Here are this month’s snap stories of personal learning for September 2018.
Every week and every month, I like to review these videos to see what I have been doing every day. It’s a great way to capture all my work and learning – and also to see progress towards my goals.
Every month I allocate an hour to review these daily videos I take on Snapchat and share these here on my blog. I use these videos as an online portfolio of my work – an online CV if you will.
Many of these are not shared across other social networks unless there’s something specific to that particular social media community I’d like to share. In effect, these are my own “sharing of my work out loud” videos and not for the purposes of marketing but rather of personal and professional development.
No specific details about any client work are shown here without their permission. If you would like to know further information about anything I mention in these videos, contact me.
Big learning month for me especially when it came to work related projects around working with teams who may need more hand-holding. I also see first hand the effect of too much work to do in little time and how it stresses me out. What allays that stress is creating some fun creative videos just to get my mind off it. My biggest realisation was that I don’t want to follow in the steps of these video influencers because VidCon left a sour taste in my mouth when it came to how platforms were screwing the content creators.
Day 1: Saturday 1 September 2018 Day 1 Vidcon
Day 2: Sunday 2 September 2018 Day 2 Vidcon
I’m hoping that Day 2 of Vidcon is better…nope.
Monday 3 September 2018
Today I got off social media for the week (not Snapchat because it’s the way I capture my day, as well as my interactions with others on this platform, is very positive and inspiring – it’s too good to not use!) for the week. I demonstrate how I’m working with a company’s IT team to create a stakeholder communication plan as well as share some questions I use when I interview them. I also show how I do a Marketing and Communications Plan and how I don’t understand how some organisations don’t know their own teams so I use LinkedIn to find their own people and work backwards from there. Sometimes, when you’re not part of the client organisation, you need to look at your own social networks and connections to get the lowdown of the company and then relay that to your client if they’re not aware of it.
Tuesday 4 September 2018
Today I’m creating agendas for a potential difficult client meeting because there’s a possibility that people are unsure what they’re supposed to be doing. I talk about the Design Ideas function in MS PowerPoint. As I work on a Mac, I lament at how different the functions (and how old worlde) the Microsoft on Mac looks. I go on about my need to travel more and how I can’t wait to retire to do more of it. I show some yarn of course…
Wednesday 5 September 2018
Today I share how I’m creating a mini course on how to create a positioning statement for customers wanting to adopt O365 into their organisation. I attend a very senior level team meeting today and have an opportunity to observe the people interactions (and competing interests) in the room. I also face off a difficult meeting with another client and share how I prepared for that despite being anxious about how it would all go.
Friday 7 September 2018
It’s a music video today so I had a bit of fun creating this (because I felt like it). Today I head into Chadstone Shopping CD to buy some funky shirts and a leather jacket because I love the fashions of Oceans 8; I also try my hand at Dutch.
Sunday 9 September 2018
Preparing for tomorrow’s IABC presentation on How to Use Snapchat and visited the Cat Show (where we met our future family member, Pud).
Monday 10 September 2018
Today I did my IABC presentation to Business Communicators on How to Use Snapchat for Video Story Telling. Initially, there was going to be 3 people in my session while the other session had the rest of the conference. It just showed me that people don’t care much for Snapchat simply because it’s not a tool or platform that they consider worthy, respectable or even valuable. In hindsight, I should have just changed the title because what I talked about was really how we can use tools to create employee stories and surface the different voices in the organisation. Luckily, I think the host felt really sorry for me and then rounded up about 30 people to attend the session after which I had people come up and want to learn more about it because they hadn’t even factored video in their business communications.
My lesson here, don’t mention Snapchat. I must have this crazy desire to put people off with my experiments with everything because I seem to touch a nerve of many who don’t know how to use tools and then make a judgement on them – and me – for using them. Do I care? Not really. If anything, it means I just have to be careful in what language I use that doesn’t frighten them off. Not all tools are for everyone.
Snapchat seems to be a conversation killer.
I don’t know why. If there’s a conversation to be killed off, it should be around Instagram and how the platform is less about engagement, participation and authenticity as much as it’s about presenting a filtered view of the world. Of course, I’m anti-Instagram which is why I’m using it for my alter-ego Shazza Breaknews and presenting the most awful aspects of her life there just to go against the popular following of this platform.
