Reporting from the front line
Jan 26th
An exhibition at Somerset House in London explores how journalists reported key news stories of 2011.
Sponsored by Sky News (so therefore focusing on the 24 hour news channel’s broadcasting), the exhibition covers the unrest in the Middle East and North Africa, as well as the UK riots.
What emerges is the role of mobile technologies in documenting important news stories and the editorial (and personal-safety) decision-making processes that go on behind the scenes. Satellite technologies enabled Sky Reporter Alex Crawford to report directly from scenes of conflict in Libya as well as from the Gaddafi compound as the rebels entered. Months later, mobile phone images of the last moments of Gaddafi were broadcast to the world – albeit with warnings to viewers about the disturbing nature of the footage.
In London, another Sky journalist Mark Stone had been tipped off by Twitter and found his way to rioters in Clapham, London. The footage of rioters and looters he filmed on his mobile phone was broadcast by the news channel.
The exhibition does not focus on the role of social media in raising awareness of or organising protests or on the growth of citizen journalism. Nor does it include commentary or analysis of print or radio broadcasts. Instead it explores the immediacy of 24-hour news broadcasting and the role and responsibilities of broadcasters in a world of rolling news and instant editorial commentary.
The co-operative spirit
Jan 19th
The United Nations has named 2012 as The Year of the Co-operative. The initiative aims to raise awareness of the nature of co-operatives as value-based operations in which the bottom line is not the only driver of business decisions.
Co-operation and alternative stakeholder models have featured widely in this week’s media. The UK’s Deputy Prime Minister, Nick Clegg, spoke about the employee engagement model exemplified by John Lewis – a model in which the employees have a stake in the business. There is proof, he told his audience, that engaged employees can help create a more dynamic organisation.
The BBC’s In Business programme has also focused on the co-operative business model. Peter Day reported from the Spanish headquarters of the world’s largest employee owned co-operative business, the Mondragon Group. Mondragon is a highly successful business with a range of enterprises which is owned by 70,000 of its 85,000 employees. Strategic decision making is also done co-operatively. Every member gets one vote in a secret ballot. In order to manage this process Mondragon’s Director of Cooperative Dissemination explains that the business focuses on getting the right information to its members so that people can reach their decision.
Marketing Week has also explored new partnership models this week. Ruth Mortimer summarises why people are exploring the opportunities of alternative business models.
At a time when we all need to pull together and make the best of 2012’s unpredictable economic situation, any model that uses the brainpower, energy and enthusiasm of every stakeholder within a business seems not only like a good strategy, but a highly necessary one.
The only way is ethics
Jan 12th
The Ethics Research Center (ERC) based in Arlington, Virginia, has just published its latest National Business Ethics Survey® (NBES) – the ‘barometer of workplace ethics’. (You can download the full report, free of charge, here).
The current findings have taken the ERC by surprise – all the metrics have diverged from the patterns of previous years and some interesting mixed messages have emerged. In particular, the ERC notes that two key influences stand out in the unusual shift in trends highlighted in the report:
The economy
The survey’s findings show that companies behave differently in economic hard times and that these behavioural changes are perceived by employees as ‘a heightened commitment to ethics’. More than four in 10 employees (42 percent) say their company has increased efforts to raise awareness about ethics. Employees respond by adopting a higher standard of personal conduct. While misconduct witnessed by US workers is at an historic low, reporting is at a near high.
Active social networkers in the workplace
Active social networkers are defined by the ERC as those who spend 30%+ of the working day engaged in social networking activity. Key findings suggest members of this group have a distinctly different view of ‘ethics’ to those of ‘non-active’ colleagues. They are more likely to report negative experiences in the workplace, and are more likely to experience pressure to compromise ethical standards. At the same time, they are more tolerant of what others may consider ‘questionable’ activities. For example, 42% of them stated it was acceptable to blog or tweet negatively about their employers, compared to just 6% of non-active social networkers. 46% felt it was acceptable to take company software home to use on a home computer (compared to just 7% of ‘others’).
Employers beware!
The report, which is sponsored by large businesses including BP and Walmart, suggests that employers may need to find new ways to work with new types of employees – those who may ignore social media policy but who are equally willing to whistleblow when they are unhappy with the organisation’s own ethical behaviour. As ‘work’ and ‘life’ merge, it seems that some employees at least are setting their own ethical frameworks in the workplace – organisations ignore this group at their peril.
