There is no Undo button

You're not supposed to talk about emotions. But. This post does.

I deliberately haven't written about what it feels like to walk into a room, with the rest of your Department, stupidly missing the signals until noticing two union reps in the room and some very serious faces. The sinking feeling. The inappropriate laughter and jokes in the face of not quite knowing what else to do. The pin drop silence as the words arrive that you stupidly thought wouldn't be said. The numbers scrolling across the screen. The obvious discomfort of the person speaking. The desperate frantic effort of thinking of ways to mitigate the numbers, to do things differently, to avoid the inevitable.

I'm a girl. I don't cry easily. I'm a geek girl, we don't, I don't think. Sat in a room, a question asked, dangerously close to losing all composure.

I know, we know, we are the web team. A thousand words since from people who don't know the fragility of decisions within a Council trying to reassure, to rationalise, to comfort. Friends trying to understand and failing, I've been there before, I've made people redundant myself, why is it hitting so hard now when relatively it didn't then?

I got my 90 day at risk letter the day after. That was 3 weeks or so ago, now. Now I watch on Twitter as others are delivered the same news, sweeping waves of noticed presents for Xmas. Good people. Dedicated people. Committed people. I hear the whispers and the things I knew deep down would happen, now are. A sense of inevitability encapsulated in a moment as I think of all the people I have met who are good, so very good at their jobs, loved their jobs, could have been paid more somewhere else but didn't want to be, wanted to be where they are now. Friends. People I respect. People who have given freely support, kind words, laughter and received the same from me. In some cases, even surrogate dads.

How is it different? I don't know. But it is. I took voluntary redundancy shortly after making a man 30 years my senior redundant. It didn't bite me anywhere near as hard as it would have done him. And yet he took it with a grace and acceptance that I am failing to have.

I know, rationally, that there is 'at risk' and there is 'at risk'. I know, sort of, that should there be no place for me any more in our Department, I would find, somehow, somewhere else to be. So it is not for me, this shock or sadness. It is for others. If I am not permitted that, I think we live in a sorry world indeed. So forgive me my current irrationality, my ups and downs, the biting anger which shows through when I don't pay attention. It is the sheer scale of this thing. I would be the first, the very first, to acknowledge and accept that local government needed streamlining. I could have sat and explained to anyone who had asked, why and where. I could have and have suggested ways to mitigate that and some of those things, the practical suggestions have been implemented.

But, you see, it feels a little like a bulldozer to fix a problem which needed finesse. It has caused such sadness, anger, resentment and horrid words to be uttered. In some cases, the damage of this will never be repaired because some words said can not be forgotten. Situations like this bring out the very worst in people, as well as the very best, and I am not proud, not proud at all of the fact that I have veered wildly from one end of the spectrum to the other in the last 3 weeks - on the one hand it has motivated me to get off my behind and work as hard as I possibly can to tick off as many of my open projects as I can - on the other it has meant that some days I have done nothing but listen to others bile, resentment and anger.

Resilience is an often used word at the moment, as is emotional intelligence. Well, I know a lot more about myself than I did 3 weeks ago, I can tell you that for nothing. I'm not thankful for that, but I can acknowledge that. I have tried my very best to remain a credit to the Department within which are, frankly, some of the most inspiring and professional people I've ever worked with, and tried not to be an embarrassment.

I have failed. But in failing I have learnt a harsh lesson. I should have written this post 3 weeks ago. The cycle of acceptance says everyone deals differently. I was stupid - I missed the one thing which would have allowed me to coral my thoughts, vent my anger, and move on.

I work for Blackburn with Darwen Borough Council. I am proud to work for Blackburn with Darwen Borough Council. If I do not continue to work for Blackburn with Darwen Borough Council, I will still be proud that I did. If I am permitted to remain working for Blackburn with Darwen Borough Council, it will be a while, I think, before I can be proud again, but we will rebuild, we will reshape, we will absorb. It seems after todays announcement from our Finance Department, we have no choice.