Tuesday 11 September 2018
Another music video day! What a weird day. I start the day well but it deteriorates quickly. I talk about Tim Tams as you do. Nothing much about learning here. Sometimes I really crap on…
Wednesday 12 September 2018
Today I talk about the different thinking of creative vs procedural thinking because I’m enjoying my own creative projects far more than just my daily tasks. I also am in a bit of a quandary as I try to consider how I can get people to answer their email or phone calls because no-one does this anymore because they’re so busy. I hatch a plan to create an introduction video with the misguided thinking that people in organisations are likely to click on a video in their email – than actually read AND respond to email. The experiment is a failure. Also, I talk about how we have a new family member joining us. Our new cat, Pud who is 5 years old and a rescue one at that.
Thursday 13 September 2018
Today I’m wearing my contact lenses and worry that I’m looking too old! I talk about how I learned you can post from an email to a MS Teams channel because each channel has its own email address. We go and pick up our new family member, our cat Pud!
Monday 17 September 2018
Today I talk about the important of reflection in our work and learning and share how I use Snapchat to collate the daily vlogs into a monthly blog post. I’m going through my to do list but then I talk about how people mix me up for social media marketing without realising I’m all about social media for professional and personal development.
Tuesday 18 September 2018
Today I share how I’m desperately trying to change my language when speaking with the business. Speaking learning and development language is simply not considered and in fact, hinders me and my reputation. Truth be told, I’m seeing that business clients really don’t care about workplace learning – it’s not front of mind – it’s not even a topic of discussion NOR do they want it to be. Anything that is considered to be time intensive is automatically discounted and it’s the end of the discussion.
I share the difficulties of working with a client and the preparation of a workshop with them that I was panicking about. I feel that with the amount of work I have to do in three days that I’m not at my best to provide real value work because I’m always rushed. I hate to be rushed. However, I talk about how one of our CNT News team members, trains our remote news teams via sharing portrait TV videos in a Snapchat back channel and talk about how clients can do this for themselves now – video seems to not be a focus for organisations but soon, they’re going to have this capability and with it, will bring new skills for their people to do and know.
Thursday 20 September 2018
One thing I hate is people who aren’t in the field of science or medicine talking about neuroscience. In this video I talk about a podcast I’ve been listening to on learning styles and neuroscience – all gumf. I talk about Skype for Business and how some organisations are not using the full capability of this tool without realising that they have at their disposal new and different ways of doing business processes like training, coaching, meetings, voting and so much more. They’re only scratching the surface with instant messaging and virtual meetings. I think it’s because people don’t experiment enough OR everyone has their own habit for how they use the tool and if they don’t follow the same actions that everyone else does – eg automatically revert to email because everyone knows emails – then they won’t change the behaviour. I also talk about MS Streams and the differences between consumer and enterprise apps.
Friday 21 September 2018
Oh gross, I find that missing coffee cup of mine in a cupboard where I left it. I also try to figure out if I can connect a Surface Pro to an iMac screen (I can’t). and then talk about getting a new/well used display monitor because I couldn’t work from a Surface Pro all day.
Sunday 23 September 2018
Cleaning out my study and talk about my green screen then try some hacks with my tripod.
Monday 24 September 2018
Hooray, another music video! Well, my used display is useless, so I ended up buying a new one. I talk about the variety of work that I’m doing and how I can’t seem to squeeze it into 3 days per week. Talking about my display is not clear enough to do my work and figure out how to get a new display unit.
Wednesday 26 September 2018
In this video I lament about not being able to show my work on client work on Snapchat. I talk about how people are learning at work and how we should be thinking less abour developing courses for them but helping them find resources so that they can help themselves (that is, give them curation skills). I also talk about how I learned Camtasia and share how I did a Win10 screencast for a client.
Thursday 27 September 2018
What happens to your data when you die? This snap story is dedicated to the various tools you can use to use to manage your digital will. I also talk about a site that I’m using to capture my social media data called Digi Me.
