I'm no expert

WTF is digital anyway

Posted on June 22, 2016 by carolynemitchell

Last week I went to the National Digital Conference in London which had a stellar line-up including a government minister, a Lord, an award-winning digital first council, the Executive Director of the GDS and a true celebrity in Maggie Philbin.
Whilst the speakers had a lot of valuable things to say, the comments by and conversations between delegates on Twitter was where the action was happening.
Rather than try to recreate what I learned by rewriting it all I’ll group the soundbites together under headings and try to make some sense of it all for you.

Organisational transformation

Innovation and disruption are key for the digital future. Risk-averse organisations take note – you will be disrupted!
You can’t redesign a service without redesigning the organisation that delivers it
It’s easy to upgrade to the latest device. It’s hard to upgrade digital skills
Digital transformation means business transformation, not just shoving forms on the website. We need to transform the way we deliver services and the way we work
Electoral registration was given as an example of good use of real-time data. However if it’s about business transformation, when will Parliament be transformed? It still took an age to have the ‘emergency’ legislation passed to extend registration
You can’t transform the whole organisation overnight. Start small – GDS was purposely a bolt on to the Civil Service with a clear remit to transform a handful of high volume transactions to prove it was the way forward
The GDS was deliberately conceived as an insurgent start-up and it’s delivered 20 brilliant public services digitally
If you want to attract the right employees to an organisation in the throes of a transformation programme you need to rethink your recruitment process. Change recruitment and the image of the organisation to align with the transformation programme
Job adverts and job descriptions need to be disrupted to bring diversity. Engineer or coder could be called problem solver to attract right people
The challenge isn’t getting troublemakers into your organisation. It’s making sure they still want to cause trouble after a year in the job. Create an environment to let them disrupt. Don’t make them conform
Providing digital services is a journey without an end point
Don’t write passwords on Post-it notes? Well, stop making me have 23 different passwords which need changing monthly then!
Automate processes and humanise jobs

Data

Data needs to be used with caution. What are the human stories behind the data
Data can be manipulated and can be difficult to analyse, especially when there is a data analysis skills gap

Digital literacy

There is a desperate shortage of digitally capable staff in the civil service and local government. This has been identified as a major barrier. There is also a lack of CPD for staff with digital skills
Digital literacy should be part of the curriculum and there should be modern apprenticeships in digital (when I checked Skills Development Scotland there are no digital apprenticeships in our area, only social care. Imagine if those carers were digitally literate and could help those they care for to use digital to enhance their lives)
The future is inspiring and the digital opportunities are endless – why then are IT classes in school so dull. Time to reframe?
According to @maggiephilbin the teachers who supported her TeenTech programme did so in their own time and bought resources with their own money. They shouldn’t have to
Qualifications have become a proxy for skills. It’s time to disrupt the education system and move to experience-based assessment of capability instead of rote learning and exams
Chicken/egg. We have a digital skills gap but right now who’s going to teach our teachers so they can teach our kids?
Let’s celebrate the creatively disruptive pupils in our schools. They may hold the key for our digital future
Coding is just a language and should appeal to people used to being around languages (research has shown that the part of the brain used for learning a new language shows more activity in girls than boys. Girls are more likely to think abstractly about language than boys. All of this means that girls are more than capable of learning coding – it just needs framed in the right way to attract them to it – https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2008/03/080303120346.htm)
I want to talk about STEAM not just STEM. The real magic happens at the intersection of STEM with the Arts
You don’t need to know how to code to work in digital. There’s more to Digital than coding & IT, there’s design, ux, marketing. We need to break down stereotypes and get more girls engaged
Social media is the easy way into digital for girls but most schools see social media as bad and a risk. This needs fixed
IT and digital are different worlds. Digital needs removed from computing class and embedded in every subject, along with data analysis

WTF is digital anyway?

