I attended the Media140, exploring the future of the Real-Time Social Web conference in Perth on Thursday, 25 February. Billed as “Brands, Marketing & Communications in the Real-Time Social Web”, I booked an early-bird ticket without really knowing what to expect. I know I wasn’t the only one. I was extremely interested to hear experiences of how other people were using social media. I was also looking forward to meeting the faces behind the avatars I’ve been communicating with for over a year, mostly on Twitter. Held at the Perth Town Hall, the long day ended with nearly all the attendees still in their seats. The content of the conference clearly outweighed the physical discomfort created by packing over 300 people and 20 speakers into the second floor of the old building on what turned out to be a sweltering day.
The Reviews are In
By now, Media140 Perth has been reviewed, tweeted and blogged about. The consensus seems to be it was a great opportunity to network, and I’m in total agreement with that. The organisers, Via Appia Networking WA, impressed everyone with their ability to manage a big event and make it fun at the same time. My hat is off to Rebecca Cole (@rebeccaco) and Bree Mitchelson (@bmitc), two dynamic young women on the brink of major success. The founder of Media140, charismatic Andrew Gregson (@andegregson), chaired the day and conveyed a slightly bewildered attitude to the international success of his conference, originally developed as a one-off event in London. The other, overriding sentiment about the conference was that nothing new was introduced and much of what was said has all been said before. That’s where I have to disagree.
Fascinating Insight
I’m not sure what people expected. As I said earlier, I wasn’t sure what I expected. In many respects, the speakers were preaching to the choir. The seats were filled with social media enthusiasts, early adopters of what business is still grappling to understand. I found the panel discussion on transforming organisations with social media to be the most fascinating. In particular, Jared Woods (@jaredw78), Communications Manager from Sinclair Knight Merz engineering firm (now Jacobs Engineering Group Inc.), delivered the most insightful content of the day. I spent 18 years in a multi-national corporate environment so maybe that coloured my opinion.
Wild Thing
SKM has grappled with how to implement an employee policy on social media. While it’s easy to define expectations of your employees when they’re at work and operating under corporate resources, it’s not always easy to define a social media policy for out-of-hours activity. Jared gave some real life examples of how employees had inadvertently caused potential commercial damage to SKM with social media, prompting complaints from customers. In what I consider to be an encouragingly liberal approach, SKM has adopted a policy that states if an employee associates themselves with SKM in their social media profiles, then they must respect the rules of acceptable employee conduct when they’re using social media tools outside of working hours. Honestly, companies have been instilling the same constraints on employees for years with things like morals clauses in employee agreements.
You Make My Heart Sing
The example that really got me thinking, though, was where a potential employee filed a complaint after perceived harassment in a job interview. While the commercial value of one disgruntled interview candidate was significantly less than losing a valued customer, what was revealed was a known problem with the employee conducting the interview. With behaviour geared towards the rough-and-tumble mining environment, previous complaints had been dismissed and a rogue employee had been allowed to develop working habits not in keeping with a professional business environment. With the advent of social media, SKM had no choice but to manage the rogue employee to avoid embarrassment. My heart sings at this news.
You Make Everything Groovy
We’ve all worked in places where inadequate people are protected. I know of few women who haven’t been harassed in the course of a career. Old-boy networks have long shielded incompetent employees. The Peter Principle is entrenched in the global corporate world and no one benefits from it except the inept person in question. Whether it is full-blown uselessness, personality disorder, racism, sexism, ageism, homophobia or any other unsavoury trait, Jared Woods is the first person I’ve ever heard discuss how social media can truly transform the workplace. If social media is going to expose our lack of authenticity and transparency – and everyone agreed about its power to do so – then it’s also going to improve our workplaces and make excellence easier to achieve. Ethics in the workplace are about to change for the better.
Wild Thing I Think I Love You
We are at the advent of a new way of doing business, and corporations will figure this out just as they did voice mail, email, the internet and intranet solitaire. Social media has the ability to humanise corporations as we learned with Westpac’s “oh so very over it” tweet last week. It also has the ability to remove the spin from government as spinmeister Barack Obama learned when he honestly expressed his opinion about Kanye West’s antics at the Video Music Awards. We’re all going to take a few knocks along the way, but I predict we’ll come out better because of it.
How has your workplace been transformed by social media?
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