The more you look at social media, the more it reminds me of storytelling. You

Social Media Camp - NYC - 2011 (Photo credit: deanmeyersnet)

can be telling stories around a camp fire with a small audience, or telling stories around the world in mass releases of information. The better the story the more people that will engage with the subject and the better your social media efforts will be. Social media people must be excellent story tellers that can engage and get an audience participate in the story so that it becomes theirs.

The major issues with that are getting people to do an action. We are passive by nature, and you can see this in a great many things that we do, we are numb already, we find it difficult to take action as evidenced by this attack in the Seattle Metro Tunnel – people including those in authority stood by as a young 15 year old girl was attacked. The public outcry afterwards was a form of action, but our numb inactive society in the USA precludes people participating in the story. We view everything as a passive information flow from the computer or TV to our brains to be digested. Honestly under the good Samaritan laws I would have been in the middle of this trying to keep the two people apart screaming for the cops, but then that is the kind of person I am.

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You can see a different form of call to action with Conversation Marketing supporting a Portland Oregon SEO firm that was attacked by a Colorado based SEO firm. But the call fell short when I read all the information on it, it seems that the whole thing is unhappy, but not a story that I will get involved with.

Then the final kind of argument that resonates and hits me where my belief system lives, and that is in Amber Naslund (From Altitude) where she talks about Social Media and Accountability. She spins a down to earth story in that yes we really can do the things we need to do to be measurable and accountable, even if we do not want to. This is a story I can dive into and feel the need to respond, even if there is not a good response other than “hear hear”.

Sometimes all we can do is agree with the story teller, other times we fail to engage because it seems like both parties were at fault, and in other ways we are so outraged that we have to do something. This is the art of good story telling, you get the response you need by how well you tell the story.

If you look at Dairy Queen as a case study and go back to all the places that DQ invested in, their blog, Facebook, and other systems, they are telling a story. But they are telling everyone’s story as they encounter the brand. You see behind the scenes processes and real people with pictures, contests, prizes and the ability to connect with DQ on a level that is impossible when you walk into the store. The story telling on the DQ Blog is enough to lead someone to the belief that they are real people doing real things to bring you tasty treats. Dairy Queen has made an art form of storytelling on the systems that they engage in. The approaches that DQ takes in their social media process is low key, responsible, providing an opportunity for people to engage on a much deeper level than walking into the local DQ and ordering a Blizzard.

It is the social media that fails that we see where the art of storytelling has failed. You see this in the thousands of fly by night twitter accounts, failed blogs and failed outposts in Facebook. It was not that these people did not have a story, but that the story being told failed to engage the audience. Of course there is always the chance at twitter millions for 29.99 (just drop a check in the mail), but you have to take a look at social media not by what can be measured, but by what story you are trying to tell.

If you are a university and you want to talk about student life, do not just tell everyone about the great benefits that students have interview people and get their stories, post pictures of student life, have a podcast, have an outpost on Facebook for students, and engage students in how they access and consume information. If you are running an active student life section, do not forget the calendar to show what is coming next so that people can make plans to attend.  Student life is not your life, it is theirs and they should be telling the story. You are simply the person in the middle that is writing text and editing audio and video segments.

This brings me to the many open jobs I have seen in social media over the last 90 days, because companies are starting to get serious about being on board with social media.  I looked over a couple of the job openings and the first question I had is what is the companies’ story? You can go visit their web site and see what they do, you can go visit Glassdoor and Jobvent to see how happy the employees are, you can talk to current employees via Facebook or LinkedIn. But you do not get the companies stories; you get individual stories about the company through the lens of job satisfaction. This often leads to thoughts on corporate reputation management which in some ways what corporate level social networking is also all about.

On two different sides we are telling stories, we tell stories to tell what a responsible corporation we are (brand management) and we tell stories to engage people into action (to sell stuff). The question we need to start asking now of our social networking folks is “Just how good a story teller are you”?

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Note: Going through the back catalog of what I have written over here at Techwag, this one really popped out, because I never did find a solution for my friend. The incident of bad mouthing stopped after about 120 days, but there was so much bad blood after that between my friend, the company, and the old boss that I don’t think they will ever speak well of the company. I know she never talks about the company, and will divert business to other companies at every chance she gets. 

Interesting thought that a friend of mine posted on one of the social networks, I won’t mention the name or the situation but the comment is:

I’m totally P.O.’d as an old boss is trying to F#%# with my livelihood, bad mouthing my design to the client Source: Best not mentioned really

We are all familiar with bosses and companies suing employees for bad mouthing the company or the boss. We are also familiar with employees getting fired for bad mouthing bosses and companies online and getting fired. Those two are fairly common and a lot more common that anyone would like to admit, but what happens when an old boss starts badmouthing former employees? This is a new wrinkle on the old adage of watch what you say, it might come back to haunt you. See your old boss is coming from a position of strength, and while HR rules might preclude them from doing anything other than verifying your employment at a company, online maybe not so much.

