Before TV, We Communicated; Social Media is Such an Opportunity Now

Posted on October 12, 2009
Filed Under Communication principles | 3 Comments

I went to a seminar on social media today and both enjoyed and bemoaned it – enjoyed it because I got reaffirmation of what social media is about, bemoaned it because the presenter didn’t make that clear enough. It’s about a change in life and listening style.

Social media is about attempting to recreate the wonderful lives we had before television. That is, the way we interacted with friends and neighbors in the suburb I grew up in on Long Island, N.Y., N.Y., before television arrived in the early ’50s.

Before TV, and this, admittedly, was largely during Word War II, the big events, the memorable events in our neighborhood, were when the neighbors got together – and my parents and their neighborhood friends did that without much prompting. They planted Victory Gardens in the vacant lots behind our homes (since built-up), or they organized block parties, when they were empowered to put up sawhorses at the ends of our street and enjoy a keg of beer and pretzels without a permit from the city. Those are wonderful memories, and they were wonderful experiences, but they aren’t any longer possible in most places.

When television came, we all went into our living rooms, stayed there, and you could see the glow from each front window. Howdy Doody, Ed Sulivan, Ted Mack, the ball games, whatever. We all had to have “a set,” and when we got TV, we stayed in front of it – black and white and, then – color! One-way communication from the networks became the rule. My folks no longer went to the taproom on Hillside Avenue to be with their friends, nor did they crack a keg on 86th Avenue, our home street, any longer.

Then I went away to college and quit brooding about it. But my folks stayed in front of the TV, and, I’m convinced, had shorter, less pleasurable lives because of it.

Now I see people trying to recreate that former sort of community in a new manner on social media – on Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn and others, without realizing, probably that that’s what they’re doing, because they don’t realize what they lost when communication became one-way in the near and far suburbs alike.

Because it’s computer mediated, social media communication isn’t the same – it’s not as personal and close-up – but it’s a lot better than watching “the tube,” it’s a form of two-way communication again.

When people say, as today’s seminar presenter should have and could have, that social media requires a change in lifestyle, it really does. It requires you to take time to engage someone on the computer, and that may take a while, weeks or months, even, like it did in our neighborhood before we found ourselves out on the street talking casually together. (Shoveling snow was another great communal activity, and maybe that can still be done. And, of course, there was also the ice cream truck with its jingly bells in the summer).

My computer doesn’t jingle, and my social media friends or acquaintances don’t shake my hand, but I increasingly value them, nonetheless. They bring me back, somewhat, to the Victory Gardens and keg parties of 86th Avenue during and after World War II and before TV. I miss those days, and I’m glad to have these new opportunities on my computer and the Internet.

Be Wary of ‘Emotional Hijackings’

Posted on July 31, 2009
Filed Under Emotions | Leave a Comment

At their next meeting, Harvard Professor Henry Louis Gates, Jr., and Cambridge Police Sergeant James Crowley might consider forming a “Cool It Club” that should have chapters in every community in America – especially in Washington, D.C.

I wasn’t there, but by all accounts, what appears to have happened at the Cambridge home of Professor Gates shortly after noon on July 16 was, in Daniel Goleman’s term, an “emotional highjacking.” While complicated by race, the incident seems to have been an emotional flareup that could happen to any of us, if we’re not mindful of what may be occurring. That’s because we all have human emotional systems.

Professor Gates had just completed a no-doubt exhausting trip home from China, had had trouble opening his front door, and then found a police officer – Sgt. Crowley – at the door suspecting him of breaking into his own home. (A lady passerby with a cell phone had called the police.)

Certainly there were all the makings of an emotional flareup, and we ought to be mindful that one could befall any of us under similarly stressful circumstances.

