Four years ago, Hornsey library became the centre of my working life after I moved to London. I had worked there for a few months when I met the assistant director Diana Edmonds, and we had a chat about social media.

At the time I had been involved in a few [...]]]> Original at guardian.co.uk

Four years ago, Hornsey library became the centre of my working life after I moved to London. I had worked there for a few months when I met the assistant director Diana Edmonds, and we had a chat about social media.

At the time I had been involved in a few conversations about social tools but had never run an independent project, and I definitely didn’t have ambitions about becoming a consultant. I was forced to come from working on some great projects in Nigeria to Hornsey where I didn’t know anyone. I couldn’t work full time, and I was looking to find any sort of work I could really get my teeth into but manage flexibly, and on my own terms.

To start the ball rolling I gave a presentation about social media to the libraries team and it was met with the usual fears. At the time (and even now) the rest of the council was still unsure about it all, with social media sites blocked across the council’s IT network. But Diana decided to go for it and give me free hand to start a Twitter account for Haringey’s libraries. It was a leap of faith.

Being considerate about local authority budgets I did it on the cheap, only working on the project one day a week, and I didn’t waste much time on non-essentials.

I started the @haringeylibrary account. For the next two months I wrote all the tweets for the service. I had practically lived in a library during most of my teens, so it wasn’t difficult to take on the identity of one. I invested time in building up the follower numbers and developed content from chats with the librarians and the local “what’s on” booklet, and if there were any questions coming back, I just asked for an answer.

I didn’t worry too much about statistics or reporting because the assistant director was interested in and able to follow what I was doing. She did, however, set me a target of followers to achieve by the time I handed over the account.

After two months I spent some time touring the nine library branches, holding workshops demonstrating what I had been doing and how it had worked, and asking for ideas on how to take the account forward. All this was done to make the project more human but without too much intrusion into anyone’s working life, so all staff ended up feeling ownership of the project.

After another two months of running the Twitter account and providing training and guidance to staff members, I finally handed over the keys (or in this case, passwords) to the assistant director. By then she had a good idea of what Twitter was all about, and what it was for.

By the time I handed over the account I had built it up to about 2,000 followers, all locals and members of the target audience. We also had cards printed which were handed out in the libraries. Since then, the assistant director has left the department but the Twitter account is alive and well.

I hadn’t set out to defy set perceptions about how social media is supposed to work. I just trusted that I could teach the librarians to talk about the work they are doing directly to library users. It seemed simple enough to me – and maybe that’s why it is simple enough for the librarians too.

But there were some things I didn’t do. I didn’t introduce social media measurement to the librarians – and on the face of it they don’t need it, because the don’t need to justify spending. I personally believe there is no good way of expressing social engagement in metrics. And there are no big social media strategy documents. There is a strategy paper, which the council’s communications officers insisted on, but it’s buried with all the other unread strategies. There were also no extra hires.

What the library department is left with is a working Twitter account, the ability to use it, constant encouragement to talk about its work, and a team that knows how to engage with its local community.

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Day 1

Why aren’t The Daves (Briggs and Coplin) traveling the globe, opening tech events as the world’s first geek comedy duo?!?

Social media [...]]]> Spent 2 days talking gov and engagement at UKGovCamp 2012. Massively inspiring unconference with lovely, passionate people. Here’s random thoughts while I’m trying to digest and organise (and rest.)

Day 1

Why aren’t The Daves (Briggs and Coplin) traveling the globe, opening tech events as the world’s first geek comedy duo?!?

Social media ROI discussions are massively frustrating. We (social media ‘advisors’) are guilty of creating the wrong expectations in people we talk to, due to our need to *sell* social. Now that it’s mainstream, why try to squeeze 3 dimensions into a half by translating the value of social into numbers and graphs?

Social in gov with Robin Riley was great, watch it here, and find the materials here. My take-away: Digital teams should not (try to) squeeze into the role of a press team under a different label but should be facilitators of learning, conversation, deal with fears etc.

Mike (REDACTED) Bracken – I asked a question! In front of everyone!! Anyways I asked if the Gov Digital Service will be a resource, helping people build skills and lose fears. I should not call my social media skills ‘soft skills’ – too easily misunderstood.

