by Janus Boye
Personally, I have a big appetite for change, but given the recent events, even I struggle to cope. We are far from done with the pandemic, there’s economic crisis like never before and what lies around the corner is harder than ever to predict.
In an entertaining and inspiring member conference call, Sree Sreenivasan, offered his insights, thoughts and tips on the crisis and beyond. This post is not a transcript of the talk, but rather a few of my observations from what’s probably the best show we have put on during COVID-19!
Sree is the former chief digital officer of The Met Museum, Columbia University and City of New York. Today he’s a leading social and digital media consultant and trainer.
One of the notable slides in Sree’s presentation: No one knows what will happen next and there is no playbook!
Clear is the new clever
In his fast-paced and helpful talk, Sree made it clear that there’s no playbook for the time that we are in. He shared an example of a word cloud made by new MBA students where the popular words were:
Frustrated
Confused
Crazy
Tired
Certainly not the usual words to expect on 1st day of business school.
He also shared a new ABC as shown on the tweet:
Besides, charging, connecting and collecting, a quick look at Sree’s activities shows that he’s also busy creating. Whether it’s going live on Youtube, sharing on Twitter or elsewhere, Sree seems constantly analyzing, creating and sharing.
In his talk, Sree also made the connection to the printed world, where he said that in magazine covers, being clever is really important. He showed some really clever covers to get his point across, like Esquire featuring Mohammed Ali in 1968. The key advice from Sree, is that in digital clear is the new clever. I interpreted that as being specific about who you are, being as clear as possible and that digital can help bring clarity.
Be helpful, be useful, also on social media
Clearly Sree knows his way around social media better than most. He highlighted LinkedIn as the most valuable, yet most misunderstood, platform of the time.
Whether in person or on a social media platform, Sree’s advice was clear:
Build your connections when you don’t need them
This goes for finding your next job, but it also goes for finding knowledge, new connections and perhaps importantly helping out others and in that sense truly building relationships.
On Twitter, Sree has an epic thread about how to cope with losing your job.
It’s all about the experience and how you make people feel
Besides confidence and transparency, generosity struck me as the keyword from Sree. His social media success formula is all about generosity and making the reader feel good.
The roadmap for social media success as laid out by Sree
Finally, Sree made two important points that also apply to improving the experience
We have to get better at design. Sree shared an example of his own design skills to illustrate the point, but I see this as something important across most initiatives. Design matters
In a world that’s now gone virtual, people don’t want to attend yet another Zoom meeting. Privacy concerns aside, Sree made the point that they want a show. They expect more than just a dull meeting.
Thanks, Sree for finding the time to meet with our community!
Learn more
During his keynote, Sree referred to so many great and inspirational resources and articles for further study. Here’s a just two of them:
The Met ousted a top executive, so he used Facebook to show the world how to do unemployment right (Quartz, June 2016)
Lose your job? It may pay to announce it (PBS, August 2016)
@Sree’s Top Social Media Tips (updated for 2020)
On this blog, we covered back in April How To Adapt Your Content Marketing To An Unexpected Shift. Finally, Sree made me think of the famous book by Dale Carnegie from 1932: How to Win Friends and Influence People
You can also browse the slides from the talk or view the entire 42 minute recording below.