Hi everyone! Please join us in welcoming David Keyes to the Whiteboard Consulting family. He joined us this month as Project Assistant, and is already bringing fresh eyes and a helping had to Nicole and me. We’re thrilled to have him, and of course immediately asked him to fill in as guest blogger this week while Nicole is sitting on a beach enjoying a well-deserved break.

This week David shares his thoughts on social media and processes… Enjoy!

Ruth.

Thoughts from a Process & Social Media Rookie

Hello, my name is David Keyes, I am the newest addition to the Whiteboard Consulting family and it’s a thrill and an honour to be here. My role is that of coordinator, the arranger of schedules and the booker of appointments, along with a bunch of other hats and roles when needed. As Nicole is on vacation they’ve asked me to step up and write a blog entry for this week.

I was given the task of looking at social media to see how best we can exploit this ever growing and not easily defined medium.

My first question was, “how do I translate Whiteboard Consulting, not to mention myself and my thoughts and my role here to a social media presence?”

When I went to college no one had a desktop computer, it was 1981 and a single computer still filled a room. All of my projects and promotions were done by hand, photocopying and pressing and distributing, so much work and time went into that – now a single sentence can reach millions and one needn’t get out of ones chair! Even our smallest thoughts or photos of our lunch can be beamed internationally and to enormous audiences in real time, it makes one a little careful about all those people seeing what you say/do/think! It gives a platform for everyone, everyone’s voice can be heard and it allows for connections previous generations have never been able to engage in! It’s miraculous and scary and inspiring.

While sitting in a facilitated process mapping session it dawned on me that this room full of invigorated participants furiously throwing ideas and thoughts out to be captured by a skilled facilitator on flip chart paper, was in fact an analogue version of Twitter. That perhaps all those cyber-voices and social medias were in fact like the voices in this room, brainstorming a concept.

I find I am a contradiction of naiveté and cynicism with the medium. Despite my hesitation to post online, I’m now looking forward to riding the social media trends and hopefully using it as a way to stimulate a dialogue about words and processes. Maybe rather than approaching it with hesitancy it will help us understand better who we are and what we are doing here. Perhaps it is worth sharing ideas, ideas worth reading twenty years from now.

David