The rules of civility and decent behaviour in social media. AKA what would George Washington do?

Recently a dear friend suggested I read The Rules of Civility by Amor Towles. Set in the late 1930s in NYC, it’s a seductive and a mesmerising read for fans of old Big Apple glamour and the influence of chance encounters on our lives.

The book’s title is inspired by George Washington’s Rules of Civility and Decent Behaviour in Company and Conversation. Towles imagined these ‘rules’ were most likely studied by Tinker, one of the book’s ambitious main characters, so he included them at the end of his work.

Washington’s rules cover everything from how you should conduct yourself in public (don’t kill fleas, lice and ticks in the sight of others) to how you should dress (in your apparel be modest), eat (drink not nor talk with your mouth full) and how you should engage with others (think before you speak).

The rules led me to think about the intense scrutiny of social media platforms right now. We’re reading about fake accounts, bots, and buying followers online. Fake YouTube views. Social media users worn out by angry, disrespectful online interactions about politics. Social media platforms hitting rock-bottom in rankings of people’s favourite brands. And recently social media executives were again in the spotlight at congressional hearings on online election interference, talking about the steps they are taking to clean up and secure their services.

Stir all this together and it’s no wonder we’re asking ourselves whether social media has had its time in the sun. Is it still useful? Should we engage? Should we close down our accounts?

There’s still plenty of value in social media engagement, but it’s up to us to behave like decent, empathetic human beings in the process.

Little did George Washington know that when he penned his rules, he was writing the guidelines for civilised behaviour in social media. Here’s my take of a selection of his rules to guide your thinking about the insights you want to share, finding your voice and nailing what you want to be known for in the social world.

Your insights 

Undertake not to teach your equal in the art himself professes; it savors of arrogance. You’ll have your insights and experiences to share in social and so will others. If you haven’t been in someone else’s shoes, then don’t try and tell them they’re wrong. Demonstrate respect for the learning and expertise of others.

Go not thither, where you know not, whether you shall be welcome or not. Give not advice without being asked and when desired do it briefly. Consider the value of the insights you share. If you don’t know anything about a subject, then avoid adding noise to the Twittersphere. If you’re asked for your opinion and have an informed view, then share your knowledge and be crisp and concise.

 Your voice

Be not forward but friendly and courteous; the first to salute hear and answer and be not pensive when it’s a time to converse. When you share your work, be prepared to have a conversation about it. Social media is not a one-way street – engage with those who are interested in your insights. There’s nothing more depressing for someone asking a question to hear nothing but crickets.

Being to advise or reprehend any one, consider whether it ought to be in public or in private; presently, or at some other time in what terms to do it and in reproving show no sign of choler but do it with all sweetness and mildness. Showing no choler is an old-school way of saying don’t be angry or irritable in your interactions. Playing the blame game and getting angry in social media doesn’t help you. If you have an issue with a post someone’s targeted at you, consider whether social is the right place to respond. If it is, then deal with the substance of the post in a calm way.

Your brand

Associate yourself with men of good quality if you esteem your own reputation for ‘is better to be alone than in bad company. To me, men (and women) of good quality are those people with whom I can have a respectful banter about subject matter we’re interested in. Focus your energy on sharing what you know with those who may benefit from your learning and experience. Don’t sweat the trolls trying to drag you down. Leave them be.

Labor to keep alive in your breast that little spark of celestial fire called conscience. Of all the rules, when it comes to thinking about your brand and reputation in social, I think Washington nailed it with this one. Show up regularly, be open and have empathy for others. Then you’ll be well on the road to building a great reputation based on engaging in social with integrity.

If you haven’t had the pleasure of reading Washington’s rules, do so. They’re informative and fun. In the meantime, before you send an angry tweet or spam your network, take a deep breath and ask yourself: what would George Washington do? If we take a leaf out of his rule book, we can lift the tone of conversations and behaviour in social media, but it starts with us.

Make good technology choices. But put people first in the digital workplace

I was catching up with some Twitter buddies at Digital Workplace Experience 2018 in Chicago early last week when I was grabbed to go and record a video on my thoughts about the conference.