But don't expect me to forgive this disproportionate bomb landing on a Borough which was just, only just, pulling itself out from the gutter. Don't expect me to rationalise it away. Don't expect me to forget, when the Borough in which I live, Hyndburn, and the Ward in which I live in, Scaitcliffe, are some of the most deprived areas outside of London you will see. As I walk out of my door each morning, opposite the house with its windows stoned in by the local 'youths', don't expect me to have a short memory. Someone made a deliberate conscious choice to ensure the people with nothing ended up in deficit. Anger does not come from seeing my friends made redundant, because they will find other jobs, because they are good at what they do.

Anger, sheer blinding white heat anger, comes from a financial policy which says exclusion will be compounded, that deprivation will be practically enforced and that neglect and abuse will go unchallenged and unnoticed. In a Council where shared services are already happening, where 8 Directors have been let go, where a Chief Executive post has been merged, where voluntary redundancies and early retirements have all already been cycled through, there comes a point, there really does, where you think, do they know the devastation they wreak? Do they understand what this will do on the ground? What happens if no one wants to run the libraries or the play centres or the creches or the thousands of other services which West Somerset, for one, will most definitely not be able to run any more?

I think the answer is no.

There's no Undo button.

#lgovsm

2 weeks ago I asked on Twitter if anyone was running the equivalent of #nhssm for local gov bods in the UK. I was very specific about the social media aspect of it - it's social media which it is becoming incredibly clear is still a bit of a massive mountain for some teams in local gov to climb, there's a lot of frustration and confusion flying around by DM and it seemed to me a time and place to moan/rant/share good practice/celebrate success was a damn good idea.

I didn't want to run it. I'll be totally honest. 2 weeks ago I felt like someone had found the valve in the inflatable me and pulled the stopper, letting all the confidence I'd been slowly building rush away. Work events have not helped with this, though as time has passed and I've dealt with the expected emotions (even understanding they were normal emotions to have helped enormously) and I'm back, pretty much, to where I was before the meteorite landed on our team.

Dave Briggs from Learning Pool very kindly offered to set up #lgchat (Wordpress) which would allow local gov types to talk about anything and everything to do with local gov. I will be in front of my PC every Thur at 3pm if I can be because I think the discussions which will inevitably happen will give me great insight into how people outside local gov see us.

However. There are a number of reasons why after much musing I decided to kick out on my own and go back to my original idea. Social media looks easy to everyone outside local government. If I were paid a pound every time someone said a sentence with 'but you just....' or 'why can't you.....' or 'it's free and simple, what's the problem' I'd be a millionaire.

It's not that simple. I don't care what anyone outside says, it's not that simple and that's coming from someone in a team inside a Council where social media is about to become as normal a way to communicate, I think, as picking up the telephone. There is a sea change, somewhere in peoples heads, a complete sea change in attitude. But anyway, there are barriers, there are still barriers, there will always be barriers. People outside don't know about GovConnect, don't know about the internal ICT project queues, don't know about locked down PC's which mean you can't install Tweetdeck, don't know, perhaps, that 5,000 people switching streaming Tweetdeck to on, could potentially impact negatively on aging WAN's (and LAN's). Then there's the fact that Flash updates are often stopped, that twinkly websites wont run, that lots and lots and lots of Councils don't allow their staff to use the web outside of their lunch time.

For these reasons and a thousand others, #lgovsm is simple. It's going to be kept simple. There's a webpage where transcripts of the chats will go so people who can't get on the web at all at work can come and read and take part in the discussion off Twitter. It'll be there for the people who are in meetings or out with the girls. It's at 1pm so people can go onto Twitter in their lunch breaks without getting into trouble. There's no complicated flash websites or anything involved. And if you can't get onto Twitter cos it's filtered under chat on the website blocking software, well then the blog on Tumblr is there too.

There is a place for both chats. But one is aimed very much at the bottom, while I think one is very much aimed at the top. And I am the right person to be running the one aimed at the operational people, the people who make things happen, who make things move, who run under the radar, who by whatever means necessary get the tech to work so other people can speak across it. That's me. The other isn't, not yet.

