Yes, we need to talk to kids about passwords and we need to start early. My son is 6 years old now and the other day he impressed one of my friends immensely with the fact that he turned his head away when I was unlocking my iPad to allow him to play his favourite games for a while. I think we need to prepare our kids to the idea of passwords as early as they can understand the notion of privacy and ownership, but before they actually own their own devices or access to the web. Which in the UK would be a 4-5 year old, really.

You might think I am crazy but the more I look around the web the more I see the notion of terrified parents who realised that talking to their kids about accessing their accounts is almost impossible. I teach social media to grown ups and just this week I had a student who once he joined Twitter he has realised his kids are on the service already! So the reality is – kids ARE in social networks; kids WILL use the Internet and actually they will receive their first passwords to computers already in first years of school (my son had it in Year 0).

So how do we talk to kids about password to build respect and trust? I think there are few major points to consider before you start the conversation:

1. Age – pending the age of your child you will need to approach the conversation in the right manner to ensure that your child understands the concept of intimacy, ownership, a safe password and trusts you enough to share theirs with you.

2. Respect – you need to explain to your child that respecting someone’s privacy is a matter of politeness and password is a brilliant test: I keep telling my son that if he wants to be a gentleman he must turn his head away and stop looking while I type my passwords (on mobile devices, on laptop or on the cash machine).

3. Ownership – it’s helpful to introduce the notion of ownership of data and devices as early as possible. If it’s parent’s device do explain why you have the right to lock and unlock it, what are the risks involved in accessing the personal information (explain what is personal information), downloading additional apps and causing larger bills on your account.

4. Parental responsibility – up to a certain age (which I am sure is up for discussion and will depend on your relationship with your child) you, as a parent, have the right, but also responsibility to ensure that your kids are safe and happy. Do explain to them how the notion of bullying can be easily experienced with mobile phones or Internet and how you, as a grown up, have the right to have access to child’s personal information. Whether you exercise this right or not will depend on your relationship with kids, but the rule has to be set in stone and executed.

5. Open communication – explain, explain and again: explain! There is no point in intruding rules if you do not explain their importance. There is no point in banning kids from the web (it’s pointless anyway) if your intention is to have an open communication with them and simply guide them towards sensible independence. Be firm, but also reasonable.

6. Your own competence – now, you and I know that kids grasp innovation and tech much faster than we do, they soak it up and come up with amazing solutions. They are faster and smarter then we are, so if you want to have a respectful relationship with your child on this topic you must teach your kids basic rules of safe passwords yourself. In order to do so, you might have to polish your skills a bit. You will find a good write up here and a discussion on the topic here. I personally really like KeePass and find it a helpful tool, but before you use it do go back to the basics and practice safe passwords on HowSecureIsMyPassword.net.

I hope this is useful and I hope that you will experience the same little feeling of pride when your kid starts respecting your password, shares theirs with you or simply comes over for a chat and asks for help if needed. Do let me know what you are doing to ensure your kids are using safe passwords!

I have been doing my evening study of Marketing Academy panellists tonight when Owen, my colleague from Voice flagged up this study to me. It looks like major retailers using Twitter for customer service cannot keep up with the volume of conversations. I would like to put aside this particular notion simply because the study was conducted by one of the currently shining social monitoring companies, Conversocial (search for  “Top US Clothing Retailers on their Customer Service Response Times on Twitter”) so it’s obviously focused on proving the need for sophisticated measurement tools.

What bothers me (and from what I see Owen too) is the fact that many retailers do not take the customer service over Twitter serious enough to run it 24/7 including weekends. Social media channels are not bound to office hours so how do they manage the volume of conversations left “at their desk” on Monday morning? How do they manage the risk of a highly critical conversation kicked off by a highly influential (does not an equal celebrity!) person escalating for more than 48 hrs? Just for the sake of comparison – the Greenpeace Guinness record activity to fight Facebook’s dirty energy sources resulted in 80,000 comments under one note in 24 hrs!

So please, please! If you do intend to move into social media with your customer service (and I am sure I will be the first person to suggest that to you if you have a good product!;)) do consider the nature of the channels you are about to use.

• Make it real time.
• Make it personal.
• Listen and respond.
• Manage private vs. public communication wisely.
• Incorporate social into all other channels of communication and customer service.
• Make this channel different – do not send people back to call you. Call them back. Make it different than other areas of your customer service. Make it unique.
• Even more: ensure that your Twitter/Facebook team is faster, wiser, nicer and BETTER than the rest of your customer service. Ensure the team WILL FIX things!

Why? Because we will go to Twitter when we ran out of options. When we are frustrated and tired of waiting on the phone, talking to many people and not getting any answers.