“Such emotional explosions,” Daniel Goleman wrote in Emotional Intelligence, “are neural hijackings. At those moments, evidence suggests, a center in the limbic brain proclaims an emergency, recruiting the rest of the brain to its urgent agenda. The hijacking occurs in an instant, triggering this reaction crucial moments before the neocortex, the thinking brain, has had a chance to glimpse fully what is happening, let alone decide if it is a good idea. The hallmark of such a hijack is that once the moment passes, those so possessed have the sense of not knowing what came over them.”

Should even a Harvard professor have such a flash emotional upset in the presence of a police officer suspecting him of breaking-and-entering, the moment might go awry. It could happen to any of us under emotionally charged circumstances.

Again, I wasn’t there on that Cambridge porch, but it appears very likely that the “teachable moment” President Obama had in mind when he invited Professor Gates and Sergeant Crowley to the White House yesterday might have included reflections on how we are all subject to emotional surges at anxiety-filled moments. They blindside us, and keep us from responding effectively.

The more we can be prompted to recognize and handle such super-charged moments, the better it will be for us all. An emotional early warning system – very early – is needed. The kind that arises from prior awareness or ingrained sensitivity. Talking about such realities can be helpful. Maybe thoughts like this were exchanged at the White House “beer summit” yesterday. We can hope so.

Crisis Communication Becoming Locally Global

Posted on May 18, 2009
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The best laid plans of corporate and governmental communicators for providing – and controlling – information during a crisis are being undone by the growing use of social media.

People building personal networks on Twitter, Facebook, Craigslist, Flickr and other social media today would be turning to them tomorrow to ask questions and spread information should a crisis strike.

They could quickly get ahead of the official information purveyors, especially if the official folks are located far from the scene – like the operators of the Three Mile Island nuclear power station, who have chosen to move the plant’s media center 60 miles away.

Such thoughts are reinforced by an article in the January, 2009, issue of Nature, “Crisis Communication, Messages appear on Internet-based social networks within minutes of disasters occurring…”

Science writer Lea Winerman notes that federal and local disaster response agencies who trained under the “top down” approach are now having to consider a far more distributed information system. And they had better plan to be in the midst of it, not miles, or counties, away.

‘How do you convince people that they are at risk?,” asks Dennis Mileti, a disaster-management researcher at the University of Colorado. “Only through other people.” And now, notes Winerman, there is the Internet to extend their reach. Using email and social media you can check in with people from the neighborhood or the globe. They’re all as close at hand as your computer screen.

And probably quite reliably so. During one series of California wildfires, researchers monitored social media sites. They had already discovered that national news websites ignored much of what was going on and that “the county so-called emergency site was always crashed.”

Local media sites, though, provided updates from “any local resident and an Internet connection and information to share.” The same kind of thing has occurred during earthquakes in China, Winerman notes.

Being envisioned is a web-based “‘community response grid’ that would combine the power of social networking sites with official government emergency-response systems.” While such an inclusive grid may be a ways off, the potential for sharing scraps or whole scenarios of information is growing rapidly.

Don’t forget, Winerman writes at the start of her article, students on the campus of Virginia Tech had already identified all 32 of Seung-Hui Cho’s 2007 massacre victims online by the time the university released their names a day later.

Baldridge Criteria Can Improve Communication

Posted on April 16, 2009
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In communication terms, as well as those of production, organizations can do well by adopting the Baldridge Criteria for Performance Excellence, whether they intend to seek the national quality award or not.

Boiled down, which is what Quality Digest does handily in its April issue, the Baldridge criteria are leadership; strategic planning; customer focus; measurement, analysis and knowledge management; workforce focus; process management, and results.

These can be as much of a mandate for a deliberate, attentive approach to organizational communication as they are for production quality. Communication, too, has results and we often are blissfully unaware of them, especially if they’re unfavorable.

Leadership starts with vision and is propelled by effective communication. You can’t focus on customers without communicating with them, by whatever means, effectively or not. Your staff members become the beneficiary of enlightened communication or the victims of poorly presented organizational imperatives.

And, above all, communication is a process that needs to be deliberately and intelligently managed. Do all that with your organizational utterances and you’re an award winner – if only in your own setting which, of course, is where effectiveness matters most.

