The one thing about social media, with Peter Casier
Oct 27th, 2011 | By Simone Staiger | Category: Knowledge Management
Peter Casier, the "social media agitator"
Peter’s visit at CIAT was timely. We were eager to make progress on the social media front. More than 80 participants participated in different hands-on sessions and seminars during three days.
2 years have passed since Enrica Porcari came with Peter Ballantyne (now at ILRI) to participate in CIAT’s annual meeting 2009. With their help we did presentations on social media, and Triple A, and, more importantly, we started for the first time to use blogs, video, Flickr and slideshare in an integrated manner. This initial effort led the then new incoming DG Ruben Echeverria to sign a blog post that set the stage for our future work in knowledge management.
Since then we have probably taken “some steps forward” but also stagnated in some other areas. CIAT’s News blog is becoming better every day with highest quality stories and pictures, thanks to Neil Palmer and Nathan Russell. The News blog in Spanish is finding its own identity with stories relevant for a Spanish speaking audience in LAC. The DAPA blog is making progress in terms of number of blogs, number of bloggers, and cool content. The Capacity blog is consistent in its effort to document the initiative’s interventions and projects.
But where do we go from here? Three ideas have been discussed with our colleagues from the Communications unit. They are mentioned here, much more will follow on each of those.
- Develop a new Web site, based on social media and dynamic content: CIAT Communications and Capacity team are making progress in the concept and tools that we want to use. More on that soon.
- Get CIAT Programs to participate: We have already two new prospects for blogs. Capacity will continue its training efforts and offers mentoring and support for newcomers.
- Continue our work on Triple A: Enrica Porcari’s presentation was a good reminder of the key issues. We have to follow up and set some indicators to follow regularly.
At the end of his visit I asked Peter a set of questions:
What is the one big mistake related to blogging? Underestimate the effort it takes to get good content and to write it up. Scientists usually don’t write blogs, probably because they underestimate the value and the potential of social media. It’s a pity because there are stories under each table and chair! Another big and related mistake is that people, when they start on social media and blogs, they concentrate more on the design than on the content.
What is the one thing that you need to start with in social media? Define clearly what you try to achieve. Don’t shoot into the wild. Don’t let it become a goal in itself. It’s ok to learn by doing, specifically when it’s a project activity, but when it comes to the institutional part of the web presence, it should be well targeted and planned.
Share one secret of community building? The power is the network, just like the Fax number lists for Marketing people in the past. However, to build a community you need to be social in your media: Interact, retweet, engage in discussions, ask questions. Too many people and organizations use social media as a broadcast mechanism… people are shy but you only gain momentum if you do more than broadcasting. This is relatively easy and quick with Facebook and Twitter for example. It takes more time with blogging.
What is one thing that surprised you after spending 3 days at CIAT? CIAT is probably in the top5 of the CG centers using social media well. Once I got into CIAT, I saw how much potential there is to do more. There is a lot of virgin territory on the one hand and some projects that were active in the past and need to be reactivated.
What is the one piece of advice for CIAT’s future Web strategy? CIAT has to put it all together. Today the approach to CIAT’s Web presence is fragmented. It has to be a concerted effort. The blogs must be made much more visible. CIAT needs one large, active and dynamic entry point.
… and for the Capacity blog? The blog stands by itself with little propagation, i.e. through CIAT’s Twitter account. I think you could also link it closer to the content of CIAT’s work, specifically the role of capacity strengthening and knowledge management at CIAT and within CIAT’s projects and programs.
… and for the CGIAR community? There should be much more networking going on among CG centers. Is there a real interest in what is going on in other centers? I do observe a change in the trends, i.e. there are more retweets among centers, but still, much needs to be done.
Thank you Peter for a great energizing week at CIAT and thanks to the participants who made this happen.
Read also: Ideas to take away from the CGIAR communications and knowledge managers meeting and more on social media in this blog
Have a look at Peter Casier’s Blog tips blog
lesson 1: introduce dynamics in static research websites…
lesson 2: get the most out of twitter, facebook etc
challenge: formulate a strategy based on cost-efficiency and maximizing impact
In addition to the other lessons and insights mentioned in Simone’s interview with Peter Casier, I got from his visit a glimmer of the hard work involved in using social media to build networks of people who can help make the connection between useful content and ever-widening audiences.
In retrospect, I might add “one thing”, to Simone’s “one thing-list”:
“What is your biggest surprise related to social media”…
Then my answer would be two fold:
It always surprises me how many people are interested in the “stories” we have to tell. And we always underestimate our own work, and the amount of people who are interested in our work. Every story is worth telling. Even if it is our daily work, which we often see as “booooring”: another day in the lab, another day of field work, another day of sampling seeds,…. People *are* interested…
And on the other hand, I am always surprised how many people we can reach with our social media networks, how fast it can spread and how far it can reach. – - Of course we all know about the funny YouTube videos that spread virally. Sharing our daily work, can spread just as far. Maybe not reaching millions of people, but certainly going much further than any other media…
Good luck to you all, and thanks again to Simone and Nathan for the support!