So, if you work in local government and you want to come and chat, see you on Friday at 1pm. The hashtag is #lgovchat. The Tumblr blog where the transcripts will be held is here. W'll be running for an hour, we'll spend about 20 minutes per question which will be put forward hopefully by all of you. You can submit questions to be discussed on the Tumblr. You can DM them to me if you want on Twitter @loulouk

Very most of all, everyone is welcome. Directors, CE's, Heads of Service, Officers, Managers, partners, voluntary sector who work with local gov, all Departments are welcome from Childrens Services to Environmental Services. There's no money for training, none for conferences, none for learning. Time to learn from each other and perhaps accept that the experts in local government social media are us. We're it. The buck stops with us.

See you there.

BWD winter - one Council, two people, a lot of determination

Lots and lots of blog inches have been devoted to bemoaning the direness of local governments reaction to the winter weather we are currently experiencing. I can't rebut them all. I'm tired of rebutting them all, frankly.

So, instead, I'm going to explain what happens when a Council has a Director of Communications who understands social media and lets his staff have free reign (within reason), a Head of Communications who is supportive, endlessly patient and relentlessly cheerleads when needed and a PR Officer who just wants residents to understand exactly what happened last year, why it happened, that we've taken steps to ensure it doesn't happen again this year but acknowledges that if it does happen again, being in an arena where people are discussing that failure is perhaps far more of value than sticking fingers in ears and singing la la la.

Essentially, though, BWD Winter is a labour of love for two people - the PR Officer and me. I know it for what it is - a beautiful opportunity to demonstrate exactly what a combination of digital, social media, mapping, Flickr and YouTube can do when all resources are thrown at it and no punches are pulled. It's definitely love, because it's taken a lot of work and determination to circumnavigate our somewhat elderly Content Managenment System. It's definitely love because the PR Officer is frequently speaking to Highways and Grit Control at  8pm on a Sunday evening. Services between 9-5pm? Not in winter. So the communications systems have changed to reflect that.

It started with a Winter Services hub page on our website. Just, you know, bog standard really. Info about gritters somehow made interesting, awesome pics of gritters doing their thing (if you're into that kind of thing, some people are, who am I to comment). Then an internal email newsletter appeared, keeping Directors and Members up to date with developments and concerns to forewarn them of incoming issues, but also to celebrate successes. Lovely internal comms but no use to the residents.

Then, one morning, the PR Officer came bouncing up to me and asked if we could have a Facebook page. Yeah, course, I said. 48 hours or so later, we'd got a BWD Winter Facebook page. And no Likes. So off we went, all of our team, merrily commenting and throwing it into our friends streams. I'm sure there is a better way of seeding a new page or group into peoples consciousness - but we were experimenting. It snowballed quite quickly (ha ha ha) and 100 Likes later, in the middle of September, when snow was but a distant cystallised twinkle in the eye, we thought we might be onto something. The grit got delivered, pictures got taken, up they went. People talked and chatted and commented between themselves, and our PR Officer replied every time a question was asked. She still does. If she doesn't know the answer, she asks Highways. If she doesn't have any pictures she wants, she asks the gritters to take some. No professional shots here, just staff taking two minutes to pop outside with their 5 megapixel snapper. Content, magically appeared.

Then we figured tying it to Twitter might be an idea. It's tied to the FB page because we're broadcasting, of course we are, but we check for replies. Check for questions. Make sure no one is missed. But Facebook is the hub of the dynamic content, which in some ways considering the demographics of our area, is exactly the way it should be.

So, what else are we publishing on our Facebook page? Pictures aren't information, pretty as they are. So there's Met Office updates, school closure updates. There will be service updates on refuse and recycling collection should we get to the point, as we did last year, where the Head of Environment decides at 7am to pull the service. We'll explain that decision, we'll explain alternative collection points if we need to implement them. We'll also map them. We'll come back to that later. We'll explain about burst pipes in schools, we'll relay traffic hotspots and accident blackposts courtesy of the Gritter Control who will receive up to the minute traffic information - from the people driving up and down the roads - the gritter drivers.

