Getting Back to Where We Came From
It wasn’t so long ago, not quite a decade yet, when I first discovered what a blog was. The idea of sharing ideas and publishing them to the world was new to me. That was what journalists did, and story tellers. Not some computer guy from Minnesota. Yet I was wrong. I read blogs from all sorts of folks, from all walks of life. The blogs with topics furthest from my own experiences were the most interesting, of course. Through the months and years, the people I knew grew from a couple dozen to hundreds, then a few years later, thousands. The impact personally, was tremendous, allowing me...
Read MoreCommunication, or the lack thereof
So an interesting thing happened yesterday. I failed at something I know how to do. It’s easy to let happen, get too many things demanding too much attention and you take your eye off the ball. Something we help our clients work through and watch out for, and here I did the classic lack of communication mistake. It should be okay, I mean, that happens to everyone. And it does. However, the real issue here is that I let myself get distracted from what I’ve been thinking about for some time, and that’s really the ‘shame on me’ part. When you’re passionate about something and really...
Read MoreBehind The Firewall – Rogue Agents
We’ve talked about this before. Employees taking steps on their own to induce change into an organization, to better serve the customers they interact with. We’ve talked about this before, though probably from a corporate perspective rather than a personal one. Let’s make it personal. Most agents of change have historically bent the rules. These people found new, simpler, or better ways of doing things. They didn’t hesitate to take on the leadership role (taking initiative) to make things happen, often without asking for permission or direction ahead of time. Taking risks and...
Read MoreIndependence Behind The Firewall
Have I mentioned recently that I do consulting and implementation work in social media strategy, community development and training? Probably not as much as I should, but I wanted to include that at the top in this post because I don’t bring it up often. It’s also relevant to what many people are doing in their role to help their businesses understand how they can use social media. You see, sometimes you need to induce change and one of many ways is to think like an outsider. Taking the perspective of someone new to the organization, but with a focus on your task at hand...
Read MoreBehind The Firewall – Multifaceted
Much of what social media is can be viewed differently from different angles. There’s a marketing side, a public relations side, a technical side, a communications side, and a human side. It’s these different aspects of social media that combine to confuse what “it” is for. It’s so easy for people working for an organization to mistake the varying degrees of social media for things that seem frivolous or unneeded. Instead, focusing on the one facet that appeals to them or their role in the organization without recognizing the opportunities of a fully integrated...
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About Me
Rick Mahn is the Founder of SMBMSP, Principal of Rick Mahn & Associates, and a Sr. Information Technologies Architect with Experis. With over two decades in Information Technologies Architecture and Social Media, Rick connects people & organizations by embracing new technologies and open standards.Learn more about Rick.
