Six Ways Social Networking Is Changing My Life

I follow and manage my work group’s social media presence as part of my job, so I’m sure I spend a lot more time online than many people. But I think because I’m always searching, comparing, and analyzing news, that I can step back and take a good and impartial look at the ways it’s changing my life.

#1 I’m better informed than ever

It used to be that you’d have to subscribe to multiple papers and magazines to get a well-rounded view of the world. Once I had my first child, my quiet early mornings reading the local paper with breakfast flew out the window – never to return. Now, all of the news is online, and thanks to social media, news organizations are pushing their hottest news stories out to me – I don’t even have to visit websites unless I’m searching for a specific story (how many advertisers did Rush Limbaugh lose or what’s the latest news from Syria), or want to get multiple viewpoints. I follow the major news sources on Facebook and Twitter, so the latest news is pushed right to my desktop or smart phone.

#2 The organizations I follow can communicate more easily with me

I admit I have a lot of varied interests (moderation is often difficult for me), and I love that organizations can easily keep me informed about their latest doings via social networking. And on the other side of that, since I manage several Facebook group pages, I appreciate being able to update our fans/followers easily via posts or tweets. 

I follow our local food bank, local family shelter, a micro lending organization, bands, accessibility organizations, friends’ small businesses, radio stations, entertainers, trainers, George Takei (he makes me laugh every day), and a multitude of other personalities and groups. I can easily customize my feeds; adding and deleting as I find new sources.

#3 Grass roots activism is keeping me in the loop

I don’t know about you, but I’ve been signing a lot of petitions lately. And I do believe they’re having an impact. Just in the last few days, I’ve signed a petition against the US government buying pink slime to put into school lunches, and a petition requesting that the MPAA (Motion Picture Association of America) reverse its decision to give an impactful film about bullying an R rating, making it inaccessible to the teenagers who needs to see it the most. I feel like my opinion counts, and governments, businesses and groups are listening. Grass roots social media is taking the world by storm. The Arab Spring, Komen Foundation, Rush Limbaugh, and U.S. politics, just to name a few, have been in the news, and all started with social networking.

#4 My virtual/worldwide water cooler

Social networking lets me catch up with colleagues and friends who live around the world. I work at home and remotely from my team, so team lunches and happy hours aren’t part of my colleague relationships. But it doesn’t mean that I don’t want to know what they’ve been up to, or check out the latest kid pics. And those friends from high school and college who’ve settled overseas or out of state and didn’t make it to the last reunion? What a great way to keep in touch. Plus, when these Facebook/Google/Twitter/Pinterest friends share their interests and causes, I find out 1) a lot more about those people that may not surface in a face-to-face working relationship and 2) new stuff to learn about.

#5 I get to share the causes and news in which I’m interested

This one may drive you nuts if you’re friends with me or following me on social networking sites, but I love sharing my interests and causes. I am always looking to recruit volunteers for the volunteer organization I manage events for, and if I sign a petition, I like sharing that information too. And if you don’t agree with me or don’t want to read what I’m sharing? You can easily skip over it, or if I really offend you, de-friend or unfollow me. And of course, vice versa. But I rarely do that – I love the exchange and varied opinions I find.

#6 YouTube videos

Need I say more? Okay, I’m not sure there’s a positive here, except that when I’ve had a tough day, I don’t mind zoning out for a few minutes and watching cute kitten, puppy, elephant and baby videos. And the number of how to videos is truly astounding – ranging from cutting your own bangs to installing a garbage disposal. I’m sure we all have our favorite YouTube genres.

So, has social networking changed your life, and if yes, how? I'd love to hear what you think.

Image: Salvatore Vuono / FreeDigitalPhotos.net
Image: jannoon028 / FreeDigitalPhotos.net
Image: worradmu / FreeDigitalPhotos.net

Repost from IBM Social Business Insights: Making Social Media More Accessible

Earlier this year I started blogging for the IBM Social Business Insights blog as part of a team of IBM Redbook Thought Leaders. I'll be reposting those blog posts here on my personal blog. 
Making Social Media More Accessible was originally published on March 7, 2012, and is owned by IBM.
I recommend checking out the IBM Social Business Insights blog for some compelling and though-provoking content.

Making social media more accessible

True or False: Today’s mainstream social media channels are accessible to all.

Before you answer that question, let’s take a look at the current state of the social media space.