It's not all data though. Not all boring stuff. There's a call for scenic photographs on the Facebook page at the moment so we can share the pretty. When the snow comes down properly, we'll hopefully be holding a best snowman competition - no monetary prizes though, only that all submissions will be published on the Council Flickr page in a specific set, and that the winner will go in a simple frame and be displayed in the Town Hall foyer. Momentary fame but a reward for bothering, nevertheless.

A few week ago, it came to my notice that people were publishing lots of gritting route info down in the West Midlands. @danslee and @sarahlay being the prime suspects. So off we went on an epic journey through 2 Departments and assorted meetings and negotiations, to get permission, get them hand drawn, get them to display properly using basic Google maps and get our aging Content Management System not to throw a complete hissy fit on loading something other than text, image or documents. It took relentless negotiating with people and tech to get those maps up. They're up. By any means necessary took on a whole new meaning. Mapping the grit bins has been simplicity itself in comparison, but a shining star in Transport still needed to run 3 revisions before being confident that most of the markers were in the right place, if not on the right side of the road. It's certainly brought asset mapping and tracking into the forefront of Highways mindset, which perhaps is a good thing? Certainly the bins will be numbered cheaply next year, and thanks to a discussion spawned by that, lampposts will be QR coded too, quite probably. Because perhaps the magic of social media collaboration between Communications and other Departments is not the actual conversation, but that the conversation on such things has been started at all. Bridge building.

So, now, our web hub has:

• Basic information on gritting, why we do it, when we do it and how we do it
• Maps showing the locations of all grit bins within the Borough which people are encouraged to feedback on if we've got it wrong
• Maps showing all our gritting routes as a term of reference for those bothered to find out when we say on our Facebook page which routes we're gritting, primary or secondary
• A link to a Facebook page with over 450 likes and 4000 impressions a day on busy days, where conversations, two way conversations are happening
• A link to a Twitter stream being checked regularly for feedback
• A Flickr gallery of gritters pictures, which will shortly be updated with residents scenic photographs

So what's the value of all this hard work and constant liasing and updating? Well. I guess this is where we find out.

With thanks to the PR Officer who started all this, @luciehigham, the Head of Comms who's been immensely supportive, @marcschmid, the Director who allows us a bit of lee way, @tomstanard and most of all to @leejorgensen, the bloke who puts up with me sitting at my desk clapping my hands excitedly when it works, and who helps me fix it by being calm when it doesn't. And whose righteous google maps hack means those grit bins are all on the same map instead of being paginated.

Teamwork. Even when we're heading towards having no money at all, that costs nothing at all. And some days, some times, on things like this, we've got it in spades. Cost of doing above = nothing. Happy residents feeling informed? Around 4,000 but we reckon word of mouth might mean just a few more.

90 minutes (and the rest)

Social media, I am told, is for telling stories. So here's a story about what led to a 90 minute meeting played out through many media and communication channels, but which ultimately was about something as simple as asking a question, and receiving an answer.

It started with curiosity. Someone at work mentioned there would be a public consultation meeting on Monday evening (8th November). I asked our Director on Twitter if it might be okay if I went, because as someone who shall rename nameless correctly identified, us digital geeky types tend to understand the most complicated technology easily, but boggle when it comes to the vagaries of local government and democracy actually in action.

In the process of discussing this, @marcschmid popped up and asked me if I'd like to tweet from the event. I agreed, it's something I've wanted to get done from our official account, @blackburdarwen for ages.

In the midst of this #gab10 happened and I didn't really think about the mechanics of what we'd be doing, simply that we were doing it. I finally got around to mentioning we would be doing it on Sunday evening.