I really hope that once day you will discover that you are facing the problem of the volume of conversations. There are tools out there to help you to measure the word of mouth and pick up conversations that need responding to, but also to engage and manage team work. Some are more expensive, some are pretty affordable even for small businesses (SproutSocial is a pretty good tool for the monthly fee they charge and gives you both measurement and engagement tools, Radian6 have both but cost much more – might help in huge volumes of conversations though). Test those tools and choose wisely. Adjust your team and processes. Listen, learn, improve. Keep up with your consumers!

You know what will happen next? You will discover that some areas of your customer service or even other areas of your operations are not perfect. One day you might be able to change the way you operate for better – for yourself and for your consumer. Why not?

Mark Choueke (one of the Marketing Academy panellists) put it wisely: “Change is happening! So what’s next?”Embrace that change and start wisely! There is one amazing element of social media conversations: if you open up and engage in conversations your consumers will help you through this change. Trust me;)

(Check out @Easyspace for bad practices and @BTCare for great work in their customer service over Twitter)

Day 1 of my holidays. I have not expected it to be so emotional! I am finding it difficult to stay away from my work commitments (yes, I did some of it;)) but I know that for the next two weeks I want to step back and take time for things I have put aside in the last 2 years. It’s interesting how every time I do it I navigate over to my work and rediscover the best bits of it. Today I had to admit a failure. Early in the day, I have been faced with the fact that someone I have invested a lot of hope, time and what I thought to be mentoring and mutual respect has used last few months to completely diminish those hopes. And if you know me personally you will also see the tragedy – I am really careful in investing my time in people and when I fail I hate to see them go.

Quite quickly I have recovered and spent a brilliant day with my son in Oxford – learning, enjoying British cinema, music, science, the city itself. With the morning failure at the back of my head, I have sat down in the evening to prepare for my next (and hopefully not last) round of Marketing Academy application: telephone conversation with one of the panelists. I love the fact that the web allows us to meet people before we talk to them in person so why not to make the most of it. I have time until the 10th of April so I need to meet the on-line profile of at least 3 people each day. Hence why I navigated to the speeches of Kevin Allen, Ben Bengougam and John Kearon – all of which provided me with perfect answers to my morning dilemma: why did I put so much hope and trust in someone who did not live up to my expectations in the first place? The on-line trust is till today one of the only measurement of people’s reliability but we – social media practitioners – know very well that it might take time but there are lot of people out there who manage to build up their profile and in reality after a short conversation completely diminish the image the value of their web shadow.

So why? Why did I make a mistake and why do I feel so strongly about it? I usually distrust people who are really kind on-line and fail me off-line or vice versa.

Ben Bengougham provided me with the first clue: “I am a business leader – not a person who needs to continue to improve their worth” he said (note: in a completely different context!). I think he might be right, but there are a lot of people out there who do feel the need to justify their position, job title or skills instead of actually showcasing them. And there is only one way to figure those people out – put them to the practical test. We prove to be a trust agent or fail. So maybe I did the right thing, but was my initial decision to risk my judgement wise at all? John Kearon had some answers to that (and even though he referred to PR and advertising I think it does refer to how we function): “We think much less than we think we think” […] “Content matters so much less than we think it does!” […] “The irresponsible is exactly what you need to do”, we need to “find our inner fool to engage with people emotionally”. Especially if you work in social media and social media marketing you tend to do that – so in a way I felt comforted by those ideas. And finally, Kevin Allen said something that made me understand my failure entirely: “No matter what it is you seek, at the core of your decisions is the rational bit, but when you connect your pure self you succeed”.

Maybe I do not know people well. Maybe I do give them too much credit. Maybe I am a bit too idealistic. But all of my current friends, colleagues and trust agents have been “recruited” into my life on the basis of initial trust, a little bit of credit and a great deal of time, work, mutual respect and quite a lot of trials on the way. For me this is the way forward and as long as I manage the risks well, I do not think I can function (both work-wise as well as personally) in any other way. My inner instincts tend to be sharpened by the nature of communication channels I am using and networks I am in, but ultimately it is the feeling you have when you sit down with someone over a beer, have a chat and grow, become a better version of your own self.

And as for failure, well, I take John’s word for it  – and it’s not an easy lesson to learn: We “need to learn to love failure….lot’s of it!”

 I came back from Brussels (training EU Commission’s social media team) with quite a few really strong case studies. I am sure you have seen the “Clash of Civilisations” video and reactions to it, but today I would like to mention a different production by the same organisation simply because I really like the idea! 

 I would like to to see more and more attempts to create a funny twist on otherwise rather boring topics. I know that sometimes ideas can go wrong if we do not consider the overall context of the message, but let’s keep on trying! It’s really interesting to see these two case studies.

What do you think makes a good video (I will not use the term “viral” because we all know the popularity of a video cannot be predicted in advance)? What is a good idea? What defines good execution of it?