Tweeting your way out of Paranoia

I was invited to present the closing keynote at last week’s NSW Local Government Web Network Conference in Sydney. Give ’em something light at the end of the day, I was told.

Here’s the result.

My argument, such that it is, is that corporations like local governments avoid change because they’re paranoid, so they need to get themselves some mental health. I present an anonymous theory about “The Three Pillars of Mental Health”. Twitter, I then argue, is the perfect low-risk exercise for a government starting to involve itself in social media and social networking to start overcoming that paranoia. I then present some suggestions for how they might tweet.

Tweeting your way out of Paranoia from Stilgherrian on Vimeo.

The articled I mentioned in the video, the one I wrote about using Twitter, is Twitter: a guide for busy paranoids.

The Flip Video delivered fairly shitty footage of me speaking, as you can see, so I decided to keep the slides in screen for most of the time instead. James Purser recorded the audio.

7 Replies to “Tweeting your way out of Paranoia”

  1. Not particularly on-topic, but I notice that you’ve used images with a non-commercial licence. I’m not having a go at you, but would you class your activities as non-commercial? I’m trying to establish whether I can/should use CC BY-NC images in presentations I prepare at work, including for industry conferences.
    Since you presenting on SM seems like part of your employment, I’m interested in your logic.

  2. @Patrick: In this case the conference was not a commercial operation, but a government / non-profit thing, and I wasn’t paid. Apart from the traditional bottle of wine that conference speakers usually get.

    Conversely, I’m guessing that an industry conference is likely to be a commercial for-profit event?

    I think there’s a flaw in Creative Commons licensing, namely that there some clear and obvious delineation between commercial and non-commercial — particularly in this age when the boundaries of work time and personal time is so blurred. With that whole “personal brand” thing, is a presentation constructed in our own time commercial because its existence enhances our profile, which is marketing, which is a thing businesses do?

    I’m wondering whether this is easier for freelancers like myself to handle. Did anyone get invoiced for this? No? Then it wasn’t commercial. That’s not actually a serious suggestion…

  3. @Ben May: Glad you liked it, thank you. I wonder whether the not-laughing was due to not understanding URL shorteners, or unfamiliarity with the word “arsehat”, or something else.

  4. I think the combo of what a URL shortener is, and what arsehat has to do with it!

    Funnily enough, would you consider what Qantas tweeted earlier just spilt milk? Or maybe two cups of spilt milk.

  5. @Ben May: I didn’t actually see what @QantasAirways had tweeted, and now of course it’s been removed. But I can see from their Twitter stream that it was a photo that had somehow caused someone offence.

    While I can’t therefore comment on the specific incident, I do think that corporations tend to over-react to complaints about being offended. I’m not saying they should completely ignore the issue, but there’s so many varied tastes in the world that all manner of things can be found offensive if you spread the net widely enough. If you remove all of that risk, you’re left with a very bland world.

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