My experience is that collaboration can be very difficult, if not impossible, if a group isn’t working towards the same plan or goal.

A group or team can attempt to move forward without a plan or a clear set of goals, but the outcome, if any, isn’t likely to be very good or successful, and probably pretty painful.

Every group or team is different, complete with conflicting personalities, ideas, motivations and beliefs. I believe this kind of diversity makes the best kind of team, but if there isn’t a plan or goal to focus on, successful collaboration will be impossible, the differences will be emphasized rather than the common goals; chaos and piss-off will ensue.

I’ve experienced this many times, and I can’t believe how many collaboration and/or project managers still don’t understand this. The plan or goal will allow people to move past conflicts and differences towards successful completion of goals.

For this week’s Social Media Take Away I’m featuring a post that I read last week in The Future Buzz blog, 50 Blogging Lessons To Know If You’re Starting Today. Adam Singer has a great blog going over there, one that I’ve been reading for nearly a year.

I’ve been doing this blog on here for less than a year, and to read some of the points on here that Adam makes is great for not just myself, but for anyone looking to start a blog, or looking to integrate blogs into their work or communications plans.

For entrepreneur’s, small business owners, and self-starters of any kind I would say that you should get started using social media. In fact, this should have been the first post in the Social Media Take Away series, but hey I’m improvising and making things up as I go here…

What is social media?

Social media is any web tools that allows groups to generate content and engage in peer-to-peer conversations and exchange of content (examples are YouTube, Flickr, Facebook, MySpace, Twitter, etc…)

Social media is particularly valuable for entrepreneur’s, small business owners, and self-starters in-general, I’m thinking artists – painters, musicians and the like, because it gives them low cost, high value, far reaching exposure for whatever they’re doing. As I write more about the social media value, I’ll cover some of these. For starters, I would say see this post on Twitter or items tagged with social media on this blog. Though, I’ll be covering stuff more in-depth, and high level, alike as I develop this feature of the blog.

As I was cruising through my Google Reader today I had a realization — Don’t provide an RSS feed to your content, if you’re only going to provide a teaser title, sans the actual content, that links to your Web site. Yes, it’s true, you can get better measurements, and better ad hits if people visit your site, but if that’s the motivator, might I recommend FeedBurner (for measuring feed stats) and RSS feed ads to monetize the feed.

Otherwise, content providers just create another irritating step that I’ll breeze past nearly every time if only out of spite. The site in question is that of a large PR organization that I’ve talked about on here before, but try as they might they just don’t seem to get the digital perspective. I know they’re old school, and they’d like to folks to go to their site, and probably even read their newsletter, too… which may even be available via a SASE on printed paper and you might even get it in 6-8 weeks, come on… this is the Web, and the point is to spread your ideas, your perspective, and your voice out there, not lock it down behind another cumbersome layer of linkbait just to lock folks into your site. This is so very old school print media and Web 0.5 at best…

So the new rule for RSS Feeds is this: include the content in the feed, even if only a few paragraphs, or don’t bother offering an RSS feed, at all, as you’ll just make the people who want to read your content irritated. After all an irritated reader won’t be a reader of any kind for very long.

Came across an interesting article here about a local Michigan company, Oneupweb from Traverse City, traveling around the state in a motor home offering up free advice on digital strategy, SEO and online marketing in general.

My initial reaction to this article was two-fold: First, what a great idea and second, this such an excellent example of a socially responsible Michigan firm doing their part to try and help those struggling in the Michigan economy.

However, what Oneupweb teaches here isn’t just about helping Michigan, but really it’s about outreach and social responsibility. As I said in my post here, the Web has always been social and it’s always been about sharing with others. It’s one thing to to do this only in the digital domain of the Web, from the comfort of one’s office or living room, such as I’m doing now, but it’s something else entirely to take this sharing and exchange on the road to meet the man on the street where he lives. Very inspiring.