IT costs are going up 60% every year. Digital does not mean IT. People are at the heart of digital – digital needs humanised
So it should really be Customer First rather than Digital By Default?
If the Executive Director of the GDS says digital isn’t about computers then it’s not. End of
Disabled people use digital every day to live their lives. Use them and their experience when building digital services. If it works for them it will work for everyone

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Leadership

Feel the fear and do it anyway
Creativity, bold thinking etc. should be considered ‘core skills’ not ‘soft skills’
If you need to pitch digital to your CEO you may have the wrong CEO – he/she is a black cab driver when all his/her customers are using Uber
Women need to apply for digital leader positions, and commit to applying until women fill more than half of digital roles
GDS are leading by example on equality – staff won’t speak at events which don’t have a balance of diverse speakers
You can’t impose culture on a team, all you can do is provide the right environment
It’s OK to think out loud about organisational culture

GDS

Wigan Council – doing digital right

The Wigan Council Deal – contract between citizens and the council
1 in 3 citizens in Wigan use an online account to transact with the council
Wigan Council have co-designed with residents and partners and in doing so have connected communities

Growing old digitally

Medicine can prolong life. Can digital make life worth living?
Watches have changed from time pieces to heart monitor, fitness monitor and more
For wearables at work look no further than @Rarelyimpossibl Theirs are even linked to personalised soothing @Spotify playlists
We no longer have a 3-stage life (education, work & retirement). Lifelong learning and digital resilience is needed to enhance the lives of those living to 100

What about the tech

Tech and tools aren’t about bells and whistles, they are about enabling you to do your day job effectively
We downgrade on the tech we use when we walk through the office door

The irony wasn’t lost on those delegates, including me, for whom the event wifi wouldn’t work!

I also think that it’s about time the annual National Digital Conference left London and went on tour – I have suggested Glasgow next year.

But I’m not holding my breath.

Culture is king (or queen)

Posted on May 24, 2016 by carolynemitchell

It would be unfair to share my latest homework for Seth Godin’s Leadership Workshop on Udemy. Instead I’ll share my notes from his lecture.

The culture of the organisation you build changes everything.

Culture defeats strategy.

Culture defeats tactics.

Culture is at the heart of whether you are going to get to where you want to or not.

Too many leaders fall into a trap – they become so focused on survival, on getting the job done and moving forward that they sacrifice culture.

We get the culture we deserve.

What corners are you happy to cut? What kind of culture do you want?

Establishing the culture should drive everything that you do going forward.

Don’t do things in the way they have always been done.

Do them in the way that will get you where you want to go.

You need to know where you’re going

Posted on April 14, 2016 by carolynemitchell

Seth Godin reckons you need to see the end before you begin the journey and this is what makes it so difficult to be a leader.

To be able to be a leader you have to be able to paint a picture of where you want to go and know where you want to end up before you even set foot out of the proverbial door. That doesn’t mean you have to know how you’ll get there but you have to claim the destination.

All of us are good at dreaming about alternative futures. The difference is that once you say it out loud you have with the fact that it might not work or even that it will more than likely fail and humans aren’t trained for this.

Seth’s homework for this lecture was to write down where we want to go and what we’re scared about if we don’t get there.

Me, I want to go to many different places, both personally, professionally and there are places I want my organisation to go. I have many different pictures I want to paint but they are created with similar brush strokes.

There are two strands to my work:

a massive transformation programme involving the whole organisation
a different way of working for my department

The journey on the transformation programme will be complex with many twists and turns and possibly some dead ends.

Embed from Getty Images

The final picture is simple – an online platform designed with the user in the centre that allows quick and easy transactions. The mantra is ‘do it like Amazon’. From the backend of the platform the organisation should be able to gather customer information to allow for service improvement as well as data to help us understand our customers. Overall we should create an efficient organisation as we go.

There are many people involved in this project and sometimes it feels out-of-control, drowning in data and outstanding tasks. Sometimes things are crystal-clear.