Monday came, and in the absence of @sturgey I attended the final planning meeting. The meeting might have been shouted about by the Communications half of our Policy & Communications Department but the planning, intricacies, paperwork, research, challenges, agendas and minutae were the responsibility entirely of the Policy half. It's the first time I've had the pleasure of working with them on something and it was a pleasure. Well organised, everything dotted and crossed - I left the meeting a little in awe, but also a little sad to find that tweeting was perceived to be a frippery, an irrelevance.

Time passed. Policies noise levels (we share an open plan office) rose throughout the afternoon to a crescendo and then fell away as the organisers drifted across to King Georges Hall to ensure everything was in place and look after the details.

5pm suddenly crept up. Wielding nothing but an iPhone (mine) and a mifi (using 3G) off I went. Arrived. Plugged in the iPhone. Plugged in the mifi. Watched the yellow flashing light. Watched the red flashing light. Experienced that sinking feeling which comes from tying to get a 3G signal in the basement of a Victorian building. Went outside, sat on the bottom step. Watched the lights, watched the Apple spinning circle. Time passed. Mild panic reared its head. Someone nabbed a technician working for the theatre. He couldn't help, radio'd someone who could. Time passed. I paced. Time passed. Got introduced to Tom Moseley from the Lancashire Telegraph. Stress levels slightly too high to be attempt anything other than briefly charming. Wondered off muttering about relays and network cables. Later discovered Tom had managed to find the only corner of the Windsor Suite I'd not tried for signal and set himself up comfortably. Time passed. Technician arrived. Found a network cable. Plugged it into the back of the mifi box in a vain hope. Hope dashed.

Sit. Think.

Call the other half of the web team. He delivers a laptop, summoned from someone somewhere. @tomstannard appears while I'm waiting in the foyer for team member to turn up. Try not to babble. Try to convey everything under control while quietly fretting. Team member turns up, saving me from acting as a temporary theatre usher. Set up laptop, plug in network cable. Start talking to the laptop, practically begging it to work. Tap in wrong password. CLONK goes the laptop. Cringe. Am sitting in the sound booth at the back of the room. Hunch down in my chair so no one sees me. Tap in right password. Watch it load. Watch it load. Time passes.....

Try and log into Tweetdeck. Nope. No joy. Finally concede that twitter.com in old mode is my best friend. Finally start tweeting, hot, bothered and slightly hyper, 3 minutes after the meeting starts.

25 tweets and 30 minutes, possibly 40 minutes later - I lost track - I'm exhausted but it's working. A new found respect for the media team who sit behind us in the office, as I realise how hard it is to hear words said, pick out salient points, ensure no skew or bias, distill to 140 characters, add the hashtag and hit the tweet button. On a track pad. Later find the mouse in the bag. Smile quietly to myself. Sit back. Watch. A room full of people engaged and discussing. Yes, discussing hard, deeply depressing, difficult cruel subjects. But here. Talking. Engaging. Discussing. Involved. Democracy.

The point of this post is that perhaps it is not the post you expected to see. It is the post of one tiny little cog in a massive machinery. Many people contributed to one girls ability to sit at the back of a room and watch, observe and listen and then pass it on to the big wide world. It is the mechanics of a process. It is teamwork (I saw some of our team members in Communcations actually doing their jobs in the wild yesterday for the first time), it is thinking differently, it is management at senior level having faith, it is Leaders saying yes and having patiemce, it is persistence and relentlessness, it is planning and foresight, it is acknowledging that people who cannot attend physically might want to attend nevertheless. But most of all, very most of all, it is simplicity itself. Document what you see, what you hear - and pass it on.

With thanks to The Guardian Society daily for quietly and unobtrusively making my day.

Just numbers?

Read the emails. All the emails. The ones explaining in clear terms what had been calculated. The kind ones warning us of what we'd read tomorrow morning. They helped. I read them. I couldn't comprehend.

I talked to my other half. He didn't understand, but in the process of talking, I slowly did.

Then I read The Guardian and I wished to go back to this mornings oblivion.

