Judy Payne and John Whitty tackled this question during a courageous conversation as part of an APM Knowledge SIG and brought the results together in this great video.

If your a member of APM’s linkedin group you may wish to add to the conversation that has been taking place.  That’s if your courageous enough.

1. Conveying information – people interact to exchange information with one another.
2. Bonding with others – this refers to all conversations that lack purpose, but increase the sense of kinship between members.
3. Status-jockeying – people interact to defend or increase their status.

And the challenge is to initiate the right balance of discussions as conveying information is often misidentified as the most valuable by facilitators when developing their group.

On a recent webinar by Richard one of the things that stuck in my mind was to find other popular discussions on other forums and see if you can adapt them for your own community

So I asked facilitators from across a few communities on the Knowledge Hub what has been your most active discussion?

This is a snapshot of the types of questions that where popular.  All you have to do is fill in the blanks.

• Does anyone know how to….. ?
• What is your favourite……?
• How is your xxxx organised?
• Has anyone got an xxxx framework?
• What software are you using to do xxxxx?
• Can anyone recommend a training course on xxxx?
• Why do people leave xxxx job?
• How can we help more people get into xxxx?
• Is the xxxx a priority in your area?
• Should xxxx register with multiple agencies?
• Share your pictures from XXXX event
• When will further guidance be available on XXXX?
• Can anyone clarify the standards that should be used regarding XXXX?

You can do this by filtering out all the rubbish and showing your group members all the good stuff.

In exchange, they start paying more attention to your group and are more likely to participate and contribute good stuff themselves.

This is a step-by-step look at how I do my daily content curation. Nothing fancy:

You can even read a recent blog showing the slides used in a recent webinar for the Online Facilitators Community by Steve Dale on Content Curation.

Less time than it takes to make a cup of tea?

Can you content curate in less time that it takes to make a cup of tea.  I believe you can.

As the Telegraph has mentioned “Scientists have discovered that the key to the best tasting brew is to let it sit for six minutes before drinking.”

Seeking

I did all of these things once, to get my toolset in order:

• Set up Google Alerts using key words
• Set up Feedly (Google Reader Alternative)
• Set up Tweetdeck (Add Columns to include relevant hash tags e.g. #kmers = Knowledge Management)
• Set up Scoop It with a theme (Install the Scoop it bookmarklet to my browser)

Add my favourite blogs, news feeds and anything interesting from Google Alerts into Feedly

This should take about 30 minutes and is a one of thing.

Making Sense (Morning)

Review my Feedly / Google Reader list.

• If a headline looks interesting, I read the story.
• If I think my group will find it useful, I open the story in a separate browser window. The reason: You probably first read the post in Feedly / Google Reader. You need to view the article on the publishing web site for the next step.
• Click the Scoop It bookmarklet

This will appear

Add an insight.  You can also post this to other social networks as well.

Making Sense (Afternoon)

Go to Tweetdeck and review the topics of discussion and links on the hashtags you follow.  If one really stands out or is getting a lot of retweets.  Open the tweet and if it is of interest use your scoop it bookmarket.

Sharing

There’s a whole range of ways you can share all the great content you have curated.

Scoop it offers the option to embed a live stream which could be used in your Announcements, Wiki etc.

It also provides a RSS Feed which can be used in conjunction with Blastacasta to import the feed into the group

It also has a new addition of newsletters.  If you select Downlad as zip file and open this in a webpage.  You can copy this and add it to a Blog post.

But I prefer the old fashioned way.  Because this stimulates more conversation and return visits.  And that is to pick the best content and use it to stimulate a discussion.

6 minutes a day – that’s all it takes

Based on the work of Ian Laurie http://www.portent.com

And I’m so glad that Social Media and Online Collaboration CoP is back up and running to balance it and show some great examples of social media use in Local Government.

But I still worry that some organisations are putting themselves at risk in an environment which could make or break them.

At a resent presentation from Steve Dale he highlighted that The Social Skinneypoints out that 85% of people that work in social media have been in the industry for two years.

Don’t get me wrong there are some great people that are doing amazing stuff with social media that have just come into the industry.

But in what other situation would you allow someone with only two year’s experience to be in charge of an organisation reputation?

Maybe some senior managers have not yet seen the light.

HMV

Take the example of HMV whose sacked workers took over the official Twitter account to live-tweet being fired.

And then details came out that that one marketing director was heard commenting‘How do I shut down Twitter?’

And in other tweets posted before they were later removed, staff claimed the account was set up two years ago by an unpaid intern.

Maybe they had not taken the power of social media seriously.