I will also share this nugget from another hero of mine, Daniel Kahneman:

“Plans for reform almost always produce many winners and some losers while achieving an overall improvement. If the affected parties have any political influence, however, potential losers will become more active and determined than potential winners; the outcome will be based in their favour and inevitably more expensive and less effective than planned. Loss aversion is a powerful conservative force that favors minimal changes from the status quo in the lives of institutions.”

What I fear about this is failure. Failing to make a tool that works for the customer and the organisation. Failing to complete on time and on budget. Failing, failing, failing.

The department picture is a comms department that uses customer insight to create targeted campaigns that will change behaviour and lives for the better. Campaigns based on evidence that can be evaluated to show our worth as a team.

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I have no fear for this picture because I am confident about the journey and the people who’ll be taking this road trip with. It feels more like I can follow the route in my head and recognise landmarks along the way.

This journey has fewer unknowns and I’m on the trip with people wo also know where they are going and can maybe take a share of the driving.

Its not too late to join me on Seth Godin’s Leadership Workshop on Udemy. You should come along for the ride.

Follow the leader

Posted on April 11, 2016 by carolynemitchell

I’ve started another course – Seth Godin’s Leadership Workshop on Udemy.

I’ve been a fan of Seth’s for years now. I have devoured his books, subscribed to his newsletter and been disappointed that I couldn’t jet to New York for his regular workshops. Needless to say I jumped at the chance of this online course.

Even the first three minute lecture had some gems:

Leadership is not management
Management is getting people to do what they did yesterday cheaper and faster today
Management is the practice of compliance
Leadership is about change and enrolling others to help make it happen

My first exercise is to reflect on a few things and share it somewhere that others doing the course will be able to see.

So here goes.

Outline a moment when someone you respect engaged in leadership

I wish I had been there to witness this as it happened but I was on a flight heading out on my honeymoon. I heard all about it on my return.

In the early hours of the Sunday morning after my wedding, while we were still partying, Princess Diana died in a car crash in Paris. I was in Turkey for two weeks and missed the funeral and the mass outpouring of grief.

I worked as a journalist on Scotland’s biggest selling Sunday newspaper (at the time) and when went back to work I was full of curiosity as to how Diana’s death had been dealt with by the paper and its sister magazine. The then editor of the magazine was my line manager and a huge Diana fan. She had been in that post since the magazine’s inception and often had run-ins with the male dominated staff of the newspaper. She approached the paper to help with the extensive coverage she expected they would be doing only to discover that the editor of the paper wasn’t considering doing anything other than a straight news piece. Lengthy arguments then ensued with the editor of the paper claiming that no one was that interested in Diana now she wasn’t strictly royalty and my boss claiming that he was completely missing the public sentiment and that the paper’s readers would be disappointed. She reckoned they’d go out and buy The Sunday Mail instead. When he still wasn’t for backing down she threatened to resign but was talked out of that by her staff. Instead she devoted the magazine to Diana with the full backing of my colleagues produced a special edition which won the praise of our readers and proved to the editor that we understood his readers better than he did.

Describe a time when you chose to lead

I suppose I have been a leader when it comes to using social media in an emergency but this has happened outwith the organisation I now work for and has been more at a national level.

My masters dissertation was on this subject and as a result I was asked to join a Scottish Government advisory group and I have spoken at many events and delivered training on the subject. I enjoy training sessions when you see people have that eureka moment and you know you’ve won over a few more hearts and minds to the cause.

Embed from Getty Images

However internally this tends to be overlooked and I have observed that in hierarchical organisations like mine it often takes a consultant to persuade management about something their own staff have been saying for a while.

Do you agree leadership is a choice?

Yes. You can’t force someone to lead. Well, you can try but they’ll make a terrible job of it, certainly at the start. However, I have often seen people lead without realising it. I think that if you have the beginnings of a plan you need to test it to see if there will be any buy-in before you dive in head first. At those early stages a person can be leading without any consciousness that what they are doing is gaining momentum. Maybe the person has been the lynchpin in a project or a team and then transitions subconsciously into a leadership role once they’ve found their own groove. I think that’s what happened to me with social media – I was in the right place and the right time, reading the right stuff and networking with the right people.