So get familiar with what the Baldridge people expect of top-performing organizations, but in communication terms above all. Baldridge may not, in fact, have express communication criteria because they are implicit in their entire program. Do well in quality and you’re likely an effective communicator.

But give your communication stance express consideration. How are you getting the results you get? Could they be better with better communication? Very likely.

Countering Information Overload

Posted on April 2, 2009
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There was Kathleen Parker on the op-ed page of The Washington Post writing about a “TMI-addled nation.” Her reflections coincided with the 30th anniversary of the accident at my former workplace, and I thought for a moment she was exaggerating the anniversary’s impact a bit. But no, she was reflecting on “Too Much Information.” Now there’s a concern for these times.

Ironically, information overload is occurring at a time when newspapers, the core of the traditional media, are disintegrating. In my own Pennsylvania neighborhood, the two Lancaster papers just merged and my hometown paper, The Lebanon Daily News, will shortly be printed by a sister paper in York, 53 miles away. (It will be interesting to see how the delivery time holds up there.)

But Kathleen has a point in that the media array is atomizing, our information setting is becoming highly variegated and challenging to comprehend. I wouldn’t say too much so, because it’s not clear how all this will settle out. As Clay Shirky says, we’re in 1,500, with electronic Gutenbergs clamoring for our attention from the Internet and cable TV.

The danger, as Ms. Parker notes, is that as people become overwhelmed with information they become less attentive, less hopeful of, and thereby less interested in, finding meaning in the buzz. Prolonged, such an overload state can make for a truly dysfunctional, inattentive society.

Maybe the best we can all do is to stake out our own information limits, and stay with them. Choose the blogs we want to follow, the books we want to read, the electronic media we want to indulge (like Bill Moyers, not Fox) and stay with them, piecing together meaning for ourselves but not expecting to get it universally – or, as they used to say, objectively – correct.

Instead of going with the flow, use a dipstick and hope it provides accurate enough samplings.

We’re Back, With a Focus on Communication

Posted on April 1, 2009
Filed Under Communication principles | 2 Comments

We’re back, with a little sharper focus than before. On the beat, we’ll be talking about communication – communication that occurs in groups, organizations and society at large. It may, or may not, just happen – good communication usually doesn’t occur that way – but we’ll be looking for examples of situations that were either improved or weakened by communication that worked, or not. Don’t know how readily we’ll find them, but feel free to contribute as our readers and partners in this interest.

We’ll also be looking at risk and crisis communication, as examples or needs arise.

We’ll start with a definition – this is the Web, so Wikipedia is our source for the term “organizational communication”: “Broadly speaking, people working together to achieve individual or collective goals.”

Well, people in groups should be working together, but don’t always. We all know that. What’s not as readily apparent is the awareness factor within a group: do its members realize they’re not communicating well? Do they care? They might not have a clue how they’re coming across, or what they’re missing out on. This is a sad reality, but one that can be improved by leadership. focus and awareness.

Wikipedia adds that communication “can be defined as the transfer of meanings between persons and groups.” For that to happen, leaders and members of groups need to have worthy aims in mind and recognize what might block them from being achieved. They need to value the all-important skills of framing, listening and receiving feedback.

You can easily have a half-dozen people in the same office working at cross-purposes if they’re not mutually aware what they’re aiming for, why it’s valuable, and what the blockages may be. In short, group communication is an express, explicit, shared skill, not one that necessarily comes naturally.

Posting Suspended, Pending Site Improvements

Posted on January 13, 2009
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Posting on Beetles Beat is temporarily suspended while changes are made on the Resource Relations website to reflect the growing importance of social media and to launch a second blog, this one on organizational communication. All should be up and running fairly soon. We are looking forward to a wider conversation, and new relationships, with our readers.

