Where your tweets go to die…

So, rapper/actor Heavy D who mostly achieved prominence in the 90s died today suddenly. My twitter feed is being inundated sporadically with necrotweets from his feed while he was still living. I’m not sure this bothers me, it’s cathartic for folks. But it illustrates the differences with grieving in an era where we’re all connected. We saw it with Steve Jobs too, but he was such a larger-than-life figure that I think that sort of response would’ve been the same if we weren’t in such a “connected” world.

It made me think about my own social presence. What do you want to happen to your accounts when you’re no longer around? There have been startups who’ve offered to take care of those issues for you, but for those of us around now…is your Facebook page the most important possession you’ll care about? Probably not. It’ll come and go like most things. One way that transparency online does help in an instance like this, is it provides people a real glimpse into your actual thinking. So it makes it easier to know where someone stands on a topic if they’re putting it out there.

I recall a guy who had a strong internet presence within a niche community, who died suddenly. His friends paid to maintain his web hosting for years and at some point, several years after decided to stop doing so. At what point does the connection extinguish? When is enough time for digital mourning? For those close, probably never. I write this because I ponder it in my own life. It’d just as well prefer to see everything deleted, rather than turning over passwords. Not because there’s anything especially secret, I’m just not sure there’s anything — journals, commentary or such — that’s really necessary to left at this point.

I can see that changing, but it’s a topic that I’m not entirely sure I’ve grasped. What say you?

Setting the social media agenda where one doesn’t exist

Last week, I was having dinner with some friends who were discussing their frustration with being in organizations where it felt as though there was no true agenda in regards to their web presence. While these folks are quite good at what they do, neither of them felt particularly strategic in their thinking and it wasn’t part of the job they felt they were taking. I told them they needed to reconsider that the thought that their only job was execution, but rather, being an asset required taking a more strategic view of things.

The conversation fired me up enough, that I had to put on my teaching strategist hat in-between bites of gluten free pizza.

Here were some of the takeaways:

1. You need to be the subject matter expert: Maybe you feel as though you’re good at specific things and feel out of your realm when it comes to trying to provide a senior leader direction on a topic. That’s understandable. But the reason you’re there is often to be the “young, fresh mind” offering up key insights and information that will help the organization move forward in its marketing digitally. In the case of these two folks, they’re working for non-profits with limited budgets, but that’s not a unique thing. Which leads me to…

2. See what others are doing well: There are so many resources online that you can spend entire days — to your peril — researching discovering and voraciously reading the pros, cons and so forth of what other people on doing online. The bottom line here is you can find people in your field and around it, doing things that can be of benefit to your organization. It doesn’t mean doing the same things, it means figuring out what’s working and what doesn’t, so you can provide a value-added benefit to the organization.

3. Assess your goals by listening and asking questions: For my shy friends who flourish designing, this one seemed the hardest. “What if I say something stupid? I mean, what if they ignore what I have to say?” Understandable fears, but you never know until you try. And the tactics involved in converting people to a new way of thinking often require showing rather than telling. It can be tempting to want to inundate folks with the bevy of new things that may or may not help. (And don’t get me started on the calls from consultants offering to change your life with this product or that one…) But it’s your responsibility to curate the best ideas, implement what you can within your responsibility and be able to show how it’s helping.

4. What’s the punchline?: Often times, it just boils down to giving someone the punchline. In organizations where people are wearing lots of hats, with leadership who might be set in a different way of doing things (read: older), it might be challenging to convince them to really propel forward with bold new innovations for fear they won’t work as well as conventional methods. That’s where it’s your responsibility to track, measure and evaluate what’s working and what doesn’t. Make sure that everything you’re doing can be tied by to goals that you established, so there’s no confusion about what time is being spent on.

Time will tell whether this recommendations from this spirited discussion — ok, spirited from my end — will necessarily help, but they’re both reported feeling more confident since our little impromptu lesson.