Social media channels enable social networking, a phenomenon fueled largely by user-generated content and the various ways users can connect and share that content. Recent usage numbers for the top five social media channels are incredible:

• Facebook has 850 million users; 483 million of those are daily active users.(1)
• YouTube has more than 3 billion views per day; 48 hours of video is uploaded every minute.(2)
• Twitter is just as busy: more than 200 million accounts, more than 100 million active users, 50 percent of whom log in daily, tweeting 350 million times a day.(3)
• LinkedIn has 135 million members in more than 200 countries and territories; new members are joining at a rate of faster than two new members a second.(4)
• Google+, as of January 2012, has over 90 million users.(5)
• The newest up and comer, Pinterest, set a new record at the beginning of February 2012 of 10 million US monthly unique users.(6)

No single company could fill the content pipeline of one of these channels, much less for all of them concurrently, as is happening right now. But when we look at the accessibility of these channels, we start to see that not everyone can equally participate in these social exchanges.

An older blog post by Nilofar Ansher from G3ict, the Global Initiative for Inclusive Information and Communication Technologies, poses three questions that can help a social media company assess the accessibility of its site:

• Can everyone publish their own content without barriers?
• Does the publishing platform support the creation of accessible content? (More specifically, does the publishing process require accessibility artifacts? For example, does it ask for alternative text for images?)
• Is that content then presented to the user in an accessible way?
• If you (or your developers) can’t answer “yes” to all three questions about your social media platform or channel, then it’s a safe bet that some people are excluded from participating.

Denis Boudreau, president of AccessibilitéWeb, a Montreal-based accessibility cooperative, put together a thorough presentation in fall 2011 that evaluated the accessibility of the five main social media platforms (Pinterest is not included). He evaluated the platforms on the eight most common accessibility problems:

• Section headings
• Color contrasts
• Labels and form fields
• Keyboard navigation
• Text equivalents for images
• Multimedia
• Language
• Validation

His findings? All five platforms failed. LinkedIn did the best, at 29 percent.
Because these platforms are available at no cost to users and participation is optional, there isn’t the pressure from paying customers or government regulations to make them accessible and inclusive – yet. Both the changing technology-related legislation worldwide that is incorporating accessibility requirements and the consumers who are becoming more vocal about access will ultimately put pressure on these social channels to become fully accessible.

Workarounds, fortunately, do exist and there appears to be some movement toward accessibility. EasyChirp is an accessible Twitter client that has received good reviews. AppleVis, a community-driven website created to collect information on the accessibility of apps developed for Apple's iOS devices, includes a free, accessible LinkedIn app. And, blind colleagues report improvements in the Facebook mobile client over the last year (you must be logged in to Facebook to access).

As a social media practitioner, I find it unfortunate that we’re not building relationships with all of our clients, prospects, and partners within social media channels because of the lack of inclusivity. Using social platforms that are accessible, such as IBM Connections, is a huge step forward in becoming an Inclusive Social Business, but until the mainstream social media channels are accessible, the ideas and insights of millions of people worldwide are not being fully shared. Neither are they fully engaged as customers in the business model of the channel, resulting in potential revenue remaining on the table.

The answer to true or false question posed at the beginning of this post? False, for now. With increasing focus on the need to make these channels more accessible, let’s hope in a year these platforms will be more inclusive.
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1 Facebook Fact Sheet
2 YouTube Press Room
3 Social Media Marketing Library
4 LinkedIn Facts
5 Google Plus News
6 Pinterest Hits10 Million U.S. Monthly Uniques Faster Than Any Standalone Site Ever

Recent Innovations for People with Disabilities

There are amazing technologies being developed daily by incredibly talented people. Some of them are created to enable people with disabilities to participate fully in social networking. The development of these technologies often aren't covered by the mainstream press because they're considered of interest only to a small audience — a definite misconception.  When you consider that more than 1 billion of the 7 billion people in the world today have a disability*, and the world population is aging at the fastest rate in history** — these are not niche technologies by any stretch of the imagination.

Here are two technology innovations I found today, surfaced by Smart Planet:

• Dyslexie font designed to help dyslexics read, write: Not your typical technology innovation, but for those with dyslexia, a cognitive disability that makes reading and comprehension difficult, this font could help them read for a longer time and with better comprehension, compared to other fonts. Dislexie was created by Dutch graphic designer, Christian Boer, who is dyslexic. The letters in Dyslexie are more widely spaced and distinct from each other, and "tied down"  — making dyslexics less likely to flip them, mentally.

• New smartphone app lets users text ‘eyes-free’: Designed by the researchers at the Georgia Institute of Technology, this new iPhone application enables visually impaired users who are proficient at typing in Braille to type up to 32 words per minute at a 92% accuracy rate. Based on the same model as the Braille keyboard, the software, called BrailleTouch, employs gesture-based texting and uses only six keys, which are displayed as dots.

