#TK11 Keynote: Google’s Karen Wickre and Ann Farmer

These are my live blogged notes from Thursday’s keynote at ASTD TK11 with Karen Wickre (Global Communications Team) and Ann Farmer from Google.

Social Media @ Google

• Part 1: How Google manages external communicates to make news and info about google findable to the outside world
• Part 2: Internal communication and discovery

Part 1: How Google communicates publicly:

Don’t do traditional press releases

150+blogs!, 100 Twitter accts, 20 FB pages…this is all for Google corporate info (how tos product news, etc.)

No dedicates editors – no long approval chains.  Writing by individuals not execs.

Corporate Comms oversees the internal process for blogs, etc. 

Twitter = “an information utility” – mostly use them as a heads up on what’s going on – raising information to a level/surfacing it.  In Twitter, there’s a great self selection going on.

Facebook – a consumer marketing platform – great for promotions, contest, activities, feedback on naming things, civic and community involvement

Communicate with an educational mindset.   Ask yourself, “What else can I share with people?”

Google has a social media toolkit:

• Wtools to use when (they serve diff purposes)
• Style guides – a blog style is the voice you’re writing in, Twitter has space limitations – how do you stay brief? snappy or straightforward?,
• How do we promote it?
• Analytics

Part 2: Ann Farmer

How successful communications work – ambiguity and encoding…

@ Google everyone and everybody contributes to the intranet…

On Twitter, hashtags provide context.

Supporting existing online training:

Phase 1: Organize existing online: – this is a gadget, loads anywhere someone wants it – Sifting terms – browse for training via specific keyboards

Phase 2: Wanted to support volunteers who were not IDs.  Created instructions for them on how to create the assets for a program.

Volunteer makes selection and then gets panel instructions…

Organizing info and making it findable.

Example – organize FAQs for the performance management guide

Problem: sorting through long lists of FAQs.

Solution: tag each FAQ – link to job roles.

“Everything is Miscellaneous” (David Weinberger) – must read!

Producing and consuming metadeta.

In the physical world, things have a place.  Think Dewey Decimal system. In a digital world, things don’t have to taxonimized in that same way…

Identifying where metadata is a side-effect of behavior.

There is no one way to organize data.  Context is everything. We need to become mind-readers

Ask yourself:

• who needs to find what?
• what terms would be meaningful to the user (anticipate the terms Joe User might search on…)

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I think what she just showed us is the future of the Learning Management System. 

This wasn’t a session to easily live-blog.  Apologies for any confusion :)