Dow Jones

And if you want to see the power it has Clair from Scoop it, show’s it in this image.

“The Dow Jones recently tumbled almost 150 points in a “flash crash” caused by widespread digital panic. What was the cause of this panic? Twitter.

The story is that someone hacked the official Associated Press Twitter handle and tweeted a false report of a terrorist attack on the White House, which claimed that the President had been injured in said attack.

This is significant in the grander scheme because the Dow essentially measures the health of the US economy and a hit of this magnitude means lots of people (deserving or otherwise) needlessly lost a lot of money in nanoseconds.

There are claims that nearly 70% of trading is done via “high frequency trading” or “HFT,” which employs a trading algorithm that crawls reputable news sources (and social media) and executes auto-trades based on what the crawl produces. In layman’s terms, a robot is reading the news and if it doesn’t like what it reads, it hits the “sell” button. Something like a Twitter hack causing a flurry of selling is a dangerous game to play, especially when most traders don’t have access to social media during the trading day and can’t keep up/compete/compensate for the robo-trades.”

I know Social Media is not going to have as big an impact in Local Government as this example.

But it is interesting and do you still feel that your social media is in safe hands?

Content curation is an up and coming skill and is seen as part of the new digital literacy.

It probably has more relevance to people who are knowledge workers, working in social media and collaboration.  But can be useful to anyone.  I suppose most of us are really knowledge workers now.

It also has very strong links to Personal Knowledge Management which Harold Jarche talks about.

So here is Steve’s presentation from slideshare.

But the facilitators who do engage with me and other facilitators across the platform are much more likely to succeed.

But how do you identify the people with something to share and something to learn.  This is where Performance Improvement Benchmarking (sometimes known as the River Diagram or Maturity Matrix) comes in.

Performance Improvement Benchmarking is a tool that allows you to create a matrix around any topic to identify areas of strong and weak practice.  Once the matrix is complete and benchmarking has begun it will enable you to visualise the knowledge gaps and connect sharers with learners.

Originally developed by Chris Collison and Geoff Parcell as part of Learning to Fly.  It has been used by many organisation covering different topics.

I have used it internally around Knowledge Management and have recently participated in The Knowledge and Innovation Networks Knowledge Management Benchmark.

So how do you use it with facilitators?  Well when I need a bit of inspiration one of the first blogs I go to is Richard Millington’s Feverbee.

Richard wrote a great blog about the Community Management Framework

So I took 7 out of the 8 themes Richard suggested are key to community management/online facilitation and started to develop a maturity matrix for online facilitators.

This is the first version which was tested in-house.  And I will be going wider to the rest of the Facilitators Community that I look after to help us plan the future activities and events for the group.

Below is the Performance Improvement Benchmark and images from the first benchmark that took place.

I created a Storify of the APM’s Knowledge SiG on the 12th March.  You will need to click on the image to take you to Storify

The topics covered included Social media tools, social networks, intranet, social complexity and knowledge sharing

Copies of the presentation from the day are available here

The bit I was especially interested in was the new roles, new skills for the 21st century knowledge professional

Steve covered two areas that I have a particular interest in Community Management and Digital Curation.

Steve mentions that Harold Jarche suggests that Labour is replaceable Talent is not as well as pointing to Dr Daniel Churchill work looking at the future worker and two new skills that are appearing.

Tool Literacy and Digital literacy.

Steve suggests we are moving away from institutions and moving towards a networked and community based way of working.  So having skills in Community Management and Digital Content Curation are handy to have up your sleeve.

What is Community Management?  I still like Dion Hinchcliffe’s explanation of a jack of all trades.  Covering all aspects of Platform management, Project Management, Product Management, Customer Management, Professional Development, Brand Management, Advertising and Marketing, Staff Development, Business Planning, community Management and Content Management

What is Content Curation?  Beth Kanter describes it as the process of sorting through the vast amounts of content on the web and presenting it in a meaningful and organized way around a specific theme.

I will be organising a webinar with Steve Dale in the future to talk about content curation in more detail and to show some handy tips and tricks in how you can use a range of tools to help keep you in the know.  But if you would like to see more of Steve’s work, check out his Slideshare and Blog

Good facilitation gives the community a better chance of success.  But what do they look like?

Dion Hinchcliffe suggested facilitators are jacks of all trades.  But as part of the session I ask them to draw the Perfect Online Facilitator.

It’s always a bit of fun.  But really gets them thinking about the role and the responsibilities they have.

Here are a couple of recent examples.  I hope I never get to meet them in person.