A recent Ross Dawson blog post included a mention of building flexibility: “the more flexible the organization, the more able it is to succeed”.   Which reminded me of some work I assisted Eileen Clegg with on extremophiles that we wrote up for Marcia Conner & James Clawson’s book, Creating a Learning Culture.

Along the lines of the biomimicry field, Eileen was inspired by her scientist husband’s work on organisms that live in extreme conditions of heat, salt, cold, and more. We riffed on five mechanisms and their corporate equivalents:

• ionic bonds: stronger bonds built upon attractions of opposites
• context-sensing: reading the environment for cues to change strategies
• heat-shock proteins: released under extreme conditions to repair structure
• inoculation: bring in what challenges you
• symbiosis: finding strategic partnerships

The reflection was that the mechanisms we were suggesting then, to make companies more resilient, were actually strategies making companies more flexible and adaptive.   It’s been a number of years, so it’s interesting to me to see what we were recommending back then and it’s even more relevant now:

• leverage human complexity: encourage diversity and use it to drive richer solutions
• develop ‘wise’ information technology: use technology more strategically to complement our capabilities
• encourage always-on cross-mentoring: have mentoring networks to provide support across tough times and develop people in multiple dimensions
• tapping social and value networks: reach out across organizational boundaries to partners and customers and eliminate blockages
• strategic community-building: facilitating information flows

These are just the sort of activities I continue to push in conjunction with my ITA colleagues, to build flexibility in organizations to, as Ross says, achieve “competitive differentiation”.   Wherever your inspiration may arise, the solutions appear again and again: find ways to motivate and empower people because you care about them and what you are doing, and they will provide you with valuable outcomes.   What ways are you seeing, trying, and finding useful?

What is a social media strategy for outreach?   Really, it‘s about demonstrating your thinking, your values, and background. It‘s about interacting with appropriate people in ways that reflect who you are.

Here is some thoughts about how that maps out in two areas: Facebook, and Twitter.   I‘m mentioning these as two of the most viable and visible tools for social media engagement.

Twitter

Having a twitter account is a necessary start, maybe several. One might be just a daily thing people can follow, but it has to provide value.   So, for example, you might stream out an interesting bit of the day. That, alone, however, is not enough.

A second important role is to engage people.   More important than the first idea is to ‘be‘ an entity.   If an organization is on social media, and increasingly they should be,   it needs to be interactive. This is accomplished in several ways:

• point to what the organization is doing
• point to interesting things outside of the organization
• re-tweet relevant stuff that others post (which requires following interesting people)
• respond to people replying to that account.

These require resources, essentially a person or persons who handle these duties.   Done well, these activities demonstrate that there is an interesting mind and a sincere heart behind the account.

Facebook

The same is true of a FaceBook page.   Not only should people be friending it, they should be coming back to be engaged   the organization, but now also with their colleagues also interested in the organization.

There are different ways to be on Facebook: as a static page, or as a ‘presence‘ with dialogs, groups, etc.  A static page might get a few ‘likes‘, but you really want to build a site as a place to come for folks interested in the organization and it’s work.   There need to be discussions supported (and interacted with).   There need to be updates.   There needs to be a way for people to have a dialog with you.   You need information: photos, events.   Use apps to create polls. In short, it’s about interaction around the organization and it’s work.

Again, the message is that you‘re active, engaged, you really care about what you do.   And, again, it takes resources.

Twitter/Facebook Integration

These two elements do not live independently.   Your Twitter strategy should be aligned with your Facebook strategy, so your tweets point to new information on Facebook, your Facebook account reflects your tweets, etc.   Your tweets should drive traffic to the Facebook site, but not exclusively.

There‘s more that can be incorporated: blogs (I use twitter and my blog more than my facebook page, but I‘m an individual not an organization).   However, your elements shouldn‘t be too fragmented.   E.g. only have separate Twitter handles and Facebook pages if your separate initiatives have to maintain unique identities. However, that‘s a branding issue, and not a place I‘m qualified to talk about.   Once you‘ve got the identity, then you need to align your Facebook and Twitter strategies.

So, you should be doing this, and you need to be doing it well.   If you don’t do it right, you may as well not do it at all.

I continue to get asked about social learning metrics.   Until we get around to a whitepaper or something on metrics, here’re some thoughts:

Frankly, the problem with Kirkpatrick (sort of like with LMS’ and ADDIE, *drink*) is not in the concept, but in the execution.   As he would say, stopping at level 1 or 2 is worthless.   You need to start with Level 4, and work back.   This is true whether you’re talking about formal learning, informal learning, or whatever. Then, I’m not feeling like you have to be anal about levels 1-3, it’s level 4 that matters, but there’s plausibility that making the link makes your case stronger.   And I also like what I heard added at a client meeting: level 0, are they even taking the course/accessing the system?   But I digress…

So, let’s say you are interested in seeing what social media can do for your organization: what are you not seeing but need to?   If you’re putting in a social media system into a call center, maybe you want reduced time to problem solution, fewer customer return calls on the same problem, etc.   If you’re into an operations group, maybe you want more service or product ideas.   What is it you’re trying to achieve?   What would indicate the innovation that you’re looking to spark?

Then, you need to find ways to measure those outcomes. You have three basic decisions to make in terms of a strategic initiative:

• it’s working, yay, let’s keep it.
• hmm, it’s kinda working, but we need to tweak it
• oh oh, this is bleeding money, let’s kill it

You should set parameters before you launch the initiative that you think indicate the thresholds you are talking about.   The keep and kill thresholds likely have to do with the costs versus the benefits.   You may change those parameters on inspection of the results at any time, but at least you are doing it consciously.   And gradually your patience will or should fade.   Eventually you end up with either a leave or kill decision.

Frankly, even activity is a metric.   A vendor of a social media system uses that as a metric for billing (though I don’t think that two touches a month constitutes a meaningful interaction by a user), and if people are talking productively and getting value, you’ve got at least an argument that intangible benefits are being generated.   You could couple that with subjective evaluation of value, but overall I would like to argue for more meaningful outcomes.

And don’t think that you have to have only one. Depending on the size of the initiative and the different silos that are being integrated, you might have more.   You might check not only key business metrics, but look for impacts on retention and morale as well, if the benefits of improving work environments are to believed (and I do).   And, of course, there’s more than the installation and measuring: the tweaking for instance could involve messaging, culture, interface design, or more.

Metrics for informal learning aren’t rocket science, but instead mapping of best principles into specific contexts.   Your organization needs to find ways to facilitate social learning, as the innovation outcomes are the key differentiator going forward, as so many say.   You should be experimenting, but with impacts you’d like to have, not just on faith.