Satir-ical

Was great to meet Jim McGee at the Social Media Strategies conference last week.  One great thing that came out of Jim’s presentation was a discussion of the Virgina Satir Change Model for organizational change.  The theory in a nutshell:

  • Things are plodding along within an organization or community
  • There is a "foreign object" (e.g. a new thought, or participant, or strategy) introduced into the organization
  • Things get chaotic while the community figures out how to deal with the new
  • There is a transformational thought, a "transforming idea," and a point at which the group "gets it" and starts to gel in the new world
  • Chaos declines, and performance then trends to a new, improved level

A couple of different visual representations:

From Satir Workshops

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From Jim’s presentation

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Check out the whole thing here on Jim’s blog.

Community Design Patterns

A great presentation on design patterns in communities can be found in the presentation attached below. NOTE: This presentation focuses primarily on the technical patterns (ie. "features") that can be used in creating online communities. It does NOT address the more important issue of the interpersonal and social patterns that emerge.  More on those in a future post.

Rake Purée

Just re-found an article from Fortune Small Business featuring some really solid advice on putting an organization’s people forward, in this case using online video.  Key line:

"People want to do business with a company that has a personality."

Here’s the article.

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Related:  And, just because, here’s an iPhone in a blender.

Twitter VoteReport

We just used Cerado Ventana to create an iPhone, mobile and widget application to support #votereport.  Twitter VoteReport is a non-partisan initiative to call out voting issues, and is urging those with Twitter accounts to report voting issues by adding #votereport to their tweets.  The resulting tweets flow to the site’s home page, and will also be plotted on a Google map.

Here’s where to get it.

As a blog widget

You can put it on your iGoogle page.

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It’s also available as an iPhone app.

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