The researchers at Georgia Tech have been busy. I also found this article in Disabled World today:

• Tongue Drive Wireless Device Operates Computers and Wheelchairs: This innovative device enables people with high-level spinal cord injuries to operate a computer and maneuver an electrically powered wheelchair by moving their tongue. The newest prototype of the system allows users to wear an inconspicuous dental retainer embedded with sensors to control the system. It was demonstrated at the IEEE International Solid-State Circuits Conference in San Francisco on February 20, 2012.

Many technologies created originally for people with disabilities have worked their way into the mainstream, making applications more usable for all. According to The Center for an Accessible Society, experts in the telecom access engineering field call it the "Electronic Curb-cut Effect", and have an extensive list on their website of IT (information technology) innovations, originally developed by, or in support of, people with disabilities that wound up benefiting everyone.

*10 Facts on Disability from the World Health Organization
**More than 600 million people are over the age of 60. By 2050, that number is expected to rise to 2 billion; more than 20 percent of the world’s population. World Health Organization

Image: Damian Brandon / FreeDigitalPhotos.net

Repost from IBM Social Business Insights: Inclusive Social Business

Social networking and accessibility are passions of mine, so I'm thrilled that I'll be blogging regularly about accessibility and social business as an IBM Redbooks Thought Leader on the IBM Social Business Insights blog, alongside some very smart and very connected people — a mixture of IBMers, Business Partners and well-known experts in the field. 
I'll be reposting those blog posts here on my personal blog, including my first one, Inclusive Social Business, originally published on January 29, 2012, and owned by IBM. 

Inclusive social business

When you see the phrase “inclusive social business,” these questions might come to mind:

• What is inclusive social business?
• Why does it matter?
• Why should I care about it?

I’m going to address these questions in this post.

What is inclusive social business?

To answer that question, first let’s make sure that we have a clear definition of social business. At its most basic level:

A social business cultivates trusted relationships and encourages innovation and collaboration to make people more effective.

Diving a little deeper, IBM has identified the three fundamental characteristics of a social business. A social business is:

• Engaged: It allows the right mix of talent and information to come together to deliver new insight.
• Transparent: It gives each individual the opportunity to participate meaningfully to improve the business.
• Nimble: It leverages networks to speed up business, gain insight and make quicker, better business decisions.

In this context, inclusion is the enablement of all people to participate and collaborate fully, regardless of ability or disability.

Because a social business is fundamentally about enabling new levels of interaction among people, it’s important to understand the demographics of potential users and tie it into some real numbers. As of October 31, 2011, the global population was 7 billion(1) . This includes an incredibly diverse variety of individuals with vastly differing abilities:

• People with Disabilities: More than 1 billion people have disabilities(2); a number that will continue to increase because of advances in healthcare and longer life expectancies. Disabilities are often divided into four categories: visual, hearing, mobility, and cognitive. (We’ll talk about these more in a future blog post.)
• Aging population: More than 600 million people are over the age of 60(3). By 2050, that number is expected to rise to 2 billion to more than 20 percent of the world’s population.
• Non-native language speakers: Using English as an example, 500 million – 1.8 billion(4( people worldwide speak English as their first or second language; which means that up to 6.5 billion don’t. In the U.S. alone, over 55 million citizens speak a language other than English in their homes(5).
• People with no or low literacy: 793 million worldwide(6)

In addition to these demographics, there are many others for whom technology must be more flexible, adaptive, and intuitive to be optimally effective. Take mobile workers, for example. Today’s workers are no longer tied to a desk in an office, but work when and where they want using multiple device types (smartphones, tablets, laptops) in multiple types of locations (airports, cars, public transportation, client sites, and others). As a result, they often encounter what we call situational disabilities – in noisy coffee shops, at airports or while driving in a car requiring hands-free access that impair their ability to connect and collaborate.

Why does inclusive social business matter?

If your tools, websites, applications, and collateral aren’t accessible, you are, by default, excluding a significant percentage of your potential collaboration pool – which isn’t good business any way you look at it. Inclusive social business should value every voice and every idea.

In addition to the three fundamental social business characteristics identified by IBM, two others should be considered by enterprises evolving their collaboration strategy. An inclusive social business is:

• Consistent: It provides barrier-free access across platforms and applications for a consistent brand experience.
• Everywhere: It enables the work and web experience to happen where, when, and how it is most effective, regardless of environmental or ability-based inhibitors

Why should you care whether your social business is fully inclusive? 