Besides the conference hosting a great group of digital workplace experts in one place, the thing I loved most was the overwhelming focus on people and change. Not technology.

Yet shiny new tools are difficult to resist and there are more of them every day. For example, the social business application market alone is expected to grow to be a $37 billion industry by next year, according to tech analyst firm 451 Research. Just like an all-you-can-eat dessert bar, tech vendors are tempting us with the alluring promise we’ll enjoy eating their sweet treats. Without thinking, we rush in for the sugar fix. Feels good in the short term, but how do we feel about our choice later?

Just like an all-you-can-eat dessert bar, tech vendors are tempting us with the alluring promise we’ll enjoy eating their sweet treats.

The irony of the march into the digital age is the further we go, the more we realise being ‘digital’ isn’t about teaching people how to use tools. Instead, the main game is helping people get into the right headspace to want to try new ways of working.

Why does this make sense? Because traditional adoption methods focused on technology won’t work to rally people around digital tools in a modern workplace. As digital workplace futurist Dion Hinchcliffe pointed out at #DWX18: “Adoption of new technology is not automatic, because participation in the digital workplace is optional.”

People choose whether they want to come along for the ride in the digital workplace. So, we need to focus on people and provide them with clear value in order to have them try something new. 

Catastrophe hit earlier this week when Slack, the messaging platform went down. The tweets about the outage were hilarious, but the undercurrent serious. Slack users had embedded the chat tool so deeply into the flow of their day that suddenly life was a disaster without it. Apparently.

There were loads of vendors at #DWX18 and I talked to many of them about their tools and how they were convincing customers of their business value.

Between the content of the conference and the insights from vendors, it’s clear we need to have better conversations about digital workplace tools that are centred on people and enabling real work.

We need to have better conversations about digital workplace tools that are centred on people and enabling real work.

The problem with starting the conversation from a ‘tool first’ perspective is we end up focusing on checklists of functional features, rather than working to a clear and compelling business purpose.

As Tony Byrne and Jarrod Gingras point out in The Right Way to Select Technology, “If you don’t have a solid business rationale for what you’re doing, you will never achieve business value”.

No one will use digital workplace tools if they don’t understand why they should or how the tools will add value. Worse still, an ill-prepared workforce will try new tools and then blame them when value isn’t delivered. Vendors may run a real risk of becoming the nearest throat to choke.

No one will use digital workplace tools if they don’t understand why they should or how the tools will add value.

Here’s a way for us to think about this:

• Start with people. Get in their heads to understand their personal fears or the excitement of trying a new way of working. Could they be champions for you, or are they resistors? How will you address their concerns or harness their enthusiasm?

• Identify a compelling purpose. Help different audience groups appreciate how a new tool will enable their specific type of work. Address the What’s In It For Me to make it meaningful. Create a link to real goals and work to be done.

• Explain how people can get into different ways of working. Focus on behaviour. With enterprise social, for example, explain what it means to listen and contribute value. Simply asking people to do those things doesn’t mean they’ll know how.

• Tools next. A balance of functional training and building digital capability is essential. Build confidence by helping users make the most of new tools. Jump straight to this step and skip over people’s concerns and a clear purpose at your peril.

• Better business outcomes. When people are clear about the purpose of a new tool and feel confident in using it to get real work done, you’ll achieve meaningful adoption.

Of course, rallying people around new technology may happen in an organisation where leadership may not be engaged or where a culture is not ready to take the plunge. We should take more interest in organisational preparedness to welcome change, so we don’t waste time spinning our wheels and ensure the success of new digital technology deployments.

Making good technology choices is important, but is only part of the success equation. For new digital technology to stick, put people at the centre of the action. Solve a problem for them and then you really are giving them something they’ll value.

Why we eat broccoli and how to avoid enterprise social indigestion

Communication professionals are helpful and herein lies the controversy when we start to look at how we help people work in the digital age.

Communicators have been used to giving our people the good stuff - the sweet stuff! - and often building bad dietary habits from a communications point of view. For example, we enjoy helping our leaders communicate messages to their people. However, in the digital age, with social technologies now available to us, it’s time for us to coach people in how to do some of these things for themselves.

