Image courtesy of NOAA, tsunami.gov

There’s no doubt that the earthquake in Chile today is a horrible, horrible tragedy. It’s yet another terrible reminder that we truly are at the mercy of nature–as if Haiti wasn’t proof enough. But as with Haiti, we’re witnessing an amazing case study of people coming together with technology to manage the impact of this natural disaster, and it’s truly fascinating to watch.

This morning I woke up at 6:30 a.m. and immediately read the news of the earthquake on Twitter, from my bed. I watched news coverage of the event on TV while I worked out in the gym in my apartment. I kept track of updates on the earthquake and resulting tsunami via Twitter throughout my make-up class session this morning.

When I went downtown this afternoon, I listened to NPR’s coverage of the event on my iPhone while I was biking, and then watched coverage of the impending tsunami in Hawaii via Ustream on my iPhone while at Chinatown Coffee. I continued listening to the audio from Ustream while I biked back–including in the metro thanks to relatively new wireles capability for all carriers they’ve installed in the largest metro stations in the city.

Within all of this coverage, of I heard references to Twitter, Twitpic, Posterous, Ustream, Facebook, CNN iReports, hashtags, texting, iPhones, and more.

The natural disasters, record snowstorms, unprecedented level of news coverage, and rapidly advancing online technology we’ve seen in the past three months alone prove–loud and clear–the world is changing, and fast. Social media is playing an integral role in this. I saw a tweet earlier today mentioning that Jack Dorsey, founder of Twitter, said one of the initial purposes driving Twitter’s development was for crisis response and management. The Haiti and Chile earthquakes prove that it’s been incredibly effective for it.

Again, this is obviously an absolutely tragic event. It’s an incredible case study for technology, but obviously one we all wish we could’ve avoided. I know my thoughts, as well as millions and millions of others’ thoughts, are with those in Chile–as well as those still recovering in Haiti–and we hope we can continue to drive the development of technology and advanced communications to ease recovery from disasters such as these.

Are you a manager? A team leader? A business owner? Well read on, hopefully you’ll find this as useful as I did.

1. Your team wants context.

Suzanne explained that you can’t just make decisions without explaining them–most of the time–because your team simply won’t be motivated without understanding the context. Giving them the bigger picture helps keep motivation and productivity up!

2. Develop a real plan, be careful with measurement.

Oftentimes, Suzanne said, the hardest part is figuring out how you need to measure your progress and success. Make sure you’ve laid out a real plan for success, and pick the measurements that make the most sense for what you want to achieve.

3. Ensure people have the proper tools.

This one is a no-brainer. If people don’t have the tools, they can’t get the job done!

4. It’s important to practice situational leadership.

“Consistency is overrated,” said Suzanne. Not every person is the same, and they shouldn’t be managed as if they are. Don’t worry about consistency, worry about being effective.

5. Frequent feedback is incredibly important.

It’s all about being immediate and being repetitive. Suzanne said that oftentimes you really do just have to drill feedback into someone’s mind to get it to really sink in. It’s also important to make sure you’re giving feedback in the moment. Don’t wait until April to give someone feedback for a meeting that happened in March–they can easily say “well yesterday I did _____” to contradict your feedback. And that just leads to a “war of anecdotes,” says Suzanne. Not fun.

6. Performance reviews are a necessary evil.

Like them or not, performance reviews are important to make sure things are on the right track. But they also need to be done right. As a manager, you need to make sure you’re giving a review on time, because it’s simply disrespectful to keep a staff member waiting and worrying over a review that was supposed to happen a week ago. You also need to be participative. Make sure you’re involved in the review, don’t just fill out a form, make a quick 10 minute meeting and then be done with it. Be involved in the process of reviewing, it’ll make the process easier for both sides.

As a side note, Suzanne offered the suggestion to do performance reviews backwards. The tendency is always to give the encouragement and good news first, then move on to the “but…”. “Put the ‘but’ first,” said Suzanne–it’ll leave you both feeling positive at the end of the meeting, and ensures the positive feedback won’t be pushed out of the way by the negative.

7. Understand people’s triggers.

Similarly to number 4 up there, keep in mind that different people will be motivated by different things, will react differently to certain actions, and might need different incentives or even punishments, if the occasion calls for it. Learn these and know these, you’ll need them to get the most out of your team.

