At this morning’s Marketing Week Live show Kelvin Newman from Site Visibility and I had a 15 minute chat (with him videoing it!) on a wide range of social and digital topics including:
MeasurementCamp – what it is, what I learnt about managing an offline community
On the 2nd of August, young coders and designers across the country will be getting together to show the Government what they can do with open data, and NixonMcInnes are hosting the Brighton outpost.
One of the words that is much used in business is accountability. And its correlate, a “blame-culture”, is much discussed, and much derided. We talk about accountability and blame here at NixonMcInnes; and we talk about them with our clients more and more, as we help them change the way they relate to their customers.
I guess we all routinely blame our colleagues, our customers, our competitors. We routinely blame the economy, the government and even the weather.
I really don’t suppose the weather does it on purpose. I know, when I think about it for a moment, that the weather really hasn’t got it in for me.
So why would I blame it? Or the government, or the economy, or our customers, or our competitors? Why do I think, if something doesn’t work out the way I want it to, that it is my colleague’s fault? It’s always their fault. And rarely anything I did.
Two concepts really help me around blame.
The first is the concept of contribution. If I accept that in any situation, I contributed something to it, and so did others, I start to move away from an attitude of blaming towards something more useful.
Blaming is often associated, for me at least, with unhelpful emotions – like anger. By accepting my contribution to a situation, not only do I start to accept those emotions, but I also start to move to a position where I can regain some influence over the situation.
When I am in a position of blame it is all so much easier. I don’t have to do anything, or change anything, because clearly it’s someone else’s fault. Nothing to do with me.
Which leads to the second concept: influence. Steven Covey put it best many years ago when he described our circle of concern, and our circle of influence.
The first contains those things we hold a position of blame about: what the government does, what the economy does, what the weather does, and maybe even what our competitors, customers, and colleagues do. These are things that upset us, but we don’t really have any control or influence over.
The second circle – influence – contains the list of things we can control, that we do have influence over. Blaming my colleague for something they did puts their action in my circle of concern. Thinking about what I did that triggered (or contributed) to the situation puts their action in my circle of influence.
As soon as I put something into my circle of influence, or as Covey suggests, take action to grow my circle of influence, I take back the power I need to start to change my world. I assume a position of self-responsibility. I start to work out what I can do about it.
So, that’s blame. What about accountability? Does accepting that I contribute to and have an influence on everything, yes everything, that happens to me mean that accountability goes out the window? How do I hold colleagues to account if I don’t blame them?
I think of accountability as a process, not an event, not a characteristic.
First, it involves commitment. Often commitments are made so rashly and loosely, that you really wouldn’t want to be held accountable for them.
I say “I’ll fix such-and-such by Wednesday”, knowing full-well, if I think for a second, that I’ve got a hundred and one more important things to do before then. Knowing that, from experience, it’ll take much longer than I said.
Knowing, again from experience, that things rarely work out the way I plan them – nearly always something unexpected happens just at the very worst moment. It’s true for me – it’s true for you.
So the first stage in accountability is making a proper commitment – something that I am happy to be held account for. I can make this easier for myself by challenging myself before I commit; or someone else can help me get there by challenging my rash or loose commitments.
The second stage is challenging. This is where accountability so often goes wrong. Because we so easily step into blaming.
Cue “contribution” and “influence”. If we can avoid blame, then accountability is simply the process of observing accurately what happened. You said you’d do such and such, and then you didn’t. What happened? Who did what? What didn’t we do? What else contributed? And crucially what can we learn?
This is hard because blame and the emotion that goes with it is just so damn attractive. It’s so much easier to blame. And the emotion feels so good.
So much easier to blame Sepp Blatter and FIFA for failing to introduce goal-line technology. Than work on our own game.
The team here have been absolutely flat out of late on an interesting blend of challenging client projects. But that’s mostly hidden away, behind the scenes.
We’ve all carped on about the power of blogging and how it’s useful to peel back the corporate veneer and allow others to peer into the busy happenings of an organisation, non? Well I know I like peeking into other organisations that pique my interest.
So here’s a brief part-anonymised run through of projects the team have been working on in recent times:
Working with a major broadcaster to help them take their viewer engagement strategy into the social web
Working with an iconic retailer to help them to learn-by-doing about where social media meets trading and building community
Building a video streaming function for a drinks company to support a World Cup promotion
Mapping the conversations around travel through the lense of a particular travel brand to inform their strategy and next steps
Building a competition application that integrates into Facebook using the then Facebook Connect function for a loyalty programme client as part of their ongoing journey into a more social marketing mix
Mapping and research the conversations and communities around a very specific aspect of healthcare for a government department to understand more about how to really engage the target audience in a helpful meaningful way
Cultivating community and conversations around a food issue for an admired charity to build on growing successes in changing behaviour and attitudes
Training a large body of communication professionals in a global media organisation to support the evolution of the organisation into a more digitally-savvy entity
Developing a casual game and accompanying set of engagement activities to raise issue around a food issue for a charity to activate people around an important issue in an appropriate and different way
Prototyping and then launching a real-time Twitter visualization application to support a live TV show and experiment further with the blending of traditional TV experiences and the growing importance of the ‘two-screen’ element where viewers also browse the internet
Visualizing the social network from within a niche online community for a forthcoming conference to tell a compelling story that reveals the underlying dynamics in that community
Partnering with two professors on something very cool and different and new.
