of these tools and forget that the reason these tools exist is to connect your organization to your stakeholders in a new way.  Social media is about building and maintaining relationships, and that’s only done by connecting people to people, not by playing with the latest and coolest tools.

There are dozens of other sub-steps involved with each of these, depending on your particular organization and environment. However, I did want to keep these high level enough so that they could apply across a wide variety of organizations.  What other steps would you include in your “playbook?”

One of the things that I have consistently noticed in my five years as a government communications consultant is that our new hires who come from the corporate world go through an adjustment period upon first supporting a government client.  That’s to be expected as there are a multitude of differences between public sector and private sector clients - from the mundane (different ways of hiring contractors) to the fundamental (no shareholders to worry about).  These differences extend into the world of social media too, specifically into social media behind the firewall, known in the private sector as Enterprise 2.0.

What makes implementing social media on the intranet of a government agency like the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) different than say, General Motors (GM)?  I’ve worked with clients from across the government who are all seeing social media succeed in helping organizations communicate, collaborate, and share information better than they ever have.  From wikis in the Intelligence Community to internal blogs at IBM, many of my clients see these articles and want to use social media to realize these same benefits, but don’t know how to do it.  The first thing that I have to tell them is that just because another organization, company, or agency implemented blogs or wikis or whatever else, they won’t necessarily see the same results, especially if they compare themselves to case studies in the private sector.  There are several fundamental differences between implementing social media behind the firewall in the government as opposed to a Fortune 500 company.  Let’s look at my top six:

1. Risks - From Mark Drapeau’s excellent Government 2.0 series on Mashable - “When Coke’s recipe or Google’s search algorithm get out, there are certainly serious consequences, but ultimately, people don’t die. The government has a higher standard.” On Intellipedia, the Intelligence Community’s wiki, 16 agencies are sharing classified information related to some of our nation’s most protected data - you think that the leadership there might have some pretty justifiable concerns about information security?  Accidentally exposing proprietary information is one thing - accidentally disclosing Top Secret military movements or taxpayer data is another.
2. Administration Changes - Every November, and especially every fourth November, every government agency has to prepare for the chance that tomorrow, they may have a new boss with a new vision for how things should work.  Organization charts are always out of date, no one ever knows what their corporate strategy is, and people are always getting shuffled from position to position.  The comments to one of my prior posts alluded to this as well - sometimes leaders who know they will be leaving their position want to leave behind a legacy.  These leaders are more apt to take risks, sometimes for the better, sometimes for the worse.  Getting and maintaining the top cover for an implementation of social media is virtually impossible in these cases - what happens after that leader leaves?
3. Intra-agency collaboration - Most government agencies do not operate in a vacuum - they have to not only collaborate amongst themselves, but must also collaborate with various partner agencies.  How big of a net should you cast when implementing a wiki or blogs behind your firewall?  For example, let’s say that the Transportation Security Administration (TSA) wanted to implement a wiki - should that wiki be open to just TSA employees?  Or, should it also be open to other agencies like the FAA or other members of the Intel Community?  Wouldn’t you think that NSA and TSA might benefit from being able to collaborate with one another?  Where you draw the line?
4. Bureaucracy - One thing that can’t be discounted in the bureaucracy involved.  Getting ANYTHING done often takes months of reviews, approvals, control gate presentations, etc.  I know of some government organizations still using Netscape as their Internet Browser because IE and/or Firefox haven’t yet been approved for their IT system.  Imagine the hurdles that have to be crossed to get blogs installed!  Combined with the various regulations and policies that have to be consulted and the administration issues mentioned above, there is often just not enough time available in the year to get these things done.
5. Demographics - I don’t have any hard numbers on this (if you do, please pass them along), but in my experience, government employees fit into a very different demographic than those found in the private sector.  They tend to be older (have to learn these tools as opposed to having grown up with them), have longer tenure (are more set in their ways and resistant to change), and are motivated by different things (innovation is rarely on their performance assessments).  The cultural change that social media necessitates is thus inherently more difficult.
6. Available Resources - If you’ve ever worked in a government environment, you know that there’s a constant battle for funding.  Every department is short-staffed and there’s never enough resources to accomplish everything, and as a result, innovative initiatives like social media tend to get dropped as the focus moves toward accomplishing the day-to-day work that makes up their organizational mission.  There just aren’t too many people who have the leadership support to take on the tasks necessary to make social media behind the firewall successful, like gardening a wiki or developing blog training courses.