There is nothing I can write here. Nothing I can say. Not because I'm self censoring because I think everyone knows whose side I am on and whose I am not, but simply that there are no words to describe the sheer enormity of those numbers and statistics.

I don't think it's an exaggeration to say that I believe they do all the talking for me.

{void}

Quantifying community cohesion

This is a wonder in the other direction, I freely admit, but it ties into social media quite closely, I think.

One of the biggest potentials often quoted for social media is improving community cohesion. I don't like buzzwords, so lets call it.....getting people to talk to each other a little bit more without any of the barriers in the way which the recent evolution of society has created.

Putting it that way makes one of the things I've been musing over today a little easier. You see, thinking of ways to quantify community cohesion is a little difficult. Or rather thinking of ways to measure the effeciveness of social media as a tool to increase community cohesion is a little difficult which is where all of this stems from as I attempt with some determination to wrestle all my thoughts, hopes, aspirations, doubts and questions on social media and its use to us into something approaching a professional document.

It's taken 5 hours of background processing but I'm finally at least at a place where I can understand that talking about community cohesion isn't terribly helpful, but that encouraging people to talk to each other and understand where each other is coming from actually is. So where does that get me? Well, if conversations are happening in places I don't know about, then chances are I wont be measuring those conversations. So the obvious answer to me is to bring the conversations into an arena where I can see them, which involves asking the right questions, providing some house rules and then listening very carefully.

But the other thing which I am wondering about is how you measure a sense of community within a town or county or country. In fluffy terms, it would be obvious - are people being nice to each other, do people help each other on and off buses or across roads, do people grit their own drives and the rest of the street be damned or do they grit the road as well, do people knock on their next door neighbours door to find out if they need a hand with the weekly shop, do people share information regarding dodgy people randomly loitering in the neighbourhood, do people investigate when they hear smashed glass at 3am............

None of this is quantifiable, measurable, put a finger uponable. It's all wavy hands stuff. I'm not interested in wavy hands stuff for the purpose of this exercise, I'm interested in real world outcomes.

Which I suppose is where big society comes in, isn't it. It's where it's come in all along. You can take the temperature of a towns sense of community by the amount of community projects which spring up inside it. By the amount of volunteers registered within it. By the amount of free time people donate on a daily/weekly/monthly basis in order to help someone they don't know out for no other reason than that they felt like helping someone. It's about people helping to build things physically, like youth clubs and church halls, but it's also about the more ephemeral stuff, the time spent leading the youth groups, leading local walks and bike rides, teaching people how to do the fundamental things in life like read and write.

If you wanted to measure community cohesion, which I think is less about people talking to each other, than perhaps about people practically helping each other, then I think I would map the community projects, efforts, outings and outcomes of the local community. It would be an interesting temperature to take in Blackburn with Darwen.

Of course, what I've actually done here is talk about community. Because talking about cohesion is a whole other post. What I wish, more than anything, is that I could march up to certain people within our Department and sit down and ask them if they'll talk to me so I can pick their brains. But I just don't know that it's appropriate, that it would be welcomed, that I am brave enough to do that without some kind of introduction or preamble. So the question then becomes, how on earth will I ever understand cohesion, or rather where people are and aren't talking and why and why not, unless I do.

IP blocked

I'm going to ask my partner to IP block this blog tomorrow. Self censorship entirely, no one has asked me not to blog. Call it a hiatus of respect. Respect for the people, perhaps myself included, who have given blood, sweat, tears, determination, single mindedness, enthusiasm, innovation, passion, heart, fire, honesty, love and belief to our jobs in the public sector.