Books to boost the spirits
Jan 9th
As previously featured on this blog, The Reading Agency is a charity with a mission to inspire more people to read more. Research shows that reading improves mental well-being and it was against this background that, in 2011, The Reading Agency launched a promotion called ‘mind boosting books’. Reading groups around the UK identified a range of books to include on a list of recommended reading aimed at people who may have experienced mental health issues including stress, anxiety or depression.
The 2011 campaign reached 50,000 people in library authorities, colleges, prisons and NHS trusts.
For the 2012 campaign (launching this month) The Reading Agency has partnered with Vintage, the publishers of Stop What You’re Doing and Read This which features essays from leading contemporary writers. An additional 26 titles will be promoted during the campaign including classics such as The Secret Garden and The Pursuit of Love. The full list includes fiction, non-fiction, poetry and graphic novels including titles for less confident readers.
The restorative power of reading (in whatever format) is well known to us all, of course and we all have our favourite mood-boosting books (let me nominate Three Men in a Boat as a book that always makes me laugh out loud although I am not sure that this qualifies it for inclusion on the list). Any thoughts or suggestions for mood-boosting reading gratefully received!
10 best intranets of 2012 named
Jan 6th
User experience and usability experts the Nielsen Norman Group (NNG) have named their choice of the ’10 Best Intranets of 2012’. Among the winners are UK based companies Everything Everywhere and Logica, MAN Diesel and Turbo SE from Germany, and Sweden’s Skanska. Other winners include Genentech, NCR, LivePerson and Staples.
According to NNG, smaller companies are designing better intranets compared to previous years – of this year’s 10 winning intranets, 6 support fewer than 15,000 employees, with the smallest being LivePerson at 550. The average number of employees in this year’s winning organisations is 19,700, which is the smallest since the contest launched 12 years ago.
The size of the average intranet team size grew to 15 people — slightly less than 1 intranet specialist per thousand employees, with the smallest teams consisting of 6 people at both Everything Everywhere (15,000 employees) and LivePerson Inc. (550 employees). The largest team was 26 people at NCR Corporation (21,000 employees).
Although mobile intranets have looked promising in recent years, this year saw a decline in the number of intranets offering mobile versions – possibly because teams do not have the time or resources to do more than focus on the main intranet. At the same time, social media components seem to have really taken off with a number of organisations such as MAN Diesel and Turbo making the most of the social potential of people search functionality within their intranets.
More information can be found here.
McKinsey’s ‘most read’ of 2011
Jan 3rd
The lull between Christmas and New Year is an excellent time to carry out some work-focused housekeeping duties. I took the opportunity to spend a few hours reviewing my RSS feeds as well as many additional subscriptions to e-newsletters, daily updates, and press releases. I took the time to consider which resources had provided real insight and impact in 2011.
One subscription that really did ‘keep on giving’ in 2011 was McKinsey Quarterly. The latest quarterly update features links to the most popular articles of 2011. Appearing in the top 10 list, and first published in January 2011, this article on recovering from information overload was discussed in this blog in February. The popularity of the article suggests that there are many opportunities for information professionals to provide guidance to colleagues on managing information flows.
Some other key themes emerge in the top ten articles, pointing the way to what is exercising those leading teams and organisations.
Creativity – information overload is identified as something that can stifle creativity – but what can spark it? In Sparking creativity in teams the authors review the latest research and present four techniques to improve creativity, including the use of analogies and creating constraints. In Seven steps to better brainstorming the authors recommend the asking of better questions, as well as ensuring that the right people are ecouraged to to participate in the process.
Strategy – in Remapping your strategic mindset, the author describes how executives can benefit from better mental (‘rooted’) maps to help them identify opportunities and threats. In The perils of bad strategy UCLA’s Richard Rumelt summarises the differences between ‘good’ and ‘bad’ strategies and helps readers identify examples of both, while Have you tested your strategy lately provides 10 tests to help executives ensure their strategies are ‘roadworthy’.
All of the top ten articles are well worth reading and McKinsey Quarterly remains on my ‘must read’ list for 2012. Other subscriptions were not so lucky, but that’s another story!
‘Person of the year’ is ‘the protester’
Jan 1st
You may remember that Time Magazine named Mark Zuckerberg as its 2010 ‘person of the year’ (and the readers of Time Magazine nominated Julian Assange in their own poll).