Everything cuts both ways, and having your boss post online that you were the worst employee, or could not meet target dates, or never finished a product, or otherwise might all be considered legitimate in the viewpoint of the boss. Of course we are all going to beg to differ, we might have not hit a deadline for one reason or another, or we might have been caught playing a video game over lunch break or shopping for the holidays while at work. We might have even been caught out doing something perfectly reasonable at the time and circumstance but looks hokey in perfect 20/20 backwards vision.

Is there recourse, of course we can always sue, but we have to make sure that we can afford the lawsuit. I do not think that there has been any kind of lawsuit like this yet, and if there is feel free to let me know where it can be located so I can read the case file and court submission.

The part that strikes me the most interesting is that bad bosses abound and might need to take their vengeance further than is normal past firing. This would be a response to be expected if you are working for a truly controlling personality, they will attempt never to let you go, or realize the thoughts in their head “you’ll never work in this town again” kind of vindictiveness.

Personally I would seriously contact a lawyer, I have seen a similar situation where I was teaching a hacking class at a school, and someone from work called the school to tell them I was teaching hacking to students. Of course I was, it was a hacking class in a controlled environment with huge safeguards built in. But when they called the local CISSP group for sanctions that was when the problems really started, and took some interesting processes to make sure that no one got hurt in the process. They were voicing a legitimate concern, but hadn’t bothered to check out all the facts. This kind of problem is also more common than we would like to admit, it happens, we clear it up and move on, but the emotions remain behind.

If you think your old boss is trying to make sure you never work in this town again, and is stating things that meet the legal guidelines for slander, then by all means do what you think best. But engage a lawyer, they are the only ones that will be sure, and can see if you even have a case. The one thing I do know for sure is to remain the adult in the room, never get upset, but explain yourself clearly and succinctly if you are dealing with an interview, new client, or new job. The only way to truly prove you are what you think you are is to live it, be it, and enjoy it.

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First World meets Social Media and attempts to curtail it much like their third world counterparts – too late the cat is so far out of the bag we can’t even catch a whiff of what things were like before social media communications to coordinate groups for good, or bad.

It is interesting that the whole world cheered during Arab Spring when Tunisia and Egypt threw out hated government and attempted to substitute their own government. The whole world watched with baited breath, and even the US State Department asked Twitter not to shut down for a planned maintenance cycle during the uprisings in spring of 2011. The governments of those countries tried everything to shut down the internet and halt communication and coordination between groups who were protesting both peacefully and non-peacefully seeking to right the injustices that they saw. The world cheered, opened up dial up lines, and did everything they could to help develop work around processes so that people could still communicate and coordinate movement between Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, and a ton of other companies with the blessing of major first world governments.

In an ironic twist, Dave Cameron the Prime Minister of the United Kingdom attempted to tell RIMM and others that it was their obligation to help the Government find out what was happening on those systems and shut down the coordination of looters, rioters, and people torching a good chunk of downtown.

With the good of Arab Spring comes the bad of the UK Summer. What can be used to facilitate the overthrow of a government can also be used to coordinate criminal actions as has been amply demonstrated by the use of social media, Twitter, Facebook, and the messaging systems on cell phones.

This cat is seriously out of the bag.

From the BBC:

He said the government, using input from the police, intelligence services and industry, was looking at whether there should, or could, be limits on social media if it was being used to spread disorder.

Under social media, Mr Cameron includes Facebook, Twitter and specific technologies such as text messaging. The semi-private BBM messaging system on the Blackberry is said to have been widely used during the riots.

Home Secretary Theresa May is believed to be meeting representatives from Facebook, Twitter and RIM (maker of the Blackberry) to talk about their obligations during times of unrest.

Are there corporate obligations in a time of civil unrest? If the UK was a corrupt government that the world would not mind seeing fall would anyone care or would people be opening up dial up lines so that people could still communicate and coordinate? Would we be working on working solutions much like a good proportion of the world was to support Arab Spring? Is there an obligation for the companies that provide social media services to shut down actions that government might not like or condone? Keeping it interesting, but this is not just a question for the UK, this is a question for all governments worldwide, social media is dangerous to the established order when enough people are disaffected with what is happening in a country, and can seriously upset the current “order” of power and control. At what point does a governments survival depend on shutting down social media, tracking private SMS messages, and while the UK was not a social protest, at what point do we draw the line and say “You Facebook need to help us catch these criminals”.

This was previously posted on Techwag 2.0 in August of 2011

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