Social Media How-to For New Employees
Break the rules to inspire change
(WORLD) With the word ‘recession’ still rattling around in our consciousness, people in our friendsphere’s will be shifting roles and enjoying new positions. This allows these new starters a great opportunity to set a template for how they work best and shake things up in a stale office.
Start using social media tools, apps and spaces from day one, which will inspire and include your new colleagues. The plan is to influence office procedure and communication dynamics so your new workmates enjoy the refreshing way of working together and score you some big brownie points in the process.
Here’s some ideas to get you started, and are things I began doing in one of my old jobs:
1: Stay connected: Twitter from your phone: coffee breaks, cigarette/fresh air breaks, toilet breaks, lunch breaks, dull meetings. If anyone asks, you’re making notes, not texting!
2: Introduce your skills into your new role, whether the job requires it or not, it shows you’re diverse and valuable to other areas of the company, no matter which department you work in.
3: Get in early/leave late: use company time for your own benefit. If anyone asks, tell them you’re researching a project, or something.
4: Research: Set up a delicious acc. and store all your valuable research finds and those dumb links people send you in emails, under a company account name that is private or known only to you.
5: Organise: Create a Bubbl.us of office seating plans, flow diagrams, org charts, ‘who’s next to be fired’ lists etc.
6: Offer to take notes in a meeting and blog away happily, whilst your phones’ voice recorder captures all as a ‘backup’ (remember to pause when the conversation dies down). Convert the audio to qwerty later, telling people, your Word Doc didn’t save correctly, so its a good job you had an audio copy.
7: Track it: Most social spaces now have RSS feeds available, so set them up in to your newsreader, including any twitter searches. Saves you having to show and hide various websites on your screen, when you should be doing something tedious.
8: Force change: create essential documents in spaces that others will have to sign up to view Eg: gmail Docs. In case of resistance, gDocs also allow people to view without requiring a sign up.
9: Document everything: Start a private blog, document your work flow, run the RSS link through free my feed and give your boss the new feed link— to keep track of things. If they don’t know anything about RSS send them a Commoncraft video and insist they ‘get with the programme’.
10: Play dumb, act smart: Upload all non-essential PDFs and dull PPT files you’ll never use to a Slideshare acc and mark everything as private. You can then delete everything off your computer, including emails, safe in the knowledge that you can tell people you don’t have those ‘essential’ files—whilst all the while knowing you have access to them in case of emergencies.
11: Visualise: Create Wordles regularly and add to the top of dull documents. Tell people its a way for visual learners and busy people to consume vast amounts of knowledge without the need to read the entire document.
If questioned about ‘changing back to the old way’… inform your boss that these are standard communication tools used by their rival competitors and by introducing these techniques you’re subconsciously increasing the skillset for the workforce.
Finally…
12: Big yourself up: Set up a Yammer acc. or an Ididwork to document and tag all social media mentions and activity you have introduced since starting work in the company and refer back to for personal development / KPI meetings. Ididwork generates a handy graph to display all your tag topics. On the basis of this information, recommend you be awarded with a 5-8% payrise, whilst sliding your bank and sort-code details across the table to HR.
What have I missed? How do you use social media whilst at work? Leave me a comment below.
(This has been a ‘Lighten-up’ production, on behalf of ‘tongue-wedged-firmly-in-cheek’ blogposts)
Also see: Beginners Guide to Social Meddling