8. Understand how people learn.

Some people learn by reading. Others need to be briefed. Still others might need a visual representation to really “get” a concept. Make sure you know how your team learns, and utilize every method available to make it as easy as possible for them to do so.

9. Manage conflicts constructively.

This one was particularly interesting to me, and she made an excellent point: “There’s no way you’re that smart that everyone always agrees with you.” If that’s the case, chances are there’s something keeping your team from giving you real input–input that could be incredibly valuable. Make sure they know that a conflict in ideas, opinion, or otherwise is all perfectly acceptable, and can be easily managed. And once it’s managed, learn from that (both sides!) and use that to build upon your managing experience up to that point.

10. Don’t wait too long to fire someone.

Firing is no fun. That’s pretty much a given. Obviously I’ve never had to do it, but I’ve always heard it’s one of the hardest parts of managing. Suzanne says don’t put it off, just do it as soon as you realize it’s the right thing to do. She says she’s never regretted firing anyone, but it’s always for the best.

A couple side notes on this one, too: First, understand the law when it comes to firing–make sure you aren’t doing anything unethical, and certainly not illegal. Secondly, make sure you’re good with discretion. No reason that the conversation needs to go past the walls of your office (unless it comes from the fired worker’s mouth) and it’s the only respectful thing to do. Finally, make sure you’re good at communicating the development to the team. You don’t have to give details, but make sure they understand that employee is gone, what the next steps will be to replace him or her, and to continue keepin’ on keepin’ on.

11. The first thing is to hire the right people.

She saved possibly her most important point for last–make sure you hire the right people! If you’re not doing the hiring right, you’re going to have to deal with just more problems down the road. Some recommendations: be quiet and stoic during the interview, listen more than you speak. You want to get to know the candidate. Also, start with the question, “what do you know about this job?” It’s an easy way to gauge their expectations and see if they match what you envision for the position. Finally, be consistent–don’t ask different candidates questions in different orders. With some questions, candidates might be given clues from other questions earlier on in the interview, and it doesn’t do you any good to give one candidate an unfair advantage.

To talk about college this way may sound élitist. It may even sound philistine, since the purpose of a liberal-arts education is to produce well-rounded citizens rather than productive workers. But perhaps it is more foolishly élitist to think that going to school until age 22 is necessary to being well-rounded, or to tell millions of kids that their future depends on performing a task that only a minority of them can actually accomplish.

Well, he’s right on that first point. It does sound élitist. It does sound philistine. But the sheer gumption of saying it’s élitist to encourage kids to get a college education? That’s absolute insanity.

The author seems to subscribe to the viewpoint that people are born with certain abilities. That some people are just destined for greatness, while others will be trapped in the lower-class culture of our society. He’s simply wrong.

I grew up in rural Kentucky. I come from an upper-middle class, pretty average family. I’ve been blessed–and a fair bit lucky–but one of the primary reasons I have been as successful as I’ve been is thanks to my education and my college experience so far, at American University.

And it’s not just me. I’ve seen friends from lower-class, lower-middle class, and even upper-class go from unsavory circumstances to college, and they’re achieving greatness as we speak. Will they be CEOs, Senators, Presidents or entrepreneurs? Not necessarily. But their advanced education is giving them the knowledge they need to keep pushing our country forward.

Let’s look at it from a macro-level. Look at the United States in comparison to Asian countries’ performance in math, statistics, engineering, and the sciences. We lag behind–sometimes by a significant margin. Sure we’ve got the economic advantage, the legacy of being the world’s largest superpower, and a fair bit of innovation under our belts, but who says that will last forever? And at the rate countries like China and India are growing, progressing, and, in many ways, catching up to us, shows that more advanced education is the only argument we should be making.

The bipartisanship on the need for education is one of the few bright spots of cooperation you can find in our government right now. Who in their right mind could argue against that?

Ponnuru is missing the point. Sure, there are some people in college right now who might not be able to handle it. But is the answer to just give up, an stop sending them to college altogether? Is the answer just to let them stop learning, to go work on the farm, to grab a job collecting garbage or clerking grocery stores? No, no, no, no and NO.