Where We Are Isn’t Pretty, and It Isn’t Us

Posted on November 21, 2008
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If there was ever an example of why the nation is in deep economic disarray, it’s the result yesterday of the visit by the “Big Three” auto companies to Washington. That and the real restate environment I happened to learn about in my old neighborhood in Queens, New York.

The auto companies displayed no sense of regard for public and congressional opinion by showing up at House and Senate hearings in private jets and without a plan on how to spend $25 billion in “bailout” aid in a convincingly useful manner.

Yet Congress showed no awareness of its own role in avoiding creation of a national health care system that would relieve the auto companies and other employers of heavy health insurance costs.

What we saw at the auto hearings was a dire example of how much we have lost sight of the public interest ? our common interest ? in an era of unfettered market capitalism.

And in my old neighborhood in Queens, there is a timeworn house for sale with an air-conditioner hanging out its front window. Asking price: $549,000. More than a half-million dollars for a home that has no doubt been a comfortable, yet work-a-day, residence for years upon years. If this house sells for anything close to the asking price, I’d say it’s a candidate for default in the future. And there are still, apparently, many offerings like it on the market.

We cannot sustain this dereliction of reality in manufacturing centers, the nation’s capital and my old neighborhood. We have to realize we are one people living in context with our time and needs, not speculators on our common future.

An Earmark to Celebrate – There Must be Others, Too

Posted on October 24, 2008
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Central Pennsylvania Congressman Tim Holden was at the Penn State Milton S. Hershey Medical Center yesterday to announce and get deserved credit for a $2.8 million appropriation he included in the Department of Defense Appropriations Act for development of the Penn State Hershey Cancer Institute. He’s done that six times now, and has provided $31 million for the emerging, $121 million center through congressional appropriations.

Congressman Holden was celebrating “earmarks” needed to build an important new medical center in his home territory. And why shouldn’t he? What’s the function of a congressman but to represent valid public interests back home?

So long as he does it openly, which Congressman Holden does. His name has been on the appropriations for the Hershey cancer center. They’ve been listed for anyone who wants to track them. They have originated in partnership with the National Naval Medical Center and its own cancer research. That’s why they’re in defense appropriations bills.

When John McCain inveighs in a broadside manner against earmarks, does he realize that he’s indicting projects like the Hershey cancer center, among other similarly worthy ones? Does he wonder what congressmen and senators are supposed to do if not to think and act creatively in support of the public interest back home? Are they supposed to sit around waiting for the president, or fate, to provide for everything?

The strength of America is in the health of its people and in the creativity of their leaders as long as those leaders have a pertinent sense of priorities. Rep. Holden and his Hershey and Navy research partners pretty clearly do.

“The most-feared words in the English language are ‘You have cancer,’” Rep. Holden said during his Hershey news conference. “Too often, people in central Pennsylvania have had to travel to Philadelphia, Pittsburgh or Baltimore, and we’ll have a state-of-the-art facility right here in Hershey that can provide those services.”

That’s an earmark and a congressional service ? provided openly and above-board ? that’s well worth celebrating, not condemning. And repeating, until the new center is built, dedicated and functioning for the benefit of Central Pennsylvanians. That’s precisely, it would seem, what representative government is about.

Guilt by Association…but with Walter Annenberg?

Posted on October 9, 2008
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John McCain joined in with Sarah Palin today in attacking Barack Obama as being associated with William Ayers, a Vietnam War-era radical and now a professor at the University of Illinois. A McCain TV ad laid it on too: It claimed that one of the nonprofits on which Obama and Ayers worked was a radical education foundation.

The foundation? Why the Annenberg Challenge funded by the Annenberg Foundation, which was founded by the late Walter Annenberg.

If Walter Annenberg, the sometimes testy publisher of The Philadelphia Inquirer, founder of the Annenberg School of Communication at the University of Pennsylvania, and Richard Nixon’s ambassador to Great Britain, had ever heard himself described as a radical…, oh my! (Annenberg founded the Annenberg Challenge to improve school performance.)

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