Perry

Hewitt

Tag: training

  • Friday 5 — 5.22.2015

    Friday 5 — 5.22.2015


    google maps view

    1. For those of you already planning your Memorial Day driving routes, Google Maps has released useful, new features alerting users to delays and detours as you enter your destination. Beyond the time estimate, new cards provide additional context about potential delays. Related trivia: Google Maps also released the top destinations from Memorial Day 2014.
    2. new twitter searchGoogle is once again showing tweets in search results, starting with mobile. Now you can search for topics and hashtags directly within Google. At the same time, Twitter is rolling out its own more robust search, with new features for logged-out users. My guess is that Twitter native search will cater more to live Twitter consumption of breaking news or events.
    3. More than just music — everyone’s favorite social playlist subscription service Spotify is diversifying into podcasts and programming.
    4. Today’s workforce spans multiple generations, new economy and old economy roles, and various degrees of digital capability. Here’s why the expertise gap matters, and why the first step is acknowledging the problem.
    5. The MOOC (Massively Open Online Course) hype cycle peaked in 2012, but educators are still trying to crack the right formula for effective, online learning. Read this explanation of why primacy of location and cost still matters to motivate learners in a world outside the autodidacts of Silicon Valley.

    Weekend fun:  It’s the long weekend — why not let loose with some street dancing to beatboxers. Bad weather where you are? Then pore through these examples of faux code in TV and movies.

    Every Friday, find five, highly subjective pointers to compelling technologies, emerging trends, and interesting ideas that affect how we live and work digitally. Try out the Friday 5 archive, or sign up for a weekly email.

  • Friday 5 — 10.31.2014

    Friday 5 — 10.31.2014

    comms mobile chart

    1. Benedict Evans demonstrates how mobile is eating the world. It’s worth reading for the astonishing growth metrics, like 80% of all adults in the world owning smartphones by 2020. One larger point is that tech is rapidly moving beyond the tech sector to transform all industries. And for now, that starts mobile first.
    2. Product managers are critical in the software industry — and this discipline is spreading as every company develops a software capability. We need more ways to educate people into becoming product managers, as well as to provide ongoing professional development opportunities.
    3. Reddit added a crowdfunding capability to allow community members to raise money and support causes they care about. Already an early adopter of cryptocurrencies, Redddit is expanding the suite of services that keep community members happy and engaged on the site.
    4. Google now surfaces a sitelinks search box to branded search results — a box that allows you to search a website directly from the Google results page. Here’s how you can disable it.
    5. MOOC 1.0 has emerged from its first hype cycle a little worse for wear. How can we ensure that next generation MOOCs will deliver effective and compelling online learning? Here’s a great roundup of lessons to be learned from other online experiences from commerce to social networking.

    Weekend fun: Dancing with drones? Someone’s gotta do it, I guess.

     

    Every Friday, find five, highly subjective pointers to compelling technologies, emerging trends, and interesting ideas that affect how we live and work digitally. Try out the Friday 5 archive, or sign up for a weekly email.

  • Four Ways to Scale Digital Capabilities Beyond Your Team

    Four Ways to Scale Digital Capabilities Beyond Your Team

    Posted over at Harvard Business Review blog network: Digital today is part of everyone’s job — and many enterprise organizations are adopting strategic mobile, social, and cloud initiatives to educate and empower employees. But these organizations still face a daunting challenge in distributing digital expertise: how do you develop digital competency more broadly across a large organization?

  • 7 tips for digital and social event strategy

    eventThere’s a lot of apt criticism of social media snake oil salesmen — including this terrific Onion video (embedded in a good sendup of TED). But social media does deliver news, shape opinion, and forge connections in important ways.

    In the forging connections department, in-person events remain vital. As much as digital platforms enable you to listen to and share ideas, the value of face-to-face connections has not been eradicated. Facebook was supposed to kill reunions — in many cases, social networking has whetted appetites for the in-person kind.

    So, how do you set the stage for online social media to support a well-orchestrated offline event? A few thoughts:

    1. Clarify the ground rules. Is your event on the record, or off the record? If it’s not specifically stated to be the former, some would-be tweeters or instagrammers might think keyboarding or holding up a camera are out-of-bounds.
    2. Form your social strategy based on your event goals (and yes, that means clarifying your event goals). Is it networking? Then you’re going to make your attendee list public early, and shout out to as many people as possible. Thought leadership? Then you’ll select and link to as many relevant resources (in-house and third party) to put whatever content you’re serving up into context.
    3. Create a concise and relevant hashtag. Character counts are tight, so don’t insert your organizational brand if it doesn’t make sense.
    4. Define your non-attendee strategy. What can or should the experience be for those who are interested in the event, but who can’t attend?
    5. Before: communicate the hashtag to registered attendees and seed it with content. A week or so prior, thank registered attendees, remind people of speaker bios, and point to related news items as appropriate.
    6. During: provide additional value — and this requires a quick and content-savvy resource on the ground. Did your speaker just mention the marshmallow experiment? Make sure attendees get the reference. Where possible, get advance copies of prepared remarks, and pre-select supplemental content.
    7. After: follow up with any wrap-ups (generated by you or any prolific attendees), and any photos/video from the event. Find ways to aggregate and publish the content created by attendees (tweets, posts, photos, video – maybe a Storify?). Thank guests for attending.
    There’s nothing like hosting an in-person event that makes you appreciate the hard work that goes into one. The digital and social elements are now a core component — and an increasingly important competency for event planners and managers.

    Photo credit: Zach Hamed