The world of marketing is changing click by click. Organizations and businesses that continue with slick (and often not so slick) ad campaigns to convince consumers that their product is the best are finding out their customers are looking elsewhere. A video that illustrates how consumers are “not buying the slick add messages has received a lot of attention.
I decided early in life that I wasn’t a sales person. I couldn’t get excited about getting people to buy things and I had very little interest in making scads of money. I chose to develop my career in social work with a major focus on youth work and community development. I love my work as a change agent with organizations and young people however this past year, I’ve being taken over by a strong desire to work on my own as an independent consultant. Well we all know that consulting requires sales skills so here I was, looking at my biased attitudes that would surely make me the poorest consultant this side of the 49th parallel. Fortunately I was rescued from myself, when out of the blue, my very good friend Emma, knowing I was entering into a new career territory, suggested that I attend a unique sales training workshop, hosted by her father, a very high caliber training consultant in the sales industry.
Recently I was asked for advice from from a colleague in the educational sector in regards to choosing an online tool for a group of educational administrators. He told me they were a group who were not particularly tech savvy and wanted something to help them share practices around school initiatives they were launching within their Board. He saw the platform as an open space where people can think and share their ideas freely. They opened a site on blogspot.com however he added that they may have some money available to pay for a platform with more to offer than blogspot. His personal criteria was that as long as it was the user friendly, easy to manage and an accessible platform available to individuals who not only have varying degrees comfort with using social networking but also have a range of hardware configurations (and firewalls). In sum he stated that “basically I’m looking for the lowest common denominator”. Well his criteria was a bit fuzzy, but without talking with him in person, I offered these suggestions.
I’m researching the best presentation format for helping audiences of social change agents understand and act on a variety of social work research reports. Today George Siemens at his elearnspace blog wrote about improving his use of visuals to express ideas. When I do workshops I need good visuals that support a solid communication strategy. Like George, I’m working at improving my ability to design effective visuals.
I’ve scrolled through the resources George listed in his post and I was blown away by the excellent tools in each of his links. His list is a portal for every kind of visualization tool you could ever imagine. For my purposes, I discovered that I need to do more strategic thinking about the overall purpose of the presentation before I even open up a slide. The best advice and resource I found came from the Extreme Presentation blog where I learned about the 10 Steps to Extreme Presentation Method. It’s a very powerful tool that I can apply to many of my projects. Below is a master list of visual tools that George collected via his Twitter contacts.
Thinking Visually
Periodic table of visualization methods
Chart of visualization options
Exploratree
WikiViz tools
Social Media Tools for Work & Learning helps organizations build stronger relationships with the people and groups that matter to them, their supporters, consumers and donors.
My work involves helping organizations with: developing their social media strategy; facilitating the web site design & development process; training staff so they can use the content management features of their web site; supporting staff as they measure results and adapt or refine their site to meet business goals.
I’ve served as an Executive Director of non profits and continue to provide leadership on local Boards of Directors. Non Profit groups choose me to work with them because I understand their unique challenges and I am experienced in utilizing social web thinking and tools to build stronger more resilient organizations.
My background and consulting services can be viewed on my Social Media Services page.
I am very pleased with the performance of the Ning Platform for collaboration and networking purposes. So much so, I am recommending this networking software platform for a number of groups I’m working with in York Region. It is a very useful tool for organizations and practitioners wanting to communicate with each other about important issues in their sector. The Ning platform is easy to set up, it’s free, very customizable, easy to administrate and helps create a sense of community among members. Read more…
Some of the best examples of using social media tools come from the corporate business sector. I like to highlight (and promote) how social media tools can be (and are being) adopted by non profit organizations and the educational sector. In this post, I’m showing the extent to which the business world is utilizing these tools and transforming the culture of corporate/consumer learning.
I follow Janet Clarey’s blog at the Brandon Hall Research as she gives great commentary on learning management systems and using social media for workplace learning. Brandon Hall Research provides independent expert advice in the form of published reports and phone consultations on the tools of e-learning; Learning management systems, Learning content management systems, authoring tools, content providers, and other tools that help organizations develop successful e-learning solutions. Read more…
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