Here’s the bottom line: In today’s global, social and hyper-connected world, excluding any individual means missing out on important ideas, insight, and opportunities. Making inclusion a top priority can help you differentiate yourself from the competition, expand your reach in existing markets, enter new markets (such as India where 50 to 64 percent of the population does not meet basic literacy requirements(6)) and drive new levels of innovation.

If you're becoming a social business, the key question to ask yourself is: Are you making the most of the wealth of knowledge and expertise you can tap by including all potential collaborators?

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1 As world passes 7 billion milestone, UN urges action to meet key challenges
2 World Health Organization: 10 Facts on Disability
3 World Health Organization: Aging and life course
4 Wikipedia: English language
5. Language Use in the United States, U.S. Census Bureau

6. UNESCO Adult and Youth Literacy Fact Sheet

 

Preventing Customer Service Fumbles from Going Viral: A Social Media Cautionary Tale

There have always been companies who are disreputable, uncaring or too self-important to listen to their customers and have ignored complaints seemingly without penalty. Consumers have traditionally had few options to get their issues addressed. The Better Business Bureau takes complaints, but has no teeth to actually penalize a company. Taking a company to small claims court is difficult, and usually not worthwhile. Often a customer’s only recourse was to contact newspapers and television stations who had a columnist or reporter dedicated to resolving these customer horror stories. For example, my local paper, the San Jose Mercury News has a daily feature, Action Line, by columnist Dennis Rockstroh, who has a wonderful record of getting companies to do the right thing. (Plus it makes for interesting reading.)

Today, thanks to social media, the traditional landscape of customer service and satisfaction has morphed dramatically — full of pitfalls and traps for the unresponsive or slow-to-respond company. The customer now has the power to make a company publicly uncomfortable for ignoring complaints. Companies that don’t quickly and correctly address customers’ concerns can have a public relation nightmare on their hands at lightning speed, thanks to the immediacy of social media and the ease of interesting stories taking off virally.

Here are two cautionary tales that all social media practitioners, if they haven't already, should be taking to heart.

Regretsy and Paypal

Regretsy is a website I’d never heard of before the pre-Christmas drama with Paypal. According to an article by CNN Tech, “Run by actress-comedian April Winchell, Regretsy is a snarky blog created primarily to mock what it considers awkward, ugly or otherwise head-turning offerings on the arts-and-crafts site Etsy. It’s a site that makes fun of Etsy items for sale.”

Ms. Winchell has a close knit group of fans, and every year she raises funds from her fans to buy and send gifts to families who need a little help for the holidays.

This past Christmas, for the first time, she used the Donate button on Paypal to collect these donations, which were thousands of dollars. Using the button triggered a Paypal alert, and they froze her Paypal accounts. She got on the phone with a customer service representative, who was arrogant and dismissive of her problems. According to April Winchell, part of the conversation went like this:

PAYPAL: Only a nonprofit can use the Donate button.
ME: That’s false. It says right in the PDF of instructions for the Donate button that it can be used for “worthy causes.”
PAYPAL: I haven’t seen that PDF. And what you’re doing is not a worthy cause, it’s charity.
ME: What’s the difference?
PAYPAL: You can use the donate button to raise money for a sick cat, but not poor people.

I won’t repeat any more of it here — it was poorly managed  by Paypal at multiple points and got worse before it got better, while it dragged on for several days. You can read the full Regretsy article on the website.

The Twitterverse picked up this story — which is how I became aware of it — and it trended for a good 48 hours, with an immense amount of backlash against Paypal.

End result:  Paypal finally did the right thing by unfreezing April Winchell's accounts, and even made a donation to her Christmas present fund, but it took too long and it was not pretty.

Here's the second cautionary tale I’d like to highlight.

The Sons of Maxwell and United Airlines

In 2008, a band called the Sons of Maxwell were flying to a gig in Nebraska, according to their story. At the Chicago airport, a baggage handler was seen roughly handling band member Dave Carroll’s custom-made $3500 guitar; causing significant damage. Dave Carroll bounced around from person to person at United Airlines, with no resolution to his damage claim for nine months, so he wrote a song about his experience and posted it on YouTube. It went viral almost immediately, and today has had 11 ½ million hits.

United Airlines resolved his case immediately then, but the incident reportedly cost the company $180 million, according to an article in The Business Insider. 

Often, these customer service mishaps are first posted on a company’s social media channels, giving the social media manager the opportunity to fix it before it gets out of control. 