What is the change you are trying to make

I want the organisation to put the customer at the centre of everything it does. We are in the middle of a massive transformation programme and I worry that, rather than customer centric service design, we are building services to suit the organisation. My team is fully on board with UX but in a big, hierarchical organisation it can be difficult to make your ideas heard when you are a small cog in a big wheel.

This first exercise in the course has been a difficult exercise for three reasons:

landing anyone in it for describing them as a leader
landing myself in it for not describing someone else as a leader
not sounding like I’m blowing my own trumpet for describing anything I have done as leadership

This last point needs to be addressed, particularly for Scottish women. We need to stand up and be seen and heard as the leaders we are so that we can encourage the younger women coming up behind us that they have as much right to to lead and take credit for leading as the men in suits who often have louder voices but not much to say.

*stands down from soapbox

Intranets are hard work

Posted on October 27, 2015 by carolynemitchell

When Wedge asked me to do a lightning talk at Intranet Now about user experience testing on a budget I jumped at the chance.

We’d just inherited our intranet from IT and an upgrade to the platform, a new task-based approach and a new design all made the task a bit daunting. I could soak up as much learning as I could then apply it back at base.

Luckily I was on pretty early in the programme so I could concentrate after I’d done my talk and scribble copious notes which I will now share. There were common threads:

intranets available to all staff on all devices, at work, at home and on the move
intranets as digital workplaces
the importance of UX

James Robertson of Step Two Designs (Australia) – How to make the most of the emerging digital workplace

Technology should allow your intranet to be delivered to staff not on the network.

Business solutions should integrate with the intranet to create an efficient workforce.

The intranet is not a thing – it’s a family/collection of interconnected digital tools.

Design should add value and should be task driven.

Intranet teams should be experts on :

change management and adoption
how the business ticks and what the pain points are
usability, UX and web design

Paul Zimmerman of Invotra – Intranet of Things – innovation in the workplace

Just like the Internet of Things collects data for improvement and innovation, so should the intranet collect data to optimise workplace processes.

The Intranet should be a connector of people, content and things. Rooms, desks, fire extinguishers, printers – all are trackable and provide info on their status. Could the intranet be used as part of their management process?

We live in an attention economy where internal comms needs to compete for employee attention.

Kevin Cody of SmallWorlders – Bridging the intranet adoption chasm

There are the three levels of engagement:

laggards – need a reason to log on
majority – need a reason to return i.e. the tools to help them work efficiently
early adopters – need a reason to lead e.g. social features, self-service, collaboration, user blogs

Create credible KPIs to measure engagement.

Intranets need to provide the basics for maximum engagement.

For more information and loads of great whitepapers see www.smallworlders.com/blog

Kristian Norling of Intranätverk – Tips for intranet search

Search is not a project – it’s a lifelong commitment. That’s why it’s called WORK.

You should delete as often as you contribute. Have Delete and Donut Fridays. (I quite fancy Corrs and Cake Tuesdays.)

Watch out for information ROT – Redundant, Outdated and Trivial.

Dates are the most important part of metadata. Based on the date you should delete, archive or keep.

Susan Quain of Care UK – Bringing your organisation with you

As the project changes around you keep the scope clear and continuously revise the comms plan. Tell them what you are going to do. Tell them you are doing it. Tell them you have done it.

Make sure you have some quick wins to gain employee confidence.

Don’t call it a project – call it an initiative.

