I can’t wait for this film to open at the Banff Mountain Film festival. I had the great pleasure and honour of meeting Dianne Whelan and Andrew Coppin; I was even rewarded with spending a fair amount of time at Everest Base Camp with them as they followed our team’s efforts to reach the summit of the highest mountain on earth.

If the film is half as amazing as Andrew and Dianne are, it’ll be outstanding. Like I said, I can’t wait to see the final product. Here’s a little bit of satellite internet transferred quality (read that as very low quality because that satellite data, she’s expensive) interview I did with them while at Base Camp:

It really is mind-boggling. Professional communicators should know better. Social media “gurus” should know better. Those Public Relations professionals? They should know better too. Yet sometimes they don’t.

What am I yammering about?

Posting identical updates across platforms automatically and simultaneously.

I get it. You’re busy. You’ve seemingly got a thousand things to do today and a thousand places to be at once. And a dozen statuses to update on a dozen platforms – more if you’re handling client accounts. I get it.

Still. It’s no excuse for laziness. Nothing. And I mean NOTHING, is more heinous, more disrespectful to your audience, nothing screams I DON’T CARE ABOUT YOU more than when you use an application like Hootsuite or Tweetdeck to post the same status update on Facebook, Twitter, Foursquare and wherever else you’re trying to broadcast to your audience online, at the same time. After all, you’ve implemented all kinds of genius social media strategy to turn your Facebook fans into Twitter followers into Foursquare checker-inners so you can broadcast the same message on different channels anyway. So why should I, the reader, have to read “Hey, check out my über crazy-good social media marketing post” on Facebook only to check into my Twitter feed 30 seconds later to see the same post? Do you believe that’s adding value and makes me want to keep being your fan or follower?

OK, scratch that. Actually, there is something more heinous than cross-posting. Connect-my-dots posting is worse.

When you post a link on Facebook to that über crazy-good marketing post on your company website and use a social media app to simultaneously post another, different link to that Facebook post on Twitter, you’re requiring your readers to click twice to arrive to the one place you wanted to send them to, and could have just sent them to.

What on earth are you thinking? Yes, I get it, clicking is easy. Yes, I get it, Facebook integrated itself with Twitter like that to seem like they are making life simpler for you all the while driving traffic to them. But not only does the data show your audience won’t click twice often, it’s also the internet equivalent of flipping your audience the bird. It’s not good communicating. It’s not marketing. It’s not effective. It’s not efficient. It’s just down right lazy and disrespectful. It’s not going to win you Facebook fans or Twitter followers. So I beg you. Just stop. Please.

The solution is simply. Really. Just build one link on each platform you choose to use that takes me to whichever page you’re trying to get me to go. Please don’t make me connect your dots. That’s not my job as your reader. You should be making it easy for me to read your content. And you should be enticing me to want to click your link with something clever, creative and alluring. You should also be checking in with me to make sure you’re doing it right. That’s the engagement part of this whole social media thingy.

People are starting to ask me about Google+ more and more. I’m not a social media guru ninja wizard expert, to be honest I dislike when anyone makes the claim they are; I’m just an avid user of some of the tools and platforms and I’m a big geek who likes to play with new digital technologies and come up with creative communication uses for them. I think Google+ has huge game changing potential, especially for progressive businesses already using many Google apps like Gmail and Google Docs to move their core communication functions onto “the cloud” and increase their productivity, especially when their teams are spread out geographically.

What Google has done with Google+ is nothing short of brilliant. It’s actually so simple it can be summed up in one small screen capture:

It’s the stuff at the top that matters: Google’s brought everything their users are using everyday into one place and made it easy. Brilliant. Google’s already number one in search, is very likely still number two in webmail and commands significant market share in other cloud computing circles; they’ve got a competitive advantage over rivals like Facebook and they’ve very likely found the winner to tie them all together. This video sums it up quite well:

If you want to read more about Google+, the folks over at GeekSugar have a great post with lots more video too.

Oh, and despite Google+’s invite-only launch, it’s still achieved explosive growth:

If you want to connect with me on Google+ (and I’d love for you to), I can be found at gplus.to/johnoshaughnessy.

The BC Bike Race, an epic seven-day mountain bike stage race is happening this week. The race starts in North Vancouver and finishes in Whistler with stops on Vancouver Island, the Sunshine Coast and Squamish in between. Two good friends are racing this year, so I hung out with cameras in tow to capture some of their day. Congrats to Dawn and Lisa for ripping it up out there against some of the best professional women riders in the country.

I shot 448 pictures in total, 10 are on Flickr. I spent some time playing with Sony Vegas to make the quick movie below. It’s my first attempt at editing a film beyond a quick interview piece. I’d love to know what you think of it.

I’m done for the day–way too much sun for this Irish skin.

Building on a previous post about using social media for business engagement, I’m going to narrow this discussion to internal communications.