I suspect tomorrow is going to be bad. But the soul wrenching will not be for me. It will be for friends. For the time they have given freely, for the extra hours and the 'extra miles'. For the stress endured and the smiles given freely to customers. For the straight talking and the talking around the edges. For the inspiration and the 5am starts. For the sometimes ridiculously abusive working conditions. For the endless patience and the being caught on the back foot, rallying and turning things around. For the hard budget decisions which have already been made, for the posts which haven't been filled and the people who have stepped into those gaps, often with little training or guidance. For the street cleaner who used the water in his sweeper to put out a car fire, for the gritters out until 2am, 3am, 4am. For the Officer who makes us more carbon and energy efficient meaning we save money, to the Recycling Manager who reduces our expenditure on Landfill Tax. For the determination to provide a good service despite the snow and ice, to the people who commit to communicating who we are and what we do, 24 hours a day when it really matters.

I love my job. I know very many people who love theirs too. They grump and they moan, as do I. But fundamentally, they too are militant optimists, believing in the service they provide and the difference that it makes. Their voices are never heard digitally, but they are there and they are many. I don't presume to speak for them, only to acknowledge them, to point in their direction, to say 'this is what we do, this Local Authority I work in, this is what we do and we are proud of it'.

I am afraid. Change is scary. But, ultimately, I guess I can always go back to data entry, right?

A whole lot of heart

Intelligence and heart. And social media, that's here too. But. Intelligence and heart.

I've hidden behind a computer for a long old time. I've kept beneath the parapet, never telling anyone what I thought, never venturing an opinion and sometimes I think never actually having one. I contributed to discussions only when others were drunk so they'd forget the words I'd say in the morning but grabbing the fleeting opportunity to test the water in expressing something. Anything.

Then someone asked a question. I knew the answer to the question. I knew I knew the answer but still I hesitated, because the person asking the question was a Head of Service and whilst I was entirely comfortable with expressing opinions with my then HoS, because he was my mentor and I trusted him and worked so very well together, I didn't know the person asking the question at all.

But I knew the answer. So I wrote the answer in an email. I didn't send the email for 48 hours. I came back on Monday morning, retrieved the draft and reread it. And I sat at my desk in my portakabin and I looked at the words I wrote, and I wondered who'd written them and then pressed Send.

The person I sent it to was @marcschmid

He forwarded the email to @tomstannard - I use their Twitter names because the conversation started on Twitter. A job became available in their team. I was told I had an interview over Twitter. I was told I had the job over Twitter. We still sort work stuff over Twitter too. And email. And face to face. It's as natural to all of us as breathing to use the right channel for the right time in the right way to get hold of the right person at the right time, depending on many different factors.

I explained this today. It got the usual reaction 'wow sounds like you lot have got the hang of this social media thing'. Well yes.......and no. But today I learnt that we can hold our heads high. That we are innovating in company, ever growing company, but we are still ahead some. That I was wrong in my assumption that everyone else was ahead of us. They're not. That we are using social media well and in the right way and I cannot take credit for that, all those foundations were built way before I came along.

But I also learnt that I know what I know. I think what I think. And it is the same as others think, I am not alone, I am not an army of one. I learnt that women can stand in front of conferences and speak and people will listen. I learnt that intelligence and heart are not things to be hidden, but things to be shown with no consideration for those things being unusual or strange.

I learnt. So much. I have 6 pages of notes thanks to the NWEGG social media conference I attended today. I talked and learnt from people, I discussed and enthused, and was enthused at. And oh, but there is nothing I love more than someone enthusing at me. It's the fuel that I need to continue to think, to continue to brainstorm, to continue the epiphanies. These are my dreams for the future, tell me yours, tell me yours, please tell me yours? What do you see? What would you want if there were no barriers at all? Imagine a world built from the ground up, what would you wish for? Can we create that, can we shape that, can we, is it possible? Why must we be constraind by what we've always done? I. need. that.

I need to wrap this feeling up and take it with me. I need to not forget. I am not stupid. I am not leading us down the wrong path. I am not speaking alone. I am not alone, I am backed up by research, great minds, innovative people, shiny people.

Intelligence with heart. Be smart and care. Don't be ashamed of having a brain which you enjoy thinking with and don't be afraid to admit that you care. These are the things I learnt from many many awesome people today.

For the sending of an email, for the pressing of the Send button, for the asking of a question, I am grateful.