The solution to this problem is obvious. Ponnuru even says it flat out in his article: “We could probably increase the number of high school seniors who are ready to go to college — and likely to make it to graduation — if we made the K-12 system more academically rigorous.” But then he goes on to refute his own point, dismissively saying “college isn’t for everyone.”

College isn’t for everyone now because our high schools aren’t doing their job. College isn’t for everyone because our education system is up to par for the greatness of America. College isn’t for everyone because idiots like this are writing articles arguing against it, with absolutely zero rational, empirical, or substantiated points to base their argument on.

In case you didn’t hear, Twitter has signed a deal with Yahoo for a somewhat more advanced integration than it has with Google or Microsoft. A conversation I had just yesterday with a friend at Agence France-Press (AFP) got me to thinking, and now this announcement has started to confirm my theory:

Twitter is starting to sound an awful lot like a social wire service.

Check below the cut for the rest.

Here’s a passage from the LA Times story about the Yahoo deal:

The partnerships with Twitter and Facebook will roll out later this year. The deals will enable users to take material from both sites without having to leave either one, said Jim Stoneham, vice president of communities for Yahoo. Specifically, users will be able to access their Twitter feed on Yahoo’s sites. They will also be able to update their Twitter status and share content from Yahoo. And Yahoo search and media properties will include Twitter updates.

Look at it this way. Imagine a news-ticker, on all your news sites, that streams breaking news not just from the major news organizations (of your choosing, of course), but also from your friends, family, and professional contacts. Imagine a news article where the headline was pulled from Twitter, the content was a digitally combined series of blog posts by highly-ranked bloggers, and the images were pulled from Flickr, Twitpic, and yFrog. Just imagine the fundamental shift in news, business, advertising–you name it–that would come from this.

Sure, real journalism would still survive–in fact it would likely thrive as more and more people look for authentic, reputable news sources. But for breaking news stories and immediate analysis of the events you are most interested in, what better to give you the news then your favorite news sources and all your friends?

I know that nowadays, it’s rare for me not to hear a piece of breaking news on Twitter first. Most of the things on TV are at least 30 minutes old, and the newspapers? Ha, they couldn’t break news if their industry depended on it… well, I won’t go there.

But could this Twitter-Yahoo deal be edging towards something much, much larger? We’ve all heard that Twitter’s goal is to be the “pulse of the planet”, could this be the key to achieving that goal? How will news agencies react? How will wire services, the AP, AFP, Reuters, all of them, survive? If more people are breaking news faster, and providing free, high-quality photos, videos and audio for these events, what justifies the high cost?

There’s a lot to think about here, all of it purely conjecture. But it’s fun to imagine. What do you think about the Twitter-Yahoo deal? Is it just another deal like they’ve got with Microsoft and Google? Is it on the verge of something better, like I’m theorizing?

Well actually, it was the setting of tonight’s Social Media Club DC event, titled “Leveraging Online Relationships,” and hosted at Microsoft’s Friendship Heights office here in Washington, D.C. Organized and hosted by the awesome Sarah Wurrey, the event blew our geeky little minds, as usual. The panel consisted of:

• Alan Rosenblatt – A digital strategist, liberal organizer, professor and blogger, Alan is also the Associate Director of Online Advocacy for the Center for American Progress. Lucky me, this has been my second time to meet him in the past five days (he can’t escape me, haha!) and I swear he teaches me so much every time, not to mention every day via Twitter/Facebook/etc.
• Rebecca Wales – Rebecca is the Director of Communications for Smart Girl Politics, a conservative action network. Now obviously I have my qualms with her cause, but she’s got some real talent and she’s an incredibly nice person. She’s a ton of fun to talk to and I learned a lot from her tonight. Plus, know thy enemy, right? (Just kidding, Rebecca!)
• Brian Dresher – He is the Marketing Manager for USA Today, and boy is he smart. Not only did he provide some excellent insight into social media, but he provided the unique viewpoint of someone who’s industry is changing rapidly and dramatically–journalism. He told us a little about what USA Today is doing to continue to connect with its audience, and even told us where you can get a little bit of a behind-the-scenes glimpse.

So, clearly, you missed out. Anyway, be sure to check the hashtag stream for more learnings from the evening. Also, see my photos from the event embedded below or here on my flickr.