Now, I put these six points out there not to discourage the exploration of social media behind government firewall - quite the contrary.  I want to identify the differences so that we can consider them and ultimately address them.  In one of my future posts, I’ll look at some ways in which these differences can be tackled, as well as what happens when these differences aren’t taken into account.

What other differences do you see?

My company, Booz Allen Hamilton, is actively hiring consultants who “get” social media.  Let me explain - as I mentioned in one my earlier posts, I’m currently a consultant within the Strategic Communications team at Booz Allen.  What does this mean?  I’m part of the team that handles crisis comms, change communications, stakeholder outreach, public relations, media relations, etc.  One of the other areas that we’ve branched out into social media consulting.  This is the team that I lead, and I can tell you that my background in communications has heavily influenced my team’s approach to social media.  For example, I can’t stand when clients ask me to “do a social media strategy.”  I don’t believe in “social media strategies” - that implies that they’re created in a vacuum and that they’re separate from other strategies.  My social media strategy is to integrate social media principles and applications into existing communications, collaboration, and/or knowledge management strategies.

Some of the things that I look for in potential candidates are:

• Experience in using social media applications behind the corporate firewall - both as an individual and as a community manager
• Demonstrated ability to incorporate social media into existing strategic communications, collaboration and/or knowledge management plans
• Consulting experience working with clients in the public sector
• At least a year of “traditional” communications experience where you were responsible for developing tactical products
• Knowledge of the unique challenges that face public sector clients when trying to implement social media
• Familiarity (not proficiency) with all kinds of social media applications (if you’ve never heard of MediaWiki or Twitter, no need to apply)
• A desire to be a part of a small, but growing, diverse team of professionals who are focused on helping our clients integrate social media into their strategies - not on selling a specific piece of software.

If you think you’d be a good fit, head on over to the Booz Allen website to check out the official job posting and/or submit your resume.  The system will ask you to create a profile before submitting your resume - please make sure that you mention my name (Steve Radick) in your entry so that I can be alerted to your interest and follow up.  Looking forward to seeing who’s out there!

So yesterday, I came across this article on Federal Computer Week - “FBI Creates Knowledge Wiki” - and my first thought was, “wow, that’s great - more and more government agencies are getting into the social media game!”  However, after about five seconds, I had a more cynical thought - is this just the evolution of “cylinders of excellence?”  Corporate intranets are notorious for their stovepiped walled gardens where information is cordoned off depening on a user’s accesses (do I have edit privileges?  Oh, I only have contributor status? How much more do I have to do to make it into the “edit” club?).  The theory that everyone’s information had to be safeguarded from others’ nefarious schemes within their own organization dominated the traditional Intranet culture.  I hate to see this mindset continue, especially with social media applications behind the firewall.

Enter Intellipedia, the gold standard of wikis behind the firewall.  Intellipedia is the Intelligence Community’s wiki that is open and editable to anyone with the appropriate clearances within any of the 16 Intelligence Agencies (keep in mind that the FBI is included in this).  So, it was with a little curiosity and cynicism that after reading about Bureaupedia, I went over to eMarv’s unofficial Intellipedia blog to see what he had to say about the matter. As I suspected, he has many of the same concerns I do.

Intellipedia is available only to those individuals with the appropriate clearances in the U.S. Intelligence Community - not the general public.  Its users are those with whom the government trusts to keep secret information that could damage national security.  Intellipedia isn’t Wikipedia, yet sometimes I get the feeling government organizations believe that the chaotic nature of Wikipedia repeats itself on internal wikis like Intellipedia.  Maybe the -opedia at the end of every internal wiki fosters this feeling, but on pretty much every internal wiki that I’ve seen, vandalism hasn’t even been an issue - increasing and maintaining user adoption has been a much bigger concern.  And why is that, you ask?