I would like to work again please.

Lloyd Davis has some amazing abilities. Seriously, invite him for a conversation, you’ll see. He also eats raw broccoli for lunch.

Mary McKenna has a new scarf.

Puffles is great company. And his bestest friend is really quite clever and impressive.

Joining conversations that one normally wouldn’t can lead to unexpected results.

I should not compile this list while getting on the tube in the second day. (Ouch)

Day 2

Need to really try and do that project with wool in Norfolk. Always thought I should go to the south coast to feel at home and see the sea – wrong! Norfolk is closest to my home state. Would be great to spend some time there in the summer.

CARDIFF IS NOT COVENTRY. (Sorry, Nicky. I’m stupid.)

I *will* finally fulfil my dream of managing a rockstar. (that’s a secret though.)

I can bang my fist on the table and not remember it ten minutes later. (sorry Kate.)

Also, I can be knitting and still get really worked up. Imagine if I hadn’t been knitting. (the poor table.)

Hugs are still great.

Sitting in a room and having a conversation, when done right, can feel as profound as half an hour’s meditation – or more so. With knitting or without.

Social media for behavioral change. Now there’s a conundrum. For soooo many reasons.

It’s *still* nice to hear when somebody says I don’t look old enough to have a 13 year old son.

And finally: A North London brewcamp, getting locals to talk about social. I’ve been rubbish at doing real life community things since the Unlibrary ended. Feeling less bad about it, things break, and that’s normal.

In this way he gets to learn from people who are good at things and who would have the odd hour to spend with him – on [...]]]> So I’ve pretty much made the decision to educate J at home rather than sending him back to school. Trust me, not an easy decision at all.

In this way he gets to learn from people who are good at things and who would have the odd hour to spend with him – on skype, on wiziq.com which I’ve recently discovered, and maybe sometimes in person, while we’re still here in the big city. We have a great maths tutor already and another very clever friend who would have time to do a few hours of teaching per week. Now we just have to identify the subjects he will do, the levels he is at in these subjects and what level he would need to get to. Then we’d almost have a syllabus.

We’ve identified 14 tentative subjects he could do GCSEs in (the more tentative ones in italics):

English Language A
English Language B
Digital Communications
English Literature
Art and Design
Geography
Maths A
Maths B
Further Pure Mathematics
Science
Physics
Chemistry
Biology
Human Biology
Economics

And maybe, possibly German. I don’t know if he can do both double Science and phys, chem and bio separately. And yes there’s no ICT because the ICT teacher I spoke to yesterday told me the GCSE is all Microsoft Office. Who cares, he can just do an A-level, or nothing at all, and still go there if he wants to later on.

Wish list:

Advice please. What does he really need to work towards, and how do we build a curriculum? Should we buy school books, what online resources are there? Do you have a login to the edexcel site where we can download relevant pdfs for the above subjects?

Things he actually wants to learn. Programming languages and the like. Currently that’s HTML5. Do you know it? Pop round, I’ll cook dinner, and we go from there.

Are you a developer or programmer within a company J could make a study visit to?

I’m going to do what the wonderful Lloyd Davis, who is a good friend, has been doing and ask my [...]]]> If you’ve followed me online, you might know that I’m the mum of a 13 year old boy with Asperger’s syndrome who’s had a bit of a traumatic time lately (see previous post).

I’m going to do what the wonderful Lloyd Davis, who is a good friend, has been doing and ask my followers for ideas.

I’d like to take my son out of London for a while – anywhere from 3 weeks to 6 months. We would need somewhere to stay and something to do, and a little pay. My son likes to be online but if wherever we go doesn’t have regular internet access, that would be fine too. He’s been on holiday at my mum’s before who doesn’t have internet or TV and says that’s no problem, since there are so many other things going on.

Where would we stay? Anywhere, as long as we can meet locals and have adventures. I’m a maker so if it’s a culture where I can connect with local makers – knitters, weavers, spinners, etc – even better.