Peter
Dear Simone… thanks for sharing this excellent write-up of the continuing (never-ending?) communications and knowledge sharing story at CIAT! Congrats to all the comms/capacity/info/knowledge teams!
One point I worry about : “CIAT needs one large, active and dynamic entry point” .. I fully agree with the need for integration and paying attention to overall ‘architecture’ of knowledge, information communications. In the context of social media, I don’t see the value of “one, large” entry point for the type of work we do. It seems totally contradictory.
The massive opportunity – and challenge – that I see with social media is that there are so many entry points!
It is no longer possible for ILRI or CIAT – or anyone else probably – to even think about having ‘a’ single comprehensive space for all people, for all uses … The ‘social’ web is about people building their own ‘entry points’ to knowledge,it is not about organizations like us building entry points ‘for’ them: We can certainly help in these processes however – as Google – a very large entry point – for example is helping us.
The biggest change I see is that we each need to create our own personal, group, team, and other social comms environments … which is perhaps the ultimate challenge, getting each of our colleagues and ourselves to manage our personal spaces in a smart way (beyond email and beyond web site ‘visiting’).
As corporate people we need to make sure that ‘we’ (all the organization) can easily and effectively ‘be’ in, and be engaging and interacting in, as many of those other people’s spaces. As good citizens and neighbours, we can help and guide people by creating some order and structure to what we ourselves do and produce, and even support some spaces for us and others to use – but let’s not delude ourselves that we are providing ‘the’ entry point! People are diverse, thankfully, and our web strategies need to be diverse.
Our centers used to have (still have?) ‘central’ comms and knowledge teams to manage all of this, the trend I see is for many (all?) staff to ultimately be explicitly communicating in whichever spaces best suit them and their messages. I want lots of people sharing and communicating. I don’t want to control all of this and channel it though ‘an’ entry point. I can try to influence which tools they might use and where they might choose to interact, but ultimately, and especially as colleagues get more smart and savvy communicators, all I will be able to do is try to cleverly ‘harvest’ their efforts and hope they use the open tools, principles and standards that I advocate and which I think will make my, and their, lives much more easy.
A long time ago I argued to the KM4Dev community that websites (in the development sector) need to be ‘jumpy’ – not ‘sticky’. Our business is totally unlike a private company – which wants us ‘stuck’ in their web sites while they empty our wallets and plant cookies. I still think that helping people ‘jump’ off our sites and services – to better places – is something we need to do; and for which social media can help. Trying to get everything – and everyone – into one entry point, I think, is to miss the point completely!
Peter,
I fully agree with you, and something I am similarly passionate about. Maybe the sentence “CIAT needs one large, active and dynamic entry point” needed some more explanation.
Once upon a time, I worked for a large humanitarian organisation. Some projects (one of which was mine) started their own blog. In a minimum of time, we built an active community around the blog. It was playful, entertaining, informative, highly active and… soon became a thorn in the eye of the “corporate” media team. The blog was forcefully folded into the “corporate” website, buried in hundreds of other pages. We lost our identity, our community, and lost our eagerness to blog. What once was a blog, became a set of corporate web site “pages”.
That is not the way to go… The right approach, in my view, is the approach ILRI took, which is also the approach CIAT is taking: let the blogs bloom. Let each social network bloom. But also have one place where all those outlets are aggregated, as a single place where all content (preferably in “excerpts”) can be found. This way the social networks can spill over from one social network to the other, and grow mutually. Otherwise, all individual blogs, remain individual efforts, isolated from one another…
So we’re on the same page!
Speaking as a private consumer of some CG outputs, I agree that a single entry page might not make much sense, even if it is only excerpts that feed elsewhere. To me, it would seem a lot like what I currently loathe about people and organizations who do use social media more to broadcast than to engage, which is the endless repetition of the same thing both within a single channel and across channels, often by “virtue” of automated sync systems. It is easy enough to plough through and ignore them, but it irks me having to do so. I would far rather see people tailor their broadcast messages to the channels through which they are broadcasting.
As Peter says, re blogging, it takes more time that way, but the end product is better for it.
Thanks for the post and discussion.
Hi Peter, thanks for your comment. Don’t get angry;-) the way we discussed at CIAT was the exact way you express it, but highlighting that we would like the homepage to be able to feed in whatever we decide to showcase, form the mutliple sources. Perhaps our unpatience to use aggregators easily on the web site made us insist on the “entry point”.
I like Peter B.’s analogy of sticking and jumping
and i agree wholeheartedly that in our blogs and sites we have to concentrate not only on how to keep people reading us, but show them where to go for more good stuff…
From the Peter C.’s sessions that i attended, i liked the real- life examples, the very practical tips and his friendliness delivering them.
I now hope we can find ways to go more in depth into issues for the people who can potentially write blogposts in one of the already established blogs we have in CIAT, but who, as Peter C. says in comment here, underestimate how interesting what they have to say is. While not everyone needs to learn to run a blog, i think everybody, and i mean everybody! in our center has something interesting to say about their work and should be encouraged to share.