So yeah, that’s a bit of what we’ve been doing. Hope you’ve been having fun too…
For the last few weeks, a few of us here have been locked away in the highest of the NM Towers, working away frantically scoping out, designing, prototyping and building 3 real-time visualizations to accompany Channel 4’s pre-budget Dispatches special, How to Save £100 Billion LIVE, which was aired on Monday evening. It’s been a privilege to work on, a highlight of my career even, but no small task by any means!
Just over 3 week’s ago, we were tasked with producing 3 visual representations of the conversation around the show, as it unraveled, in real-time, on Twitter, the goal being to give the audience at home a voice in the proceedings, and access to the collective thoughts and opinions of others watching, making it easy to follow the live TV show and online conversations, simultaneously.
We immediately set about defining how we might clearly and accurately represent the conversation visually, settling on slicing and dicing it from a few key angles: who’s talking, what are they saying, how much are they saying, and where are they saying it, complemented by some bite-sized, easily-digestible statistics, such as number of tweets, tweets per minutes, number of ‘tweeters’ and most authoritative tweeter (hat tip: the awesome Infochimps trst.me API).
Teaming up with local data visualization whizz kid, Mr. Ollie Glass, we got to work right away, first prototyping 2 proof of concepts using the Processing environment, and then iteratively testing and re-working until we were (mostly) satisfied. A few last minute deployment and integration issues kept us all on our toes (also, I’m not sure I helped massively by demanding a last minute complete rewrite of 2 out of the 3 visualizations), but after 3 week’s of grueling days and impossibly long nights, I’m incredibly happy with the results (*yay*), both from a technical, and a functional ’social TV experiment’ perspective! Go team! :)
I will happily follow-up with a technical ‘deep dive’ if anyone shows even the slightest amount of interest (FYI: it involves helicopters, chimpanzees, lots of Sellotape and a jazz guitarist) but for now here’s a quick run-down of the data (visualized in a very neat list):
Total tweets: 2,020
Total tweeters: 1,017
Top tweeter: Sunday Telegraph Business Editor, @ahmedk123
Conversation velocity: a whopping 23TPM (Tweets Per Minute)
So, 12 whole months since I joined NixonMcInnes, and whilst I could write a whole blog post about the amazing year it’s been, I won’t; a quick scan of our back catalogue provides a wealth of information on the topic of working here. Instead, I wanted to discuss my experience of our salary process, as it’s pretty special, and is a process that I approached in (hopefully) a fairly unique way.
Instead of going into huge depth about the process, which is constantly evolving, not perfect, and also ultimately uninteresting in detail, here is the 30 second outline: we are personally responsible for proposing salary changes on an annual basis, and once you’ve prepared a salary proposal with help from your direct manager, an elected group of four colleagues review and discuss your review before approving or suggesting an amendment. Ta-dah!
Like most other people, I’ve previously worked in workplaces where salary changes are often unexpected, and always undiscussed. Therefore, the openness of NixonMcInnes is pretty exhilarating, and that’s why I wanted to share this, my proposal.
As part of my future development, I want to make more of my creative side, and so the salary proposal seemed like a perfect time to do so. I’m pretty pleased with it as a picture, but obviously a picture requires more narrative than a word doc or powerpoint would, but for me that was the fun. In short, the little robot is me now, and the bigger robot is the world-conquering mega consultant I will become. Going from the top clockwise, you’ll see the actual figures in question, main achievements, a word-cloud of feedback from colleagues and clients, my plans for the future, and then a visual pause for discussion about whether the proposal is fair, equitable, affordable and attractive – the four main benchmarks against which we measure any salary request.
I’m pleased to say that the committee approved my proposal, but instead of a quick rubber-stamping exercise, we spent an hour discussing my role in relation to the other consultants, and their respective goals and rewards. Doing this with colleagues rather than one-to-one with a boss can be slightly awkward as it’s unusual to be so open about your strengths and weaknesses, but ultimately it results in a team who completely ‘get’ each other, and can find ways to compliment each others unique characteristics.
Lastly, when planning and writing this post, I asked the team whether I should blank out the actual amount on the proposal, which lead to an interesting debate. I posted the question:
Some responses suggested not to show the amount:
Others suggested a clever alternative:
And others were all for openess:
So, I decided to just put it up there. We are a transparent organization, we share other figures, so why not share this? I’d welcome any feedback you have on the idea of salaries being public, any thoughts on the process, and lastly any comments on my picture :)