We have to let go of the temptation of helping leaders, in particular, in organisations to deliver their messages for them and we need to teach these people how to fish.

The reason I'm including broccoli in my presentation for #EuroComm18 is because it took an awfully long time for my children to learn to eat broccoli. How did they learn? It was put in front of them many, many times and the dietary benefits of it explained. After a little while, eating it became habitual.

This is the landscape we face in communications when it comes to the use of social technologies in our organisations. We have to help people build good habits in the digital age. As communicators, we must stop feeding people ice cream and doing everything for them. We must help them learn to eat broccoli by helping them work out loud and share what they know in social channels. 

When used properly and purposefully, enterprise social technologies are real levers in helping businesses get things done. It’s time for communicators to think more broadly about their role in that.

These are all things that don’t happen naturally, as much as we would like to think we hand over the technology and miracles start to occur. Unfortunately, that's not the case, even in the digital age.

It's time for us to stop looking an enterprise social tools solely as communication tools.

Enterprise social is about far more than just communicating messages. When used properly and purposefully, enterprise social technologies are real levers in helping businesses get things done. It’s time for communicators to think more broadly about their role in that.

So you might be a communications professional, however, if your goal is to help your organisation achieve its big goals and objectives and live its purpose, then it’s time to step into a different pair of shoes.

This means having serious business conversations with people around the organisation to step beyond the boundaries of 'doing comms' and help organisations and their people discover the broader business benefits of using social technologies to get real work done. To crowdsource ideas. To uncover pain points that customers might be having with products. To generate new ideas. This is where enterprise social technologies come into their own. They can help us to be a lot more productive, but we must stop looking at these tools simply as communication vehicles. 

Social technologies can be way more than that and communicators are in the box seat to grab that mantle and run with it.

This is an edited version of my conversation with IABC EMENA Chair, Alex Malouf, recorded for my #EuroComm18 podcast.

Don’t be a passenger. Get in the driver’s seat with social

My first car was a 1986 first generation Hyundai Excel. It was blue, with a clunky gear box and a 70-horsepower, 1.5-litre motor. It could go from zero to 100kph in around 13 seconds (my best guess).

Yes, it was an underdog in the motoring world, but I loved it. The first time I jumped into my car as a licensed driver, I was excited and I imagined all the road trips I'd go on with my mates in the future.

Having wheels gave me an incredible sense of independence and control. No longer a passenger at the mercy of public transport or my exceedingly chatty chauffeur (my dad), I was in the driver’s seat and in charge of the car.

Managing your social media is just like being in a car. If you stay in the passenger seat, you’re at the mercy of the driver. The only way to truly stay in control and manage your impact and influence in social is to jump in the driver’s seat.

The only way to truly stay in control and manage your impact and influence in social is to jump in the driver’s seat.

 I’ve written about the importance of being social before.  In particular, I believe women need to get over the self-talk that making themselves visible is not a ‘nice’ thing to do. Let’s park that for now (sorry – bad pun).

The key to not feeling overwhelmed by social media is to engage in it thoughtfully. Here’s a model I like to use when I’m helping clients learn how to get in the driver’s seat and take control of their social media engagement.

My insights. Think about what it is you want to share and why. What subject matter are you an expert in? What are you trying to achieve? Remember, using social in a purposeful way can be about your work agenda or something personal.

My voice. How will you share what you know and create value for your followers? Finding your voice is about identifying where your audience is and the right channels to engage in generous, open conversations about your subject matter.

My brand. Think about how you want to be perceived. Even before someone meets you, your social media footprint will tell a story about who you are and what you stand for. Consistency is key. Keep this in mind when you’re working out what you’ll share on social and how you’ll do it.

Working out what you want to share, how you’ll create value and how you want others to perceive you will give you the beginnings of a roadmap in how to navigate social.  

The most important step of all in social, however, is to stop being a passenger and jump into the driver’s seat.

Plan the trip, invite your community along for the ride and then get behind the wheel and drive. When it comes to being social, the journey is just as much fun as arriving at your destination.