Businesses tend to be focused on ROI. And why not? If you’re going to be spending money, it should be purposeful and provide tangible results. There is a ton of discussion online about ROI calculations of social media. In fact, I’d suggest that horse has been beaten to death and kicked one too many times. But if you want links, here they are, and are, and are, and are, etc.

Here’s a bit of a case study: first the outline of the problem.

I worked in a medium sized corporation not too long ago. It was connected to a larger professional organization but tended to isolate itself as an arms-length entity. The employees there had created a culture over the years that was somewhat disjointed–different but the same as their wider peers across their professional organization.

Like many corporations, this one is caught in the grips of perpetual change: leadership shifts, organizational moves, staff growth in some business areas, retrenchment in others. The business has the tendency to silo due to the nature of the work and the organization of business activities–some employees are skilled professionals while others would be considered front-line service workers–teamwork across business areas is crucial to the success of both the business deliverables and the well-being of the organization.

Like all organizations of its size, this one has communication and knowledge transfer issues. I’d hesitate to call them critical problems; that said, a clear employee engagement strategy to create an open, multi-directional dialogue between leaders, managers, supervisors and employees would be beneficial. As would a well-defined plan to create an open source platform for business knowledge to be captured and spread throughout the many knowledge workers who depend on the expertise of long-time employees and leaders to do their work.

Much of the corporate written knowledge is contained on the corporate website and intranet. The intranet is problematic because it hasn’t seen an upgrade or redesign in years. As a result, some workers tend to shy away from using it as their primary source and prefer to create meetings and shop around documents to get what they need. This is a costly and time-consuming practice that often results in a logjam of product development. Two business areas even have regularly scheduled knowledge transfer sessions that resemble an undergraduate lecture.

Here’s my pitch:

Knowledge transfer

A corporate wiki on the intranet site edited by chosen subject matter experts regularly and published by designated approval actors. Initial content development is a minor issue as much of the content necessary to make this resource purposeful already exists. However a team of communications experts will need to organize the content in an intuitive, hyper-linked environment. Meetings scheduled for knowledge transfer should include clear wiki-deliverables: that is, if we’re meeting to hear about corporate knowledge, write it down and upload it to the wiki. The wiki becomes the default location of knowledge in this case–every subject contains the most recent version of the specific associated knowledge. Version control risks are minimized when knowledge is contained in one central location and format.

Engagement communications

This is a bit more tricky. Should you use Yammer–a closed Twitter-type community–or something like Ning, a closed Facebook-like community platform? I can understand the draw of Ning, as most people are familiar with what Facebook is and does. However, Yammer, to me at least, is so much more powerful for creating organizational conversations–streamlined, search-able and horizontal. The problem with Yammer, as I see it, is the lack of an intuitive application client to make it easy to keep the conversation flowing and organized.

Here’s the solution, laconi.ca plus twhirl, (solution find courtesy of Chris Brogan).  You get the benefits of a Twitter-client with a closed system like Yammer.

Like all communications efforts, these require careful planning and implementation. There should be research, development, testing, implementation and evaluation phases.

It all starts with buy-in at the top. It’s up to the internal actors doing the planning to convince the decision makers of the relevance of an internal conversation creating effort. My recommendation is to start with a baseline: answer the question “Where are we having corporate conversations currently and how do we measure their effectiveness?” Present those findings, pitch the additional conversation creating qualities of any new tools (we’re not replacing what we were doing previously, we’re building on those practices) and counter the initial negative reaction (if there is one) by asking “How do you evaluate the ROI of knowledge transfer meetings, corporate newsletters, employee events and whatever else our organization does to increase employee engagement?”

I think you’ll be surprised at the response. Or lack there of.

Went to an unconference for the first time today. To be completely honest, a trusted friend recommended I go, said “you’ll get a kick out of this,” so I did zero research, bought a ticket and showed up. I was very pleasantly surprised.

When I attend conferences, I usually play the part of listener. Selfishly, I seek to get as much out of these types of learning opportunities as possible. Networking is always a bonus–I met some great people who I look forward to crossing paths with again in the near future.

I attended four break out sessions:

1. Social media and climate change in BC facilitated by Dr. Raul Pacheco-Vega (aka @hummingbird604)
2. Public service engaging citizens of BC facilitated by David Hume (aka @dbhume)
3. Net neutrality, a town hall style event (see saveournet.ca) on a topic you’ll be hearing a lot about over the coming months judging by the number of politicians in the room
4. Social media for a cause, which I was partly responsible for suggested topic, and morphed into an organic discussion of not-for-profit use of social media and the importance of including social media within communications planning (note, not in replacement of traditional PR/media strategies)

There’s a ton of content out there, much of which is contained on the VanChangeCamp Wiki, blog and on Hummingbird604.com. I’ll update this post over the next couple of days as I stumble across more links and content.