Because building and maintaing a large enterprise-wide wiki like Intellipedia or the wiki available behind my company firewall, is a LOT of hard work.  You need gardeners to clean up formatting, coaches to help people get comfortable with collaboration, trainers to teach the actual tool, techie guys to manage bandwidth, and so on and so on.  You can’t just install a wiki, say this is what it’s going to do, and let people have at it - it won’t work.  That’s why things like Bureaupedia are so frustrating to see.  Intellipedia has already done the hardest part - they have a vibrant community (more than 37,000 users according to Wikipedia) with the infrastructure already in place.  Why recreate the wheel?

Now I understand that there really is some information that can’t or shouldn’t be shared beyond the FBI - that’s absolutely expected, and I’m not advocating that everything the has should be shared on Intellipedia.  However, what I am advocating is that instead of creating Bureaupedia, I would have rather seen the FBI first make the big splash into using Intellipedia, with a much smaller mention of how an internal wiki was created for those things that can’t be shared beyond the FBI.

Anyone have any other insight into the how Bureaupedia works?  I’d be interested in knowing their split of technical staff vs. change management staff and if they have a plan/strategy for how to teach users when and where to use Intellipedia or Bureaupedia.  Rolling any enterprise-wide social media application is a tough chore - a chore made much easier if you can tap into existing communities like Intellipedia.

Photo Courtesy of http://www.uscg.mil/

The Coast Guard’s top officer, Commandant Adm. Thad W. Allen, recently discussed the need for the Coast Guard to start using social media like Facebook and blogs to improve communication amongst one another and with the public (Read the full article over at MarineLink).

“Whether you’re a civilian, auxilarist, reservist, active duty, contractor or retiree, to understand that when you’re blogging, that’s no different than operating in a social environment on a Coast Guard base or anyplace else,” he said. “We have a duty to the American public; we have a duty to each other to be guardians of each other. And to the extent that we have core values, I think we need to demonstrate that as we operate on a daily basis in the blogosphere.”

When I saw this, I was simultaneously impressed and skeptical. One the one hand, I applaud the Commandant on his realization that social media has the potential to improve the Coast Guard’s ability to communicate, especially in times of crisis. On the other, I’m skeptical that the Coast Guard as a whole will be able to really commit to using social media, or if the Commandant will be the only one to really embrace this approach. I love that he’s not just talking about using Facebook, but that he’s personally engaged with it. However, will the Coast Guard middle management buy into using blogs to communicate with the public and with each other? Or, will they too experience the issues encountered by General James Cartwright when he brought blogging to U.S. Strategic Command?

One of the things that I’ve seen happen time and again when supporting my clients implement social media in their organizations, especially government organizations, is that it’s not the leaders who need to be convinced - they’re leaders for a reason. They’re visionaries; they’re innovative thinkers who understand the potential of social media. It’s not the junior employees - they’ve grown up in this culture of information sharing. It’s the middle management who need to be convinced. These are the stakeholders who will make or break the social media initiative.

Middle managers are typically of the Baby Boomer generation, have been with the organization for a while, and are often set in their ways. They’re often too senior to be able to take risks and try new things yet too junior to be directly impacted by the proclamation of the organization’s leadership. However, as General Cartwright experienced, they can severely inhibit the ability of the organization to realize the potential of social media. The key is to show these middle managers how social media can help them be more efficient, communicate better, and most importantly, how it will help them in a very real way, in their day-to-day work.

I’m really looking forward to seeing how this plays out - it will be interesting to see how social media changes the way the Coast Guard communicates both internally and externally. The Coast Guard is lucky to have a leader who understands how social media is fundamentally changing the way the government interacts with the public - I just hope that the rest of the organization realizes this opportunity as well. Here’s to you Commandant Adm. Thad Allen - good luck in your endeavors!