Social media is a new term for a concept as old as the Web itself. As long as the Web, as a network of connected users has existed, it’s been a social medium. So when you have folks sharing things in a variety of formats (i.e. still images, audio, video, etc.) somehow it becomes social media. That’s it. It’s really that simple. There’s no mystery or secret to what marketers and communicators are calling social media; it’s what the Web has always been from YouTube and Facebook, today, to pimply-faced teens swigging soda on Dungeons and Dragons BBS’ (Bulletin Board Systems) all through the late 70′s, 80′s and early 90′s.

Social media has evolved, the technologies have changed, and the user-interfaces have gotten better, but the core of what the Web is, has changed very little. In recent years, particularly since the Web 2.0 hype began, marketers have tried to frame social media as something else, some kind of communications or awareness panacea whereby you herd your fans/customers into some kind of digital stable, and get a direct, captive audience. This has worked to a very limited extent because as soon as there’s somebody building a fence or stable, there are ten other people building wide open pastures where users can roam free. I’m not sure a model that promotes captivity over freedom will ever exist, online or elsewhere.

That’s the gist of a post I read on Twitter this morning. I laughed out loud when I read that, because social media can be a real time suck, and I know I’ve used those words myself before.

The fact is social media is time and labor-intensive, worse still is if you don’t have any idea where you’re going, or what you’re trying to achieve. You can post on Twitter, Facebook, YouTube, write a daily blog, etc… but that’s hours of work, that needs to be done on a daily basis or at least a couple times a week. Without a plan or a goal there’s also no way to measure if the work is a success, and should be continued.

The fact that tools like Twitter, Facebook, and YouTube are free and blogs can be added to any Web site with little work, and no cost combined with the potential of these tools (to say nothing of the hype factor) has a lot of organizations eager to utilize them. However, because there’s no capital investment organizations aren’t prone to developing a plan or strategy for implementation. Often, I hear of communications managers, web designers, or copy writers inheriting the “social media” piece because organizationally they seem to be the best fit for it… equally often this inheritance comes with no plan, strategy or awareness of how much time the implementation, but more importantly the upkeep of social media takes.

I highly recommend that anybody getting into social media ask themselves what success would look like, then survey the time involved, and most importantly figure out whether there are resources to support it. Once you’ve got these in place then you start thinking about a plan/strategy.

This press release that the IABC – International Association of Business Communications issued yesterday is very interesting to me. It’s titled: Two Out of Three Communication Professionals Don’t Think Twitter’s Popularity Will Last…

To be sure, this is a bold statement, not because I’m a super Twitter user, though I did crack 100 followers yesterday (not much in the scope of @Oprah or @APlusK (Ashton Kutcher)), but because this statement positions itself to be some kind of pronouncement about Twitter as a communication tool. Twitter, or any other Web/electronic communications vehicle is temporal at best, and subject to the natural evolution that has affected communication methods since the dawn of the Web.

With the Web communication approaches are always changing – Usenet, BBS Systems, and Listservs were improved upon by OneList, eGroups and later Yahoo, Google Groups and AOL Instant Messenger. Yahoo and Alta Vista informed Google, which Google improved on. AOL Instant Messenger laid the ground work for ICQ, and Facebook, or semantically different, but no different really, Twitter and micro-blogging. Live Journal laid the groundwork for blogging and MySpace which laid the ground work for Facebook, and Facebook was informed by Twitter when they integrated a Twitter-esque piece into Facebook, which actually was more reminiscent of AOL Instant Messenger status messages… Anyway, you get the point.

Facebook, if they’re still around in ten years, will be radically different. Twitter, if they’re still around in ten years, will be radically different. This is the evolution of sharing ideas, information and our lives in our community, while the definition of community, and what it means to communicate with that community, continues to change.

The bone that I really have to pick with IABC’s press release is their choice of wording in the title. Many communicators don’t get Twitter especially in the context of business. So in some ways this title, from a leading communications organization creates the appearance that they’ve washed their hands of the value that Twitter could add to communications, and the subtext is that communicators should, too… Maybe that’s unintentional, but from my perspective that’s how it comes off.