Here’s a great slideshare of a session I wish I’d attended (by @greensandbox):

[slideshare id=1616935&doc=unbundlinggovernance-090621183836-phpapp01]

I walked up to Everest base camp last year. No big deal. It was on my life’s to do list. Crossed it off. It was such a non-thrill that it took me over a year to upload the photos to Flickr.

Sarcasm really is lost in the written word, eh? At least for this writer’s readers.

I still haven’t come to grips with the full extent of how the Everest trip impacted my life, my goals, my perspective, my work, my wife–I could go on and on. One day, when I’m ready, I’ll put ink to screen and tell that story. I’m not ready yet, so in the meantime you’ll have to be content with some photos. Video is next. Then ink to screen. And maybe some WhiteOut too. No, I’m not a natural blonde. And yes, that is likely one of the worst jokes ever.

Simply put: social media exists, the number of people using it is growing extremely fast and if your business isn’t engaging those people through social media, there’s a strong probability your competitors are.

When I talk to business leaders about engaging their stakeholders using social media I am generally met with two objections:

• we have no idea where to start, we can’t calculate the value and our online presence is doing just fine; and
• we don’t want our employees wasting their time online.

There are many reasons for rebuttal, but the two most common I give are:

• at minimum, your brand should occupy space in social media to listen to what people are saying about your industry/business; and
• if your employees want to waste their time online, they’ll have plenty of opportunity without restricting social media. If your employees are wasting time online, it’s likely because they’re not engaged. Use social media to engage them, interact with them and drive productivity.

To me, the whole point of social media is engagement. Engagement is multi-directional communication. Multi-directional communication allows relationships to form. Why would any business not want to build relationships with its customers?

Perhaps it all comes down to control? Old-world communications has typically been about message control. Engagement through social media, for a lot of businesses, means loss of message control. Jonathon Narvey,  an influential voice in the social media scene, says in an article published in BC Business Magazine:

Succeeding with social media is not about control but about participation.

I like to think of social media as an opportunity to participate in incredible word of mouth advertising. We know that word of mouth advertising can be some of the most influential action-creating communication. We also know there is tremendous risk associated with someone else having control of the message. And here is where social media shines: traditional word of mouth communications are hard to follow and track, social media was designed to be followed and tracked. The benefits for business are tremendous–you’ve been given a platform to listen to what your customers are saying about you and react accordingly. Isn’t that the whole point of communications? And successful businesses tend to be successful because they listen to their customers.

It’s going to require time to build your brand’s presence in social media. I recommend you resist the temptation to pull the plug after a short experiment. You’re participating in community building; community and relationship building requires time. Create a plan and put it in place, including a realistic and long-term evaluation. I’d be happy to help you do this successfully.

My wife, bless her heart, understands the pain we non-Canuck fans feel whenever the Canucks are in the playoffs. She’s been subjected to the constant cheers and jeers from otherwise non-hockey fans in her workplace who feel it necessary to join the ever-growing bandwagon this city seems to produce like no other.

Once per week, the group my wife works with gather together for a huddle and take turns leading, saying whatever happens to be on their mind that could add positivity into their working environment. Yesterday was her turn and she seized the moment to create a good laugh.

In honour of the many people I know who could either care less about hockey, or who happen to care more about their own teams who they have been loyal to during this trying time, I give you this dandy piece of writing, presented the morning after the first game of round 2 versus Chicago. While the Vancouver Twitterati were deliriously tweeting about sweeps after 1 win in a 7 game series, the poor “fans” at the office were given this to ponder:

I expected the trash talk
Thanks for proving me right
All I can say is the Canucks were very lucky last night

Blew a 3-nothing lead going into the third
Luongo was lucky
And so was his herd

It’s the first team to 4 wins
That’s all that matters
And only a matter of time before Vancouver’s confidence shatters

Sundin will continue to do what he does best
His specialty is leading his team to losses
Especially those with goalies as bosses

So savour the victory
Celebrate my friends
Round 2 will be where your party ends!

Now this is all in good fun, so please don’t take it too seriously. To Canucks fans I say: enjoy it while it lasts, it may take another 14 years before you feel the same kind of “we’re winning the cup” excitement you feel today.

I’m a big fan of this concept: take vehicles already on the road–the ones people know and trust–and turn them into all-electric machines.

It’s the model employed by Rapid Electric Vehicles of Vancouver, BC. They design and manufacture all-electric drive systems for Ford F150s, Escapes and Rangers–the three most popular fleet vehicles in operation on North American roads today. They’ve partnered with all the right organizations; leaders in battery technology, charging infrastructure and clean energy sourcing. REV is a turn-key solution for vehicle fleets seeking to green their operations today.

Government mandates are going to be very difficult to meet. All government related fleets in British Columbia must be carbon neutral by 2010. Go zero-emission electric or buy offsets–those will be the two choices available. REV has an excellent business case for zero-emmision electric fleet vehicles.

You’ll be hearing a lot about this company in the coming months. The buzz has already started.