If you were reading the news or traveling by plane today, you probably already know about the JetBlue evacuation of JFK airport in New York today.  Turns out the evacuation was precautionary, and ended up being just two paperweights that resembled grenades.  However, to a social media dork like me, the really fascinating part of this story was that I was there (I was one of the evacuees at JFK this morning), and I was directly involved in bringing the story to light (I, along with a few others tweeted about the incident as it happened).

So, why does this matter?  And even more importantly, what does it have to do with emergency response?

Let’s take a look at the timeline for some more information -

Twitter Search Results for

7:54 AM - I tweeted that “Sooo…JFK airport is being evacuated right now….just great.”  Right around this same time, @almacy, @johnhamilton22, and @imnotobsessed also tweeted similar messages about the evacuation.

7:59 AM - One of the people who follow my tweets, Mark Drapeau (@cheeky_geeky) saw my tweet and began re-tweeting so that now, both of our networks of followers would get the information.

8:00 AM - I overhear some JetBlue employees saying that “some idiot had hand grenades in his bag”

Scene outside JetBlue Terminal at JFK

8:03 AM - @almacy posted a picture of the scene

8:05 AM - Mainstream media begins to catch on - Geraldo Rivera on the scene!

8:06 AM - BlogsofWar posts the running Twitter traffic

8:13 AM - FOX5 in New York finally reports on the story but with no real information and no mention of “grenades”

8:23 AM - First references to the “grenades” on mainstream media

8:50 AM - Crisis averted, and everyone is let back in to the terminal

We’ve already seen examples of this in the London bombings and the Virginia Tech shootings - today’s evacuation is another sign of the times, albeit on a much smaller scale.  Think about the potential impact that Twitter, blogs, and other social media could have on emergency response efforts.

Government agencies should advise first-responders to start monitoring the social media world, including Twitter, Facebook, and the blogosphere just as they do the police scanner.  Where the police scanner gave the average Joe a way to learn about what was happening in their neighborhood before the mainstream media could report on it, tools like Twitter do this and more.  Now, not only can people learn what’s going on from people who are involved first-hand and in real-time, they can also use these tools to share this information with anyone else who is monitoring them (like I did).

If this morning’s evacuation had been a serious threat, think about the potential benefits that could have been realized if the government agencies involved were using Twitter.

• They would have a real-time timeline of what happened from the time the announcement happened
• They would be able to pinpoint to the minute where people were, and what they were doing
• They could use the pictures taken at the scene and posted to the web to identify who was where and when
• Families and friends are notified en masse of people’s statuses
• Agencies would know what information (and mis-information) is being spread on the ground and could use that to dispel rumors and correct mis-information

Now, I’m not nieve enough to suggest that FEMA should be monitoring Twitter all the time and jumping anytime there’s mention of a disaster.  I’m merely suggesting that government agencies and mainstream media need to place a greater emphasis on mining these sources, and training their staff on how to use the informaton that’s available to them.

I know that there are some real risks to this approach as well - hoaxes would seem to be that much easier to pull off, for example.  Are there others?  What other benefits do you see?  What obstacles exist?

For more information on this topic, refer to these two excellent blogs, who also had an opinion on the  power of Twitter.

• “Let’s Network!”
• The 60 Second Marketer

So much good stuff coming out of BlogWorld 2008 that it’s difficult for me to categorize everything into tidy little posts!  So, here goes another Top Ten list - this time, on the top ten things that I like and didn’t like about BlogWorld 2008 (in no particular order).

Things I liked:

1. The Speakers - it was great to see many of the social media heavy hitters out here in Vegas, talking and engaging with everyone.  I got an opportunity to meet and learn from people like Chris Brogan, Gary Vaynerchuk, Jason Falls, Coach Deb, and more.
2. Networking - I met soooo many more great people that I’m now following/being followed by, I’ve added more blogs to my RSS feeds, and have opened up tons of future resources.
3. The Wynn in Las Vegas - Wow! Great hotel…a little overwhelming, but hey, it’s Vegas!
4. The subject matter - Wasn’t too novice, wasn’t too advanced.  I got more out of this conference than most “social media” conferences that I’ve been too - they’re typically too 101-ish.
5. Live Twitter feeds - Having the ability to interact with the speakers and the rest of the audience members in real-time during the sessions has changed the way I look at these conferences.
6. New Tools - At my job, I’m one of the more technically-advanced people there. I use dozens of Firefox extensions, am on Twitter, use open source software where possible, etc.  Here, I’m not even close - the number of new tools that I’ve learned about has been overwhelming.  Still trying them all - will do a future post on the ones that I’ve found most helpful.
7. Informality - Loved that most people/speakers wore jeans, football jerseys, etc.  Made them seem more real.
8. #bwe08 tag - the speakers/moderators consistently and constantly pushed this tag so that it will be easy to aggregate all of the BlogWorld content during and after the conference across the Web - pictures, tweets, blogs, everything.
9. Diversity - I was thrilled to see people with so many different backgrounds.  Young people who are CEOs, older, more traditional corporate leaders, kids just out of college, people just trying to learn about social media, social media experts - there were tons of people all there for different reasons.
10. So many ideas that I want to get started on! - I’ve been inspired to do/try so many things coming out of this conference - I can’t wait until I get back and can start doing some of them.

Things I didn’t like:

1. Shoddy Internet access - BlogWorld wireless Internet was very slow, if you could even log on.  Unacceptable, especially for a conference like this.
2. Lack of power - very few places to actually plug in and charge up cell phones/laptops.
3. Food - Not enough food/drink easily available.  Was at least expecting free basic refreshments (coffee, etc.)
4. Conference Sessions on Sunday - Steelers > BlogWorld.  Missed last session on Sunday because I had to find a TV for the game (even though they lost).
5. Temperature - Very hot outside/very cold inside. I saw women wearing shorts and sweating outside, but wearing hoodies inside.
6. Red-Eye Flights - there weren’t a whole of flight choices for me to choose from - either leave really early and miss most of Sunday, leave really late and take a red-eye, or leave in the middle and have three connections.  Not fun…
7. Crowds - I think that at times, people underestimated the ability of 2,000 social media specialists to mobilize.  Parties were PACKED, and some were even impossible to get into.
8. Not enough time - I wish I had been able to clone myself - there were so many times where I wish I had been able to clone myself so that I could attend them all!
9. No Enterprise 2.0 sessions - A majority of my clients are more interested in how to use social media/blogs inside the firewall.  There was very little of the content focused on this topic - most of it was focused on using social media externally.
10. So many ideas that I want to get started on! - I’ve been inspired to do/try so many things coming out of this conference - I don’t know if I’ll ever have the time to actually do them!

I’ve still got one more day here at BlogWorld, so I reserve the right to add/delete/modify this list to fit in more stuff tomorrow - keep the quotes coming! (thx to SukiFuller!)

I’ve heard some incredibly insightful/funny/wise/profound/outrageous things here at BlogWorld 2008.  Here are the top ten things that I’ve overheard and/or saw in the Conference Twitter feed.

1. “Be You and Be Every Flaw.” - Gary Vaynerchuk
2. “Here’s my best practice on SEO (search engine optimization) - just write good shit.”  - Guy Kawasaki
3. “In order to make Twitter/social media work, your employees need to know HOW YOUR BIZ WORKS.” -Toby Bloomberg
4. “I spend my life searching for negative things people say about me, and then I go and address it.” - Gary Vaynerchuk
5. “Trying to take stuff off the internet is like trying to take pee out of the pool” - unknown
6. “I want a relationship not a one-link stand” - Liz Strauss
7. “It’s not about pitching blogs with traffic, it’s about building relationships with blogs with influence.” - Steve Radick (me!)
8. “Best way to get links is to have an opinion and piss someone off. Then turn off the comments.” - Michael Gray
9. “There is a human being behind every Tweet, blog, and email - remember that.” - Chris Brogan
   
10. “How do you place a value on all the positive changes, and the positive blog posts, and the publicity created?” (in reference to measuring the ROI of social media) - @comcastcares

There are many more and I’m sure that there are others who have already come up with similar blog posts.  Jonathan Gunson already did one just on Gary Vaynerchuk’s quotes from his keynote.  If you have quotes that you liked, or want to respond to some of the ones I’ve collected above, leave a comment below.  Hoping to hear even more nuggets tomorrow….