These are @lisariemers rather nifty notes from my presentation

So the rest of my notes didn’t make much sense but here are the soundbites:

staff have the right to see organisational news first on the intranet before it hits the papers
compliance with business processes is directly related to how far away the employee is to HQ
profiles + tagging = tailored content + learning
can your intranet be trusted – people only trust things that work so do the basics well
is your staff directory up-to-date? Every now and again force staff to update their details before they can use the search
the Greater Internet Fuckwad Theory – normal person + anonymity + audience = idiot
tone does not travel well online. Keep an eye on debates and step in if needed but as a mediator understand all perspectives
just making your intranet look good doesn’t mean people will use it
turn off the magazine and newsletter and give your intranet a chance. Switch off the offline and the old way of doing things
replicate the way people interact with technology outside of work
is it time to drop the term intranet? What we really mean is a digital workplace – a digital space that enables employees to work more effectively and efficiently

And there you have it. A full-on day of intranet learning. A huge thanks go to Wedge and Brian for organising such a great event and for recognising that it is needed. Also a massive cheer to the great speakers who passed on their wisdom and to the audience for their feedback and support.

The full line-up and slides are on the Intranet Now website.

Are you sure your intranet is doing its job?

Posted on June 16, 2015 by carolynemitchell

Other people get excited about going to a Take That concert or meeting a celebrity chef. Me, I prefer web superstars, so when I heard Gerry McGovern was running a How to Simplify your Intranet workshop in London, the fangirl in me went into overdrive.

I have read his books, joined his webinars and applied his top task theory to our organisation’s website but the intranet was a mystery wrapped in an enigma.

Following a service review, our team has just inherited the intranet from another department. So the timing of Gerry’s workshop was perfect for us – new team, new version of the content management system (CMS), new version of the intranet.

To kick off the workshop we went round the room and three main themes emerged:

how to make a self-service intranet
the competing needs of users, content creators and HR
how to stop the intranet being the place where PDFs go to die

One delegate summed up his desire eloquently:

“I want the intranet to delight employees. They shouldn’t just tolerate it and it definitely shouldn’t disappoint.”

Gerry then asked us what one thing each of us would change tomorrow if we could and this again produced themes:

introduce a top task approach
make the intranet a place to collaborate
make things easier to find
make it accessible outside the network to allow remote working
tighten up the governance

Then Gerry got down to business and believe me, his passion takes no prisoners.

“Your intranet should be the antidote to a bad week,” was one of his first comments. “It should be there to make your job easier. It’s not just there for adjusting flexi or booking holidays – it should help you with your day-to-day tasks and free up your time.”

And we were off.

Most of this is soundbites from my notes but I’ll try my best to make it flow.

Why base your intranet on top tasks?

The first step to a great intranet is identifying the organisation’s top tasks, the important, most used ones. It also helps to know what the tiny tasks are too because this is where the ego of the organisation lies – the stuff managers want on but which don’t add value or simply aren’t used.

Tiny tasks go to bed at night and dream of being top tasks but they generally never do grow to be top tasks.

The metrics you use on your intranet will tell you some of this stuff but cold hard stats don’t give you context. Don’t rely on Google Analytics alone – you need to look at actual human behaviour.

Before you start on the quest to find your top tasks, identify the influencers in senior management and get their buy-in. You need their protection because you are the enemy of the tiny tasks and therefore the enemy of the egos of those who don’t get what you’re trying to do.

In the short-term, ditching tiny tasks will not win you friends.

Gerry described how the CEO of Aer Lingus booked flights on competitors’ websites during senior management meetings to show how it should be done – this is the kind of buy-in you need.

Stop creating content

Humans like to create things but hate to finish and maintain. They also hate to delete. This is why we have bloated websites and intranets.

Stop building and start managing – iterate, iterate, iterate.

People are rewarded for creating but tell someone you deleted 50 documents and they raise their hands in horror – this needs to change. Deleting the stuff getting in the way of doing the top tasks is one of the most productive things you will ever do.

If deleting is too scary, archive instead but you need a document retention plan.

Archive nothing you will kill your intranet. Archive everything and you will kill your archive.

Your archive is a fox and your intranet is a chicken – keep them together and all you have is a fox.

Measuring success

Tasks need to be measurable and you need to be able to set targets but whatever you do, don’t measure page hits – hits stands for How Idiots Track Success!