What would the returns be, apart from the fact that you’d be doing something nice? f there IS internet access – we would definitely be talking a lot about wherever we will be. Say you know somebody with a touristy project, I could do the social media set-up and training for them – I have a good history of doing this with very successful outcomes. My son is creative and writes too, has unfortunately deleted his first youtube account but had a lot of views on his first videos – together we take pictures, run blogs, have good networks on twitter and facebook.

I’d be very grateful for any ideas.

Then, in Jan 2001, we moved to the UK – to Reading. In the nursery here, he showed the first signs of being ‘trouble’. After [...]]]> My son was born in Sweden in April 1998. He went to nursery from the age of 15 months, and as far as I know, he was absolutely fine there.

Then, in Jan 2001, we moved to the UK – to Reading. In the nursery here, he showed the first signs of being ‘trouble’. After a few months they showed me an A4 printout of a document with advice for staff members on how to deal with my son – I wish I had kept it. It was basically: When he is upset, get down to his level, speak with a calm voice, don’t talk down at him, cause that will make him more upset. Wasn’t that how they were supposed to treat all children? I put it down to inexperienced staff. Also, it was obvious to me that I did not understand the culture.

Then he started primary school, and the problems really started. He was usually ok if he had an able, experienced teacher – there was a shock when his beloved class teacher had cancer and passed away, he still talks about that now. From that moment on he had a series of substitutes. One Mrs Flower gave him the ‘if you write to the end of the line, I will give you a cookie!’ treatment, that was one of the few times he got violent, and excluded for a day. It was the old pattern of him responding to being patronised with tantrums, and easy to again put down to untrained staff. And me not understanding how things are supposed to work here.

Seeing that he loved to draw mazes from about the age of four – intricate, A3 sized, actual workable mazes – they used that as a carrot as well – do what we tell you to, and we let you draw a maze – and that of course killed it.

The move to secondary school was the most difficult. But one good thing in the school he started in was that the Special Needs Coordinator at least knew how to make the right arrangements for him to finally get diagnosed.

So in May 2010 we finally had a diagnosis. A few month earlier we had realised for ourselves that he very likely had Aspergers – the big breakthrough happened when we found a forum on WrongPlanet.net called ‘you might be an Aspie if…’. We read through it, and he recognised himself. This was cool and he could immediately see that there were many Aspies around that are highly able and very good people. Aspie forums have less bullying and other madness than NT forums. He has a huge amount of good qualities and I think he knows it. He’s never labelled himself publicly like others though. He is active on a lot of online forums but didn’t finally join wrongplanet.net.

At the time of the diagnosis, I was told about DLA and immediately applied, using the services of a charity called Haringey Autism to help me fill in the forms. My claim was rejected twice, and since all other benefits are tied to DLA, I am not getting any financial help apart from housing and child benefit plus Working Families Tax Credit.

In January 2010, Jonatan’s father, who he was spending a lot of time with at the time, was diagnosed with leukemia. For a while we went and spent time in hospitals, visiting – but seeing his father get so close to death several times was far too upsetting and Jonatan made the decision not to continue doing this. After the first chemo, Jonatan’s dad first recovered, but the disease came back around Christmas last year, so he had another round of chemo and a bone marrow transplant. He is still around but is not well at all.

School didn’t became easier, even though they made an effort to give Jonatan help. One thing is that it’s a big school and puts a lot of pressure on children to be socially aware and able. The staff changes a lot (the school has spent 3 times as much as other Haringey schools on substitute teachers), which of course makes actual learning impossible for an Aspie, even though he’s academically able.

He gets to leave class but then he gets to go to a Learning Support Centre for the children with SEN, who are usually disruptive. So a few months ago, he got his own room and computer that’s always accessible to him – I’m not there, but the feedback I got was that he managed to calm down another aspie mid-meltdown. That was nice, but doesn’t sound like a very calm environment to me.

He’s not been statemented as I am not sure having an untrained member of support staff on his side would be of any practical use whatsoever.

In fact, he doesn’t have anyone around him that actually knows anything about Aspergers. The support staff have neither teaching nor any other relevant qualifications. The head of year was very much involved until the end of the last school year – he is now much busier actually teaching and is not available to me, or to Jonatan anymore.

