Social Media Checklists: Cleared for Takeoff?

I did Altucher this weekend, which is why I'm late in posting now. Between my social media work at Autodesk and the time I spend reading other people's stuff, it's been a challenge finding time. Especially when I find content I really like. This weekend I spent hours reading every single post this guy ever wrote since 2010.

James is a pretty famous guy who made and lost millions (not necessarily in that order), lives in my home town of New York City, and became an accomplished author essentially by giving his material away for free.

I won't go into the details of what this guy writes about. Suffice to say he hasn't had a bad post since 2010, and that's a pretty good batting average. Go read his material - I hope you get as hooked on it as I did.

What the heck does this have to do with social media? Stick with me, I'm getting there. You see, buried in the vast flow of Altucherism is a nugget called Atul Gawande. That's Dr. Gawande to us mere mortals.

To find him, you have to read Altucher's post about living forever. Go ahead. Do it. It's in item #10 about avoiding hospitals. See it? Great. Now, if you're involved in any kind of training or coaching for social media in a very large organisation, click on the link, and either order or Kindle the guy's book The Checklist Manifesto.

At Autodesk, my team is responsible for on-boarding customer service staff onto social media channels. We started with forums and Twitter. We're headed out to new frontiers shortly. Now, I'm not a certified trainer - I only play one on TV - but through experience and trial and error, I've been learning a lot about training people to be successful on social media channels in the past six months. And you know what? It's quite a challenge. And I'm talking about working with really good people here - experienced, seasoned folks used to real phone/email combat in the customer service trenches.

In the process, we did classroom training, videos, screencasts, vendor tools training, real-time piloting (as I call it), simulated exercises, learn-by-example, ad-hoc mentoring, you name it. We bought books, we wrote guidelines, what-if scenarios, and a myriad of shared documents on what to say, where to say it, how to say it, why to say it, etc. In a real-time 24/5 context, this stuff can get pretty hairy. Can you spell "information overload"? Additionally, we work social on a global level with international teams. So you have cultural differences as well. And then of course, different people have different levels of familiarity with different channels, various approaches to learning and retaining, and so on.

Yet of all the techniques and methods employed, at least so far, I noticed early on that "pilot checklists" were the most efficient. So now you see why, upon reading about Dr. Gawande's work, something clicked for me. More importantly, the Manifesto identifies three types of problems: simple, complicated, and complex. Social media oscillates between the latter two. So can checklists help tackle these? I think so.

It turns out that a lot of social media interaction (monitoring and engagement) can be decomposed into discrete and well-defined sets of simple sequential steps. I know this because I'm working on social media capacity modeling these days. And to do this right, you need to know how much time people spend doing social. Turns out with a little experience you can clock both monitoring, triaging, and engagement activities to the second. If you have the frequency of events, and the time per event, and you know how many hours a day an agent can spend on social, then you have a pretty decent capacity model.

I know most of us "experts" - much like the doctors in the Manifesto - like to think of social media as a "gift" only a chosen few can master, but that's just nonsense. Truth be told, social media is not "voodoo" anymore. This is particularly true for sheer engagement. And most people can learn this stuff effectively. They need to be inherently "social" - which is a human trait (nature) - and they need the right checklist, which is a machine/process trait (nurture). Then they need to read the checklist of course.

The checklist for Twitter pretty much goes like this (it's roughly the same in any other channel):

1. Find a post (we have a triaging decision map)
2. Assign it to yourself (we use Radian6's Engagement Console)
3. Classify it (discrete values)
4. Select engagement level (a workflow state machine)
5. Annotate it (metadata)
6. Tag it
7. Respond
8. Sign response (like ^XYZ)
9. If needed, go into DM mode (exchanging private user information)
10. Create corresponding case in CRM if and as needed

I'm simplifying somewhat here, but you get the point. You can do the same thing for engagement on forums, Facebook, G+, etc. and for various channel modalities for publishing and promotion. Consistently, the checklist system has been more efficient and easier to "regulate" than any other type of operational content. Why is that?

People need clear, concise, sequential action items when in the heat of battle, not large how-to theoretical documents. Checklists are like a safety blanket. No one can get slapped for a problem if the checklist procedures were properly followed (but the checklist author can).

Long documents are open to interpretation. Checklists are not. Checklists are easily accessible - our guys slap physical printouts on their cube walls - whereas shared documents on SharePoint are not. Checklists are easy to maintain and adjust based on "bio-feedback" (live from-the-field experience). Big documents are harder to pull up, shuffle around and maintain.

So there you have it - for all the time and effort put into large and long social media training processes, it turns out a few simple checklists can usually do the trick faster and more efficiently. Who would have thought? Except Dr. Gawande clearly.

Checklists. If they're good enough for 747 pilots, astronauts, and brain surgeons, they're good enough for social media customer service folks as well - and probably essential. I bet you the guys at the Dell or Gatorade Mission Control Center use them all the time!