Don’t measure volume – measure use. Test your intranet and base decisions on evidence.

Test, test and test again

If there’s one thing that will get managers on your side it’s saving money or making efficiencies, and the savings we’re all aiming for on our organisations’ websites can be made on our intranets.

Focus on what people do

eureka moment Manage the task, not the channel. Don’t manage the intranet or the content – manage the thing people are trying to do and if it means getting involved in changing the process in the back office, roll up your sleeves and get stuck in.

Always focus on the task. Bring the tools, policy, FAQ, news etc to the task – if they are standalone they are just noise.

Self-service is the buzzword of the moment for intranets but most content isn’t fit-for-purpose or even understandable without an expert to interpret it.

Sources of your task longlist

Creating a task longlist

Once you have your longlist get people to quickly choose their top five tasks

If it doesn’t help complete a task get rid of it. Policies are all well and good but people don’t look for a policy document – they just want to complete the task they came on to do.

If you need it to complete the task but people drop out, it needs rewriting.

Top task life cycle – identify task, measure the baseline (it will be horrible), make the changes, measure again, repeat indefinitely.

Navigation

Navigation is the most important part of a top task website. Make labels clear and avoid creating ‘dirty magnets’ – terms that attract users for vague reasons e.g. FAQs or Knowledge Base. eureka 2

Put things where people expect them to be. Documents may be produced by your legal department but don’t put them there if people naturally gravitate towards marketing for them.

Don’t use labels like ‘Useful links’ – what’s the alternative, ‘Useless links’? Start at your top level then work your way down, aiming for a 90% first click success rate.

Employees will trust an intranet that helps them do their job, not one that is used as a propaganda tool.

Research around the world shows that two thirds of employees feel overwhelmed – this is your business case for an intranet overhaul.

We wouldn’t accept broken chairs or desks in the office, but we accept a broken digital workplace. Imagine if content that went past its sell-by date started to smell. We wouldn’t tolerate it and we wouldn’t have the bloated intranets most of us have to put up with.

The difference between the web and the intranet is that on the web people spend a lot of time and money making sure their content can be found. On an intranet being found means having to do some work!

Gerry’s international research boils intranets down to five main navigation categories:

About me
Find people & collaboration
News/current affairs
About the company
Core – the essence of what your organisation delivers

Focus on the core.

Working out the navigation

The future

Socitm are considering getting involved in intranets in a similar way to the Better Connected review they do of council websites each year. They attended Gerry’s workshop and we discussed creating a space to compare top tasks and best practice because, let’s face it, internal tasks are going to be pretty similar across the board. Watch this space for more details.

You can have a look at #intranetnow on Twitter where you will find notes and Periscope films from the organiser @Wedge .

This post was first published on All Things IC blog 14 May 2015. Thanks go to Rachel for the opportunity to share.

Happenstance is a wonderful thing

Posted on January 18, 2015 by carolynemitchell

So this year I’ll be 47 – three years off 50. I thought my life would be slowing down, but then sitting on the couch watching Coronation Street or Eastenders has never held much appeal.
Last week my latest course started so I’ve been busy reading research papers all week. The course is brand new, a Pg Cert in Making Use of Digital Research, distance learning at Edinburgh University. The first module looks at the social shaping of digital research – I had my usual wobble, thinking I wasn’t going to be intelligent enough but I suspect I just picked the wrong paper first.
One paper struck many chords though. My last post about teenage relationships on Facebook drew a comparison to some of Danah Boyd‘s research and I’m ashamed to admit I didn’t even know who she was at the time. I did a bit of digging though and was pleased to discover that my random thoughts are actually being proved right by actual research by someone so influential. Her paper Six Provocations for Big Data echos more random thoughts of mine about how the white male geeks have had their way too long and that coding and data analysis should be core to every pupil’s learning, across every subject, a conversation I’ve had with our Education Improvement Manager and Caroline Stuart Business Development Director at Oracle. About 18 months ago I had a T-shirt made with the legend ‘The geek shall inherit the earth’ on the front and if we don’t act soon it’ll come true. For our children to understand the world round about them they will need killer coding and data analysis skills.