This year, in a break with tradition, Time Magazine has named not one individual but a group of people who have called for – and brought about – change throughout the world. Time Magazine’s ‘person’ of the year in for 2011 is ‘The Protestor’.
From the Arab spring to the Occupy movement, 2011 has seen a ‘contagion of protest’. The protest movement has provided three of the OUP’s words of the year, chosen for their resonance for 2011.
Protest has been transformational in 2011 and seems set to continue in 2012.
Bring your own…. device
Dec 15th
The blurring of work and personal life and the increasing ownership of mobile devices mean that more people are choosing to use their own devices in the workplace.
Whereas once it was the organisation that provided the technology infrastructure to its workers, it is now the users who are making these decisions based on their own preferences.
This trend (Bring Your Own Device or BYOD) brings challenges for organisations when it comes to managing access and security but it is important as employees and customers are increasingly expecting instant access to whatever they need, through any channel and via any device.
Writing on eChannel Line, Leyland Brown of Hewlett Packard says that companies need to shift their focus away from devices to the actual content. If they get it right, organisations will find that they can improve the productivity and performance of the workforce by ensuring that they have instant access to the appropriate information delivered in the format of their choice via their own devices. Sounds like a job for the information professionals!
Everyone is talking but is anyone listening? Using social media to promote info services
Dec 9th
There’s no doubt that, in some quarters at least, social media are replacing more traditional methods of communication. Earlier this week it was widely reported that French IT services giant Atos which employs 80,000 people is planning to ban the use of internal emails in favour of communication via other channels such as social networks, instant messaging and microblogging.
A panel in the European Librarians Theatre at this year’s Online Information show, organised under the auspices of SLA, debated how to use social media tools to promote library services. The international panel featured Jo Alcock from Birmingham City University, Dennie Heye from Shell Information Technology International in the Netherlands, and Katrin Weller from Heinrich-Heine University in Germany.
Jo had carried out an informal survey to find out how librarians in the UK were putting social media to work, and found a trend towards consolidating accounts and tools in order to streamline the wide variety of tools and services on offer.
The panellists agreed that were a number of obstacles that could impede the implementation of social media tools. Jo noted that senior management could be cautious, particularly given the experimental nature of some social media initiatives. Implementation can be time consuming, and this problem is exacerbated when staff don’t see the importance of the project. And in some settings, access to social media is banned altogether.
Katrin echoed the focus on experimentation and trial and error – a willingness to try things out and learn as you go is key to success in social media. There isn’t a manual!
From Dennie’s point of view, making the business case to senior management was all important. At Shell, they have introduced enterprise social network Yammer to enable communication between people working in different teams and offices. By focusing on its use as an IT support tool, they were able to make a strong business case by showing that using Yammer freed up time for IT support staff.
Jo pointed out that librarians will need to exercise professional judgement in choosing the right tool for the job – for example public libraries will want to communicate with their patrons in specific ways which will be very different to the approach taken by a corporate information service; and there will be a difference between internal and external communications.
The panellists agreed that flexibility and personality were both key to the successful implementation of a social media strategy. Jo pointed out that you need to be able to adapt to changing expectations. Dennie recommended being yourself – an authentic, ‘human’ voice is much more effective than a personality-free corporate voice. For those wanting to take the plunge, Katrin suggested that you start by asking yourself ‘what will success look like’ so that further down the line you have something to measure against. This will also provide a touchstone to use when faced with choosing between the enormous range of social media tools out there.
Word(s) of the year
Dec 6th
As the year draws to a close, the dictionaries teams at Oxford University Press announce what they consider to be the words or phrases of the year.
In 2011, the teams have announced that their global word of the year is the phrase ‘squeezed middle’. Referring to the section of society affected by a range of economic factors, including inflation and pay freezes, the phrase has resonance in both the US and the UK.
The US shortlist of ten words or phrases provides a fascinating snapshot of world events and technological trends for 2011. Joining the words ‘crowdfunding’, ‘gamification’ and ‘clicktivism’ are ‘Arab Spring’, ‘the 99 percent’ and ‘Occupy’. Also included is ‘bunga bunga’ – a noun associated with parties hosted by Italian PM Berlusconi.
Meanwhile, over in Germany the ‘youth word of the year’ has just been announced. ‘Swag’ is used by German youth to describe a cool, charismatic persona. The choice of the word is somewhat controversial because it has clear roots to an English word ‘swagger’.
Other words shortlisted in Germany included the verb ‘Googeln’. Which needs no translation.
