The road to agreement: when learner and trainer meet in the middle.

A portion of the training I facilitate is for people who might not be there entirely of their own volition. Some training is compulsory and when sold like that creates a barrier between the learner and trainer straight away.

Usually on day one learners don’t entirely meet your eye as you greet them, there is palpable tension. This is where the experienced trainer excels. By engendering an environment of ease and presenting choice to the learner.

The congenial environment can be achieved by the trainer remembering that they are human and to show it. People like to feel in control, by emphasising through verbal and non verbal communication that they are not trying to be ‘dominant’, a trainer can demonstrate that this is not their aim.

And then the trainer can present a choice to the learner: you can enjoy this session and maybe get something out of it or you can choose to leave. The consequences of the decision is for the learner to take responsibility for, and for me this is key. When the learner takes personal responsibility for their learning and actions the door opens and there is where the meeting between trainer and learner truly begins.

Reflections following Human Rights Roadshow #16cities

Last Thursday I attended, along with some fellow human rights trainers, an excellent Human Rights Roadshow put on by the British Institute of Human Rights (BIHR). They are working their way across the country to #16cities to raise awareness of human rights and what’s happening to these rightsunder the coalition government, though I must emphasis in a very nonpartisan way.

One of the guest speakers was Katie Pratt from Equality Southwest who updated us on several interesting changes currently being consulted on by the government. The one of great interest to the third sector (and indeed those in the private sector hoping for a slice of public sector outsourced pie) is the Public Sector Equality Duty which, as the Home Office states on its website is,

at section 149 of the Equality Act, requires public bodies to consider all individuals when carrying out their day to day work – in shaping policy, in delivering services and in relation to their own employees.  It requires public bodies to have due regard to the need to eliminate discrimination, advance equality of opportunity, and foster good relations between different people when carrying out their activities.

The Equality and Human Rights Commission (EHRC) ‘were intending to produce a statutory code of practice on the Public Sector Equality Duty (PSED) for England, but unfortunately, we are no longer able to proceed with this plan. The Government feels that further statutory guidance may place too much of a burden on public bodies. Although the Commission has powers to issue codes, it cannot do so without the approval of the Secretary of State, as we are reliant upon government to lay codes before parliament, in order for them to be statutory’.

All of which makes you wonder how committed the coalition government is to human rights.  Or not as the home secretary , Theresa May, has stated she would like to scrap the Human Rights Act 1998. Obviously she is in favour of human rights, just not for criminals, or asylum seekers, or travellers, or Scottish people (the last one may not be true) but the point I’m trying to make is that one of the beautiful things about being the only country in the world with human rights embedded in national law (finally a number one position we can be proud of) is that they apply to EVERYONE. And once you start chipping away at who qualifies for rights it leads to a slippery slope of entitlement only for ‘good’ people or at least whomever the government of the day classifies as good.

No government will ever like the Human Rights Act as it requires the government to do things it doesn’t want to do. More importantly it offers fudamental protection of the freedoms so many of our forebearers died for. As a nation (feeling very Churchillian by this point) the Human Rights Act is one of our greatest monuments to a democracy built on fairness and equality and it is under threat.

By the end of this year, the Commission on a UK Bill of Rights will report back to the Government on whether the Human Rights Act should be scrapped and replaced with a new UK Bill of Rights. The BIHR have a brilliant guide to this consultation on their website. Please read it. Responses have to be sent to the Commission by the 30 September 2012, so don’t delay! To keep your Human Rights, #Act.

Social Media Influence – measurement and meaning.

Tomorrow night on #nhssm we are discussing social media influence in healthcare – how to measure it and why does it matter. For the purposes of this post I’m being a little more general and relating it to generic social media use.

Measuring our reach and influence

There are numerous freely available measurement tools out there each offering something slightly different. klout is one of the best known and it is commonly said that you won’t get a job in silicon valley without a klout score of over 50. Whilst klout will show you your most influential tweets or posts across numerous social media platforms how that is calculated is less than clear as klout keep their infamous algorithm a closely guarded secret. With at least two different changes that I can remember to how they calculate that score which drastically altered most people’s klout score it is questionable how influential klout remains.

Other social media influence measurement sites such as Peerindex, twentyfeet and Sprout Social offer similar algorithm based scores and each offers something different. They are worth investigating for their own merits as they vary greatly with the information they generate.

The new kid on the block (ish) is kred which seems to offer a different and open method of measuring social media influence. As they say, The main difference from klout is Kred’s transparency.

‘A normal retweet might be worth 10 points, but one from somebody with high Kred might be worth 50. A mention is worth more than follow, and so on. Since Kred is calculating everyone’s scores in realtime, it normalizes your score against the average.’

I particularly like the real time calculation and the beautifully visual lay out.

But why does any of this matter? Two words – social influence.
Social influence occurs when a person’s thoughts, feelings, or actions are affected by others. Essentially, influence is the art of persuasion — the ability to cause a change in mindset or actions so someone thinks or behaves in a certain way. In the world of social media marketing, influence is currency. In order to raise awareness, foster brand advocacy, win attention, and generate real-world action, businesses want to know the answers to questions like:

What are influential people saying about our brand?
How many of my Twitter followers are clicking my links and retweeting my content?
Is our Facebook page creating the kind of engagement I’d hoped?
What is our brand’s “true reach”?

And these questions are interesting to other organisations and individuals too. For example those who want to understand the value of a budget being spent on social media in health and social care. Though social media influence measurement sites are not the panacea to measuring quality of online engagement they offer us the opportunity to see our connectedness in a new light.

A final word is to mention #oiconf
an online influence conference in South Wales happening this Thursday. There are some great speakers lined up and I’ll be following with interest on the hash tag.

The Echo Chamber

My post today is considering how we ensure that our social media interactions are meaningful. A moot point could be do they have to be, after all how meaningful is re tweeting? (If it’s for a cause you believe in then there is meaning, and I’ve argued self into a corner already!

This is from a professional point of view as personal social media use usually serves a need to which we have automatically ascribed meaning. Considering the scope of professional social media use – promotion, information sharing, story telling etc – how do we ensure that what we are tweeting/sharing/pinning/liking is serving identified objectives in a meaningful way and not just adding to the ‘echo chamber’ of noise as social media’s detractors claim.

Certainly we have no control over the sheer volume of others output but we do have control over the quality and volume of our own output. How many of us read through every article we tweet about? I have been guilty of scanning for key words and posting without fully reading content of news articles. This time saving habit could have consequences. We could inadvertently align our organisation with questionable values through sheer laziness. That won’t impress the boss!

My approach to ensure meaning is to be very clear with what I’m trying to achieve with my social media interactions. Whether it is to show support for an event or cause, promote an event or share a news story I make sure that it is appropriate, balanced and relevant to the work I do.
Of course this process is entirely subjective and if you work as part of a team there should be agreed boundaries.

And there’s always the golden rule – make your interactions an authentic representation of your team and organisation – and by extension yourself. People usually know when you’re faking it.