This course is aimed at policy makers and our employee development manager is keeping an eye on the course for colleagues. I’ll give you regular updates on here but if I’m anything to go by an old dog can definitely learn new tricks, especially if there are biscuits involved!
The other things that will be keeping me busy is a research project at Glasgow University. I was asked by the project lead for some feedback on his initial proposal and after a couple of reads it blew my mind.
The Serendipity project’s aim is to develop a dashboard for use by organsations to help with decision-making when working on new policies. It can also be used to give a real-time picture of a place or scenario and maybe even used during emergency situations to help work out the best decisions on the fly.
The idea is to overlay real hard data with all available social data to create community biographies. It’s hoped that public behaviour could also be predicted over time.
For instance if you overlay all the anti-social behaviour data a council has about an area with all the sentiment created about the area on social media you’d get a rounder picture than just all the bad news.

If there’s a major accident on the roads, social info about how people divert around it can be used to model future behaviour and help roads departments and the police plan ahead.
During incidents, past research can be overlaid with social data and emergency planning decisions about evacuations etc and can be tested for potential public reaction before they are actually announced.
It’s looking highly likely that the council will be signing up to the research to be partner, although the details still have to snagged. Needless to say I’m excited.
I might not be ready for the easy chair yet but a nice comfy pair of slippers wouldn’t go amiss and maybe a SAGA holiday brochure.

A song from me to you

Miles Kane – Happenstance

That status narrowly missed me

Posted on December 12, 2014 by carolynemitchell

When you’re 14 Facebook comments can make or break friendships but in my experience it’s like real life – everyone falls out then their best of pals two days later.

Teenage relationships tend to be fluid but until social media they were played out in youth clubs, classrooms, bedrooms and the playground. Often the only parental inkling of teenage turbulence would be a passing comment along the lines of:

“How was school today?”

“Fine.”

“You going round to Sophie’s tomorrow?”

“Nope.”

“Why?”

“Just don’t feel like it.”

Then tomorrow she goes round to Sophie’s as usual, like nothing was ever wrong.

And then Facebook happened. Now the drama is there for all to see and we, if we’re Facebook parents have to learn when to pretend we didn’t read that or when to have a quiet word in the shell-like.

As a networked parent I’ve held my daughter’s social media hand along the way, from CBeebies aged 4 to Facebook, aged 12 and three quarters. I’ve hopefully given her the tools to keep herself safe, in general and to think about channel security settings. Now she’s a bit older she’s now helping me get my head round Vine, Instagram and Snapchat.

However, on Facebook, among teenagers there’s this phenomenon known as an aimed status. Yes, aimed statuses are a thing.

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My daughter and some of her friends are friends with me on Facebook and I kind of noticed these aimed statuses a while back. A random statement, seemingly plucked out of nowhere, no one tagged, no one named, but something, usually snide, aimed at someone who’s hacked you off. The first time I noticed them for real was when I thought one of them was aimed at me. Turns out it wasn’t but it showed me the power of an aimed status to raise paranoia levels.

I’ve noticed lots of these going through my news feed – they all seem to be at it – and the flurry of responses is sometimes funny as friends try to work out who it’s aimed at. Everyone has a laugh and it all blows over.

Then this happened.

“You’re pathetic tbh. Sort yourself out.”

A couple of people chipped in with suggestions as to who was being pathetic. The one girl who’d been ruled out but hadn’t obviously read all the posts suggested she be tagged the next time my daughter was aiming a status at her.

Her retort? “I wasn’t talking about you but if the shoe fits.”

At this point there were about 5 people in the conversation and 10 comments. Then the girl’s mum waded in, all guns blazing and it all took a turn for the serious.