However, there was a frightening article published in October, 2011, that stated: 70% of Companies Ignore Customer Complaints on Twitter. In addition, it also says, "Previous research from ExactTarget called Twitter X-Factors showed that fewer than 1% of customers use Twitter as their first stop in problem resolution. In almost every case, the people complaining on Twitter are doing so because your company already failed to satisfy them in one or more traditional customer service channels."

Scary stuff, isn’t it?

So the moral of the story for social media managers?

You can’t control the customer service department at your company, even though a direct line to a management connection in that department can help immensely. But you can respond immediately when a complaint appears on any of your social media channels, and let the customer know that you’ve heard him, and are working on an answer. And then do it. Escalate the issue as quickly as you can internally, and when you have a resolution, make sure that you publish the resolution on the social media channel where the complaint first appeared. How you respond will be noted by your fans and followers.

I don't know about you, but being held up as the poster child or business case study of "what not to do" is nothing I'm interested in pursuing.

Image: graur razvan ionut / FreeDigitalPhotos.net
Image: Pixomar / FreeDigitalPhotos.net

Go Ahead — Blame Social Networking for the Photo Explosion

Trite but true: A picture is worth a thousand words.

Photographs have been invaluable in the communication of information since the photographic process became a reality in 1836 thanks to Louis Daguerre. Photos have documented all of life's important events: weddings, births, graduations, vacations — the list is endless. And photos have always been important in publications; but they've been the bailiwick of professionals who had the vision, equipment, talent, and budget to create and reproduce their work. For amateurs, photography publication choices were limited to photo albums or slide shows. And I don't know about you, but I used to wait to develop film until I had enough to make the trip worthwhile, and usually by then, I had no idea what was on the rolls of film any longer.  

Things have definitely changed with the invention and proliferation of digital cameras that keep getter better and cheaper. Would it surprise you to discover that according to a recent U.S. study, 27% of photos and videos are now captured on smartphones? And with today's social media applications, anyone can create and illustrate custom content almost instantaneously. With instant upload apps to Facebook, Twitter, blogs, and photo galleries — you can easily post photos online straight from your smartphone and invite friends and family to share the experience or adventure as it's happening. "Wish you were here" has an entirely new meaning now, doesn't it?

Facebook's 800 million users upload, on average, more than 250 million photos per day.* And to get some idea of the explosion in the sheer number of uploaded photos, take a look at this article, which shows an installation by Erik Kessels looking at the future of photography by featuring printouts of all the images uploaded to Flickr in a 24-hour period. It's pretty mind blowing. (I know they're making a artistic point, but I shudder at the decadent use/waste of all that paper with our focus on conservation.)

Do some people overshare? Of course. But some things never change — they overshared before social media, inviting you over to watch the hundreds of photos of their trip to the wilds of downtown Omaha, Nebraska. Personally I enjoy knowing what my friends and colleagues are up to, and I love discovering new places and things from their posts and photos.

Social media sites = Photo repositories

I think it is more than fair to lay the responsibility for the photo explosion at the feet of social networking. And think of all of the benefits:

• No more boxes of unsorted photos to trip over
• You know exactly where your friends and family are at all times and what they're doing
• Aunt Edna can friend you on Facebook to share her Omaha photos — you don't have to sit through the slide show.

2012 Personal New Year's Not-Resolutions

I'm not a resolution person. The years I make them, I inevitably break them — actually, it's pretty well guaranteed I will, just from the sheer pressure I put on myself. I'm more successful when I look at places in my life where I'd like to make incremental changes (not resolutions), and work into them gradually. This article in the Washington Post runs along the same lines. (We could just be talking semantics here, but that's okay — I'll live with it.)

Having time off in the last two weeks, taking a social networking break and updating only my personal status on Facebook gave me a much-needed breather. I also refreshed my vision board, which I felt worked very well for me in 2010, and I skipped in 2011 with a not-surprising lackluster personal year. (If you've never heard of a vision board, check it out here.)

So a few things I want to work on in 2012 both personally and professionally:

• Make dinner more frequently for my kids ahead of time (crock pot meals and casseroles) so that I can work out around dinner time with much less guilt and/or skipping entirely
• Resume my regular workout schedule that went awry with a running injury last year
• Take a quick break from my computer daily and walk my dogs around the block
• Tame my social media-induced ADD and schedule social media scans
• Blog more frequently with shorter posts
• Keep a running list of blog posts and tweets and articles I want to look at later instead of leaving 45 tabs open in my browser that inevitably get lost when my browser crashes
• Apply some cool things I've learned recently about personal branding to my own brand

What about you?  What are you going to change in 2012?