B-cycle

An amazing thing happened to me at work the other day… I got to sit in a large board-room with leaders from around our little Fortune 100 company to take part in a discussion about shaping the social media policy for Humana, and a record of the event can be found on Twitter.  That’s right; it’s been captured in the public domain. Seriously. Now, as a project manager I’ve facilitated and sat in my share of project kick-off meetings.  Most of them have been tremendous wastes of time, with task-saturated (and therefore unfocused) stakeholders plotting ways to get out of future meetings rather then contributing. This particular kick-off meeting turned out to be different. It started off pretty normally: pleasantries exchanged; feigned enthusiasm; technical difficulties; five minutes of fun, etc.

When the meeting got under way, everyone was expecting more of the same and that’s when one of the team members threw the room a giant curve ball: Let’s do a live tweet stream of the meeting’s high points and use this record for our meeting minutes.  My hand was giddy at the thought of not having to feverishly scribble down notes, so I was obviously in favor of the Twitter option. We went around the room to get consensus, and there were some legitimate concerns about being too transparent, but we ended up agreeing to a basic KISS guideline: when in doubt, don’t tweet it. Thus, the hashtag #hcoc (Humana Chamber of Commerce) was spawned. I’ve also created a FriendFeed Room here so that you all can follow along at home.

The idea behind the Humana Social Media Chamber of Commerce is that no one organization will own "Social Media" for all of Humana.  We are a large organization made up of individual departments with separate customers/demographics, individual social media needs, and budgets.  We want to use the Chamber of Commerce and Electronic Commons areas that we are creating as an extension of the Web 2.0 world that we all live in today on the internet. The need to share and exchange best practices will replace the need to control.  It’s a lofty goal, but a goal worth striving for nonetheless.  After sitting through this particular kick-off meeting, I think that we’re on the right track. There was a genuine exchange of ideas.  Viewpoints were clarified and understood with the high points going out on Twitter. People were smiling.

It was amazing. 

To be clear, not everyone in the meeting participated in the live tweet stream, but one unexpected byproduct was that co-workers following the stream at their desks were able to contribute insights without even being in the meeting (and a few people outside Humana’s walls as well). I’m still trying to get my head around the idea of harnessing this kind of power. Maybe Joey Bagadonuts in Accounting has an insight that our team didn’t think of, and now we have a way for that voice to be heard and documented as part of the conversation.  It’s a cool concept to noodle on, and I’ll be sure to update our progress on this blog as we move forward.

Stay tuned, but for now you can enjoy a presentation of our inaugural “minutes” below:

Photo by: cambodia4kidsorg

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