The perfect wedding guest

Dave

We took The Boy to see his former “and beloved” nanny Bonnie get married yesterday. I was a bit apprehensive about his ability to sit through the ceremony, but we hit on an interesting formula. He went down for his nap much later than usual, so he had only been sleeping for about half an hour when we got him up to go. He was dazed and cranky all the way there, and just waking up as we arrived.

He sat quietly and attentively through the short ceremony, then just as it was ending and Bonnie and Steve had been presented for the first time as husband and wife, he said, just loud enough to be heard a few rows away, “All done.” He got an appreciative laugh from the crowd. Then just as they turned us loose to head to the reception, he said, “Now let’s eat cake.”

Integrating social media into your overall strategy: my presentation at the Ragan event at Cisco

Dave

This week I’ll be heading to Cisco in San Jose for the Social Media Summit, put on by Ragan Communications. I’m excited to be attending and even more so to be presenting. I attended a Ragan event at SAS about two years ago, before I took on the Social Media Manager role, and met a lot of smart and inspiring folks, including Shel Holtz and Lee Aase.

The title of my presentation is, “Can 11,000 employees speak with one voice? How SAS is taking social media from grassroots to an integrated strategy.” “SPOILER ALERT: 11,000 employees cannot speak with one voice, and I wouldn’t want them to even if they could.”

I’ll be talking about what we’ve learned in developing our social media guidelines and recommendations for SAS employees and how to effectively create your own. More than that, we’ll discuss how a comprehensive and practical social media policy can form the basis for your social media strategy as a whole.

Whether you’re talking policy or strategy, it all starts with some basics: knowing what your goals are and how you define success, and getting all the right people together in the same room.

If you’re attending the conference, let me know what you most want to talk about. Let me know even if you aren’t attending the conference. We’ll be using the hashtag #RaganCisco. Expect some great content.

Oh, and am I a little nervous that I’ll be onstage immediately before Guy Kawasaki? Yes, but not as much as if I were following him.

The difference between sharing and taking

Dave

We took The Boy to the park today, and when he wasn’t literally running around in circles, he was engaging in his other favorite pastime: trying to gather up everything in sight and hold it all simultaneously. He’s not happy unless he has at least one thing in each hand, which can be hard when you’re climbing on monkey bars.

There was a little girl with some sort of primary-colored wheeled conveyance, and Conrad naturally decided he should be driving it. She wasn’t playing with it at the moment, and he sprinted across the playground, climbed on top of it and started to peddle away.

Now I know he’s only two, but I want him to understand that you don’t just get to grab everything you see. And by the look on the little girl’s face, I could tell she wasn’t particularly happy that this sweaty little boy was absconding with her vehicle. So I said, “Conrad, please give that back to her.”

To which her grandmother replied, “No, he can ride it. Can’t he, honey? You need to share.”

First of all, don’t go turning my lesson about not taking other people’s stuff into your lesson about sharing. I’ve just told my son to do something. Please don’t tell him he doesn’t have to, since, you know, you’re not his parent and all.

Second, do you really want your child to grow up thinking it’s okay to just take other people’s stuff? Or that if someone wants to take your stuff you need to let them? I know the instinct is right, but maybe we need to be teaching the toddlers that you should share your stuff when the other person asks, not when the other person just grabs.

The “big” Boy, the Bunny and the T-shirt

Dave

Since becoming a parent I’ve noticed two things: all the cliches are true, and it’s nearly impossible to avoid them when talking about your child. So this post is basically an extended “they grow up so fast,” with picture.

I just took this picture at breakfast. “I realize I take a lot of pictures of him eating because it’s just about the only time he’s sitting still.” I find it especially poignant for two reasons:

First, he’s wearing a t-shirt we bought him last week on Ocracoke. They didn’t have toddler sizes, so we got him an extra small, thinking he’d grow into it. It fits.

Second, the bunny. I bought that for The Mrs in the days leading up to Conrad’s birth. Somebody had recommended having “focal points” to concentrate on during labor, and this was one of them.

Jean stared at that stuffed rabbit for hours during the most intense and meaningful experience of our “all three of our” lives. Now, two years and a bit later, the reason for that concentration is here, wearing boy’s clothes and getting blueberry juice on Mommy’s focal point.

“insert cliche”

Explaining social media with a sippy cup

Dave

I’m on vacation with The Mrs and The Boy on Ocracoke Island, NC, one of my favorite places on Earth. We had lunch today at Howard’s Pub, an Ocracoke institution known for staying open 365 days a year no matter what the weather.

Somehow we only brought two sippy cups with us to the beach, so when we got back in the car after lunch and realized we’d left one on the table, it was a big deal. I walked back in to try to find it. Keep in mind it had only been a few minutes since we had left.

I told someone who I thought was a manager that we’d left a sippy cup on the table. He seemed kind of annoyed and said, “They probably threw it away. Do you want another one?” I realized he thought I meant the kids cup they had provided and told him it was a cup we had brought ourselves.

“Oh, then it would be at the hostess station,” he replied, and walked away. When I asked the hostess, she gave me a blank look, looked under the counter for a moment and went back to selling t-shirts.

The frustrating thing was I knew the sippy cup was somewhere on the other side of the kitchen door, either in a bus tray or at the top of a trash can or maybe on a shelf if someone had noticed it. I suppose I could have walked into the dish room myself and looked around, but of course, we just don’t do that. All I needed was someone willing to listen to what I was actually saying I needed, and take a moment to look for it.

I spotted our very helpful waiter and asked him. He walked through the door, asked the dish room guys if they’d seen it, and handed it back to me. I thanked him, and was happy we’d tipped him well for his earlier friendly and helpful service.

The old model of customer service requires the customer to conform to the procedures and structures of the company. In the social media model of customer service, it’s incumbent on the company to be where its customers are asking questions and answer them in the way the customer needs, regardless of how things have always been done or whether or not it conforms to their organizational silos and responsibilities.

Even more, it requires people who are willing and able to listen, think for a moment, and do what it takes to resolve a situation to the customer’s satisfaction. That’s always been the customer service model at exemplary organizations. Social media is making it the norm, and highlighting the exceptions.