Then, on the final day of the last school year, on the way home from school, Jonatan was physically attacked and hurt. Severe bruising on his eye socket and jaw, his nose might have been broken, his glasses were lost. Since then, he wouldn’t go outside in the summer, even now he doesn’t go outside without me – unless it’s to school, and he hardly goes there. His anxiety levels are through the roof and he’s only gone to school one day a week for the past 3 weeks. He’s physically ill from the pressure.

He recently opened up to school staff about ‘losing the will to live’ which has caused shock waves.  When he thought he was doing the right thing, and tried to get better at communicating, as a result got he himself excluded for two days. He felt hugely disappointed and shocked at having what he said to one staff member mailed around the school including the head teacher and misquoted back to him, because he had mentioned suicide.

He is under a lot of pressure to get back to normal, but I’m less and less inclined to think that that’s even reasonable. So I’m trying to find ways of support open to us.

Thanks to everyone who has tweeted ideas already – I will follow up on some of those today. And of course re-apply for DLA (those forms can really make you want to give up, I tell you.)

I’m one of these people who have strong opinions. I write them down and am not afraid of starting a discussion. But – there is always an inherent flaw in not [...]]]> There’s a lot I’ve written that I’m now looking at with a new eye. A lot of it I’m not so sure about anymore.

I’m one of these people who have strong opinions. I write them down and am not afraid of starting a discussion. But – there is always an inherent flaw in not knowing the whole story. Things I’ve written that were based on guesswork are now making me cringe in a big way. And when do we ever know the whole story? How much need is there for us to trust that there is sufficient experience and skill that we sometimes shouldn’t criticize others’ way of doing things? Maybe there even is a point to SEO and affiliate marketing? It makes me shudder even saying this – but then I’ve been looking for work in my field and people wouldn’t throw ‘social media’ in with ‘SEO’ and ‘affiliate’ if there wasn’t a point to it, would they?

Anyways. I’ve cleared out all my old writings. I will probably make them available in some sort of archive. I know it’s good to be sure of yourself, and the more conviction you put into your broadcasts, the more people will listen and follow you. I don’t know if I have anything that interesting to say anymore. I’ll hopefully come up with something to write about that I don’t have to delete the next month. And I hope it’s not all going to be about how social media has changed my life. (Well – it has, ok?)

In the meantime, I’m still looking for work in Berlin. My skills are soft ones and often companies are looking for interns and students to take care of their online voices and communities (remind you of anything?) A wild dream of mine is to go to Rostock and study there for a bit – the university is to die for -, and maybe approach the whole social media thing from an academic point, so people will listen to me when I tell them to not leave it up to others and throw it in with SEO and affiliate marketing (there, I’m pontificating again.)

In any case, I need to make the move, even though it scares me – in fact, it’s for the first time in my life that any move properly scares me. It’s scarier than moving to Nigeria. I guess – once you’ve moved home after over 20 years abroad, there is no more sentimentality, no more homesickness, no more nostalgia. This is it. And it *will* disappoint me.

But at least the air quality should be better.

On Wikipedia you will find that he was one of the great poets we had in Germany. In fact, he and Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, the founding fathers of Weimar Classicism, are considered our national poets. They were both part [...]]]> Friedrich Schiller is one of the great loves of my life.

On Wikipedia you will find that he was one of the great poets we had in Germany. In fact, he and Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, the founding fathers of Weimar Classicism, are considered our national poets. They were both part of the bunch of great minds that were brought to Weimar by my great heroine, the duchess Anna Amalia, I think you would call her ‘a great patron of the arts’. The library she had designed for her and filled with beautiful books is still one of the most amazing places to visit in Germany – it was damaged by fire a couple of years ago, but there was a wave of support that helped restore it.

Goethe and Schiller, even though there were great friends, were very different. Goethe was older and fully aligned with the establishment. Schiller was younger and started a whole literary genre – ‘Sturm und Drang’, which I have no idea how to translate into English. Very Rock’n'roll.