Suddenly the people in the conversation were being accused of treating her daughter badly. She then went on to name a mutual friend on Facebook for all to see and described her as ‘troubled’ and said she’d already warned my daughter away from her but didn’t listen.

To Alyx’s credit she came right back with the fact that she can choose her own friends thank you very much.

At this point I felt I had to intervene to I posted the following:

“Facebook is not the place to be having discussions like this. If you have any issues with my daughter I’d appreciate a grown-up phonecall, not a slagging session on here with a bunch of teenagers.”

This comment got 18 likes – almost a record for me.

A few comments later one of the teenagers came out with this gem of a truth:

“Teenage lassies argue all the time then fall back in within a week anyway.”

And another:

“If my mum was fighting my battles for me in an aimed status I’d take a head dive out my window.”

265 comments happened while us mums had a heated Messenger debate – I never got the grown-up phonecall. Turns out her daughter was giving as good as she got with the aimed statuses but had been blocking her mum! But she doesn’t think that I should leave Alyx to fight her own battles because she’s just a child.

Well, actually I consider Alyx at 14 to be a young adult and if she can put her own wrongs right then I’ve taught her well.

However, the lesson learned from this is that a parent diving head-first into a Facebook conversation is like butting into a playground conversation – wrong, cringey and just a tad creepy.

What starts as teenage banter suddenly becomes slander when an adult joins in.

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As for aimed statuses, I might not like them but they seem to be as much part of teenage life as spots and Freederm.

I’m pretty much over you and your random thoughts tbh . . .

A song from me to you

I think your ears are bleeding

Posted on November 28, 2014 by carolynemitchell

So my last blog caused a bit of a stir. Most people felt my pain. Others thought it was the braggers who had the problem.

One person took things into their own hands and nominated me for a Comms2point0 UnAward.

David Grindlay from Falkirk Council has been a partner in social media crime for a few years now. We met on Twitter, then at social media events, then at regular meetings. Now he’s a firm friend of the whole family. I’m sure our paths would have crossed eventually but social media sped things up. He phones me every now and again to ask a question, usually about social media, sometimes about emergency comms, occasionally about behaviour change. I always come off the phone feeling sorry for him because once I start talking I rarely come up for air. I always imagine him putting the phone down, ears bleeding and gently banging his head off his desk.
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But I guess his ears must be OK and he must value my input or he wouldn’t have taken the time to write such a glowing nomination. I was overwhelmed, happy that someone I respect thought so highly of me. But at the same time the Calvinist in me was on the verge of breaking out in hives.

There were 202 nominations for the UnAwards and a panel of judges did the shortlisting, although Dan and Darren couldn’t shortlist the Best Comms Officer category. I don’t know who was responsible for picking me but I’d like to thank them because being shortlisted for a Comms2point0 award, un or otherwise, means more to me than anything from the CIPR or any other official body.

I love Dan and Darren and have learned so much from them over the years that I wouldn’t be the person I am today without their help and influence.

I met them on Twitter, then in person. I have worked for the day with them when they were at Walsall Council. I have been in the audience at events where they have presented or run workshops. I have eaten curries with them and drunk pints. On Monday I co-presented with Dan at a social media training day and that was just the icing on the cake – sharing knowledge with comms colleagues and sharing a stage with one of my social media rock stars. In fact, I was also sharing a stage with another social media rock star, Leah Lockhart, another person I met on Twitter but now count as an actual, real life friend.

And that’s the great thing about comms people on social media – we really bring the social part to the table. Twitter breaks the ice at events – suddenly people you’ve been talking to for months in bursts of 140 characters are right there in front of you and the niceties have already been done.

I have regular get-togethers at the house and have invited Twitter acquaintances whom I now count as friends.

I have never been more social in my life.

I used to be the painfully shy kid, who’d go red if the teacher asked me a question in class.

I’d go to parties and stick with the friends I went with.

I could never pluck up the courage to speak to a stranger – I mean, what on earth would I say.
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