So, I’m sitting in my absolutely stunning hotel room here at the Wynn Hotel in Las Vegas, getting ready to attend BlogWorld 2008 from tomorrow through this Sunday. I hope to use this as my home base for reporting back my thoughts on the sessions, on the speakers, and on what I learn from my fellow bloggers. I’m particularly excited to meet some of the notable bloggers that I’ve got on my blogroll as well as meeting some other new and upcoming bloggers too.

Here’s my BlogWorld schedule for the next few days:

In addition to posting here, I’ll also be live-tweeting, live-Yammering, and posting pictures and videos to Flickr and YouTube. Check back often for the latest updates on the world of blogging, to learn how much money I’ve lost in the casinos, and subsequently, how angry my wife gets at me for losing money and spending too much time on the computer (Love you honey)!

As I mentioned in my first post, I’m currently leading a small, but growing team of people at my firm who are focused on building our social media capabilities, both internally and with our clients. Five years ago, when I joined my company, the only mentions of the terms “wikis” and “blogs” were usually preceded by the words “What the hell is a…” Now, as with most organizations, there is an enormous demand for social media, both internally among my colleagues, and externally with my clients. Luckily, I work for a firm where I have had the flexibility to pursue my interest and passion for social media, and over the last two years, have been able to grow this capability to where we are today.

So how did I get to this position? It’s important to note that I didn’t go to school for social media (I majored in public relations), I didn’t get staffed on a project where sharing information using social media was part of the culture (I was working for a client in the Intelligence Community where the prevailing attitude was “Need to Know“), and I wasn’t told by my leadership that I would now be the social media expert (they didn’t know a blog from a website). No, I was just a strategic communications consultant who saw that social media was fundamentally changing the way organizations communicated, and I decided that this was an area I wanted to focus on.

To my surprise, when I first started working in the Intelligence Community, I stumbled across something called Intellipedia, a wiki similar to Wikipedia, on the Top Secret network on which I was working. Upon more exploration, I found out that Intellipedia uses the same software (MediaWiki) as Wikipedia, and is not only available on the Top Secret network, but that it’s actually used to share VERY sensitive data across all of the agencies within the Intelligence Community. Well, upon discovering this, I said to myself that if the CIA, FBI, DNI, and other Intelligence agencies can use wikis and blogs to share classified information, there’s no reason why these applications can’t be used across the government.

I started voraciously reading about how Intellipedia worked - who was behind it, what technical feature did it have, what else was planned, who was using it, etc. I bought all kinds of social media books (Wikinomics, The World is Flat, Wikipatterns, The Long Tail are just some of them), I attended multiple conferences and other professional development events, and most importantly, I didn’t shut up! I talked about social media to anyone who would listen to me. I constantly looked for ways in which social media could enhance or replace existing processes (couldn’t we just post this white paper to a wiki and edit it there instead of sending it around over email?), I volunteered to help write proposals, white papers, and any other document that I could get my hands on where I could talk about social media, and I sent dozens of social media media articles and success stories to my leadership and anyone else who I thought would be interested. In short, I really annoyed a bunch of people for a long time!

Eventually, I must have gotten my point across as I’m now one of the top bloggers on our company’s internal blogging platform, am one of the top wiki editors, am advising many of our senior VPs on what they need to know about social media, and am responsible for meeting with many of our clients to talk about how and if they should use social media internally. Over these last two years, I’ve worked a lot of 9AM-5PM days on my client work, only to be followed by nights working 5PM-9PM on building our social media capability (my wife is a saint for putting up with me!!). I’ve had to learn how to tactfully stand up for what I believe in without pissing off too many people. I’ve had to do a lot of “what is a blog?” briefings. I’ve had to endure a lot of contentious discussions with our legal, marketing, HR, and IT departments. The last two years have involved a lot of work, a lot of stress, and a lot of headaches, but it’s also been extremely rewarding, personally satisfying, and exciting. What’s in store for me over the next two years?