I’m assuming that IABC considers themselves to be experts in communications, as it is they’re business and issuing this press release could support this theory to some, but truly, if they were they would understand the history and context of not just Twitter but the history of communicating on the Web in general and fold some of that history, if only a couple paragraphs, into the release. They didn’t, though…

Twitter is a tool, and tools become outmoded and improved upon. Anybody trying to harness the power of these tools needs to recognize their temporal nature. Neither Twitter nor Facebook are here to stay in their current form; if they stayed in their current form they wouldn’t exist at all in ten years… MySpace stuck to their “current form” for too long and they’re foundering because of it, replaced by Facebook; same with Yahoo! who were improved upon so long ago by Google that they’ve become the de facto cautionary tale of why you have to change (Read: evolve) or die.

I started doing this blog as an outlet for sharing my experiences, best practices, and things I’ve learned working in the field of electronic communications and digital strategy. The one thing that I didn’t realize, each time I sat down to write a post, was just how much my education in and feelings on leadership would play in the creation of the posts, particularly with regard to publically taking a position in my personal life that might have direct repercussions to my professional life.

One such item that I’ve come to terms with is my belief in marketing as a way of developing long-term awareness rather than a tool for short-term business growth. Some folks might consider this two sides of the same coin, but I don’t. For those people focused on short-term metrics and the bottom-line it’s difficult to imagine that marketing *only* creates an awareness. However, this makes me think of an old adage: You can lead a horse to water, but you can’t make it drink. Some marketers prefer the alternative ending: You can lead a horse to water, and when marketed well, the horse will drink, and drink, and drink. I don’t believe this.

I believe marketing creates awareness. If the universe wants what you’re marketing then awareness will reel those folks in. If the product or service provides lasting value then the product/service will retain them.

Too often marketing or the creation of awarness around a product/service is viewed in the short-term. Without immediate results the marketing is considered a failure, and with great short-term conversion and sales the marketing is considered a success. This makes pretty flimsy criteria for determing success or failure, but to many folks things are just that black and white; for these folks, sadly, reality doesn’t coincide.

Marketing needs to stay focused on the long-term. Creating awarness, opening and changing people’s minds is an extremely slow process. I would argue that there’s no shortcut, and it’s something that an organization must take their time with.

Closed… that’s how many companies today think they can operate their business and successfully employ a digital strategy.

In a world where the lines between what’s work and personal become more blurred, and folks are reviewing message on their Blackberry’s in bed at night, or doing more and more work from home, how can any organization expect that there won’t be some blurring between not just the work into the personal portion of life, but also the personal part of life bleeding into work. They’re hand & glove, and in a world where business wants to leverage social media, transparency and openness for business gains, that doubled-edge sword cuts both ways when social aspects of the business can’t be contained in quite the same way they were in days of old.

This makes businesses very uneasy, and this Business Week article: Web 2.0: Managing Corporate Reputations serves to illustrate this. While a fair journalistic effort, at least from the model of closed, and old model business communications, the story offers very little in the way of what it means to be open, and how openness and transparency can transform corporate reputation, and in some cases define it (Read: The truth will set you free… or when there’s nothing to hide, there’s nothing hide from). However, we’re in a transitional phase, so it makes sense that an open and transparent perspective can be lost especially when you’re talking about big businesses who’s business it’s been to keep things cloaked in darkness.

It’s not fair to think that business can expect employees to be on Blackberry, Facebook, or Twitter dealing with clients, customers, reputation, etc, thus leveraging these new outlets… and that somehow the personal aspects of people’s lives won’t enter the fold. The human experience is messy business, and if you don’t want those lines being crossed then make those lines very clear, and eliminate these pieces from your strategy, because they’ll just be inauthentic in a forum where authenticity rules. Otherwise, the fact that humans can have off-days and make bad decisions is inevitable, and it’s also inevitable that some of that may bleed into business. It happens to everyone, all the time, let’s just be with that, and move on. If a company is authentically open and transparent, nobody will care about an employee’s drunken mis-step or other unsavory details of their life getting out.

An organization with a successful digital strategy embraces openness, transparency and the reality that we’re operating in a world that’s forever out of our control.