My mum took us on holidays to Weimar where you can walk around all their houses, including the summer house in the park where Goethe wrote part of Faust etc… you can see Schillers house, and a lock of his hair… and of course the palace where Anna Amalia held her literary salons which were the cause of so much cross-pollination between those great minds. I was young and impressionable and that has really never left me. (I had a poster of his desk on my wall as a girl. I know… others have boy bands…)

‘Kabale und Liebe’, which in its literal translation is ‘Intrigue and Love’, but is usually shown outside of Germany under its older name of Luise Miller (here’s the link to the production at the Donmar Warehouse), was the first Schiller play I saw. I must have been 13 and I loved it – here it is often compared to Romeo and Juliet, but we meet the to main characters at a point where their love is already established and they both already know it’s doomed. Add some stereotypical politicians and a mistress who finds out where the money that pays for her jewellery comes from (i.e. young men being sold into a mercenary army by her lover, the duke) – it’s got everything plus, it makes you think a little.

Schiller was very, very idealistic (probably helped by the fact he never got old – he died at the age of 34 Or so I thought, Wikipedia says 45?) These were the days of the French revolution going awry and the rest of Europe, and especially Germany, watching it with trepidation. Apart from his plays and poems he also wrote a volume of letters about how people get good ideas and have good lives by just consuming good art. Revolutionary, no?

All my projects have revolved around providing social media advice and training with the objective of empowering the client to [...]]]> It’s Social Media Week London, and I’m booked on a panel discussion on Monday, pitting me as ‘the Social Media Purist’ against specialists from PR, SEO, Social Technology and Digital Marketing backgrounds.

All my projects have revolved around providing social media advice and training with the objective of empowering the client to handle their own voice online.

I believe that Social Media done properly, a human voice talking online about what the organisation does, engaging online and using social streams on the company’s web presences, ticks all the boxes.

So what would I recommend as the ‘right’ way to do Social Media?

I’ve seen organisations where the person being asked to make decisions on Social Media will happily profess to having no idea about social media. So why not begin by investing in the management team, helping them develop their online literacy? (Tweets from my current Speak For Yourself online engagement course are on the right – it’s geared toward creating a safe environment, teaching a group in short bursts of face-to face involvement, guiding them towards collaboratively developing a new literacy in the time between the lessons, in which they get to immerse themselves in using the tools).

While the decision-makers are developing their own understanding, invite good social media advisors to develop a silo-busting model of using social media with a focus on your customers. For example, if you’re a travel company, make sure you have a plan B so that operations teams have the skills and access to update your customers in cases of emergencies (otherwise you end up like Eurostar, having your Twitter account churning out special offers while people are stuck in your trains for hours.)

I would go even further and argue that a social media presence for any company develops a following on the basis of this feed potentially being used in emergencies, or when things don’t go as planned; and companies owe it to their customers to make it useful. This is not going to happen if your PR agency handles it, or if it posts updates based on what search words are optimal for getting website hits. However, making it useful is certainly not going to hurt your numbers.

Customers who are putting up with the ‘marketing chit chat’ on the basis of the company ‘getting’ the useful side of social media will feel cheated if the company doesn’t. Invest in an organisational model of using social media that’s geared to not just getting business, but also serving the people who are paying you right now. And for this model, developing in-house capacity, and decision maker literacy is crucial.

In organisations of any size, it’s very likely that, in the long term, you will have a number of social media feeds from various departments, not only documenting their work to the outside, but also help them to work together. I would suggest that the resources used in 1. stopping employees from using social media and 2. using an external agency to speak for your organisation could be better placed in developing that capacity now.

Tomorrow will be the start of a pilot 6 session Social Media course over 7 weeks, where face-to-face sessions are limited to an hour per week, and learning happens [...]]]> Sharing Social Media skills, either in open mornings, through consulting, coaching or structured courses, was one of the main intentions when setting up the Unlibrary.

Tomorrow will be the start of a pilot 6 session Social Media course over 7 weeks, where face-to-face sessions are limited to an hour per week, and learning happens in a collaborative on/offline environment.

This course is an experiment in how we can achieve an intense learning experience using only open-source collaborative and social tools.

Find the full lesson outline and follow the course progress using the hashtag #sfy1 – that’s the new widget in the column on the right.