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PS Asks: James Roughton [Professional Safety](Professional Safety Via Acquire Media NewsEdge) PS: Why should safety professionals consider social media an important tool? James: I spent more than 40 years in the SH&E industry and in 2009 I got what I call the "Oh, by the way" call. In that situation, you have two choices: sit by and brood or find something else to do. I decided to start looking into social media and after about a year and a lot of mistakes, I realized that safety professionals are not really looking at the most beneficial aspects of social media because they're only looking at Facebook and Twitter. I considered the production side of social media and I started giving presentations on how it can best be used. One thing I'm talking about is curation, which refers to how you file downloaded data. A good example is a new book I just published this past year, Safety Culture: An Innovative Leadership Approach. Managing the data when writing that book was very hard. Social media and some free Internet tools saved me about 40 to 50 hours of formatting references and citations. You do not have to be afraid of the Internet and social media if you use them properly. What I'm trying to teach people is that there's a right way and a wrong way. If you want to use Twitter and Facebook, that's your choice, but you have to leam to use them more effectively. Social media can make your life a lot easier. I can't tell you how many hours it has saved me. One important thing to keep in mind is to stay focused on what you're doing. When you start using social media, you can end up going 40 different directions. If you start searching for something, it is going to lead you somewhere else, which will lead you somewhere else. Focus on one thing, and when you get that done and you've done it right, you can move on to the second thing. PS: Which social networking sites are most beneficial to safety professionals? James: I use various social networking sites. I do not visit each one daily, but I do post to most of them. Linkedln is one of the best social media ates you can use. Because Linkedln is more business related than Facebook, I used it to start a safety training group about 3 years ago. That group now has more than 7,000 members and continues to grow. Linkedln is the best choice for professionals for several reasons. You can interact with many people. For example, when I post, I reach about 100,000 people at one time. I try to show people how to do that, because when you join a group you get so much information from the group that you have to pick and choose what is good. PS: How can safety professionals make the most of RSS feeds? James: I gave a presentation titled "Using Internet Tools to Increase Productivity" at an ASSE Georgia Chapter meeting in January 2013, and one of the questions people asked me was how I can post so much and so frequently. RSS stands for really simple syndication. It accumulates everything that's been posted on a given website during a certain time period and presents that information on a single page. Most websites have it, including many that are relevant to safety, such as OSHA, AIHA and NFPA. Most safety professionals search the Internet every day, going to the same websites, but they don't catch everything because they don't know where everything is located. RSS feeds generally reproduce all of the most relevant and up-to-date information. One option is to use Google Alerts, which sends the information you've subscribed to via e-mail daily or once a week or as it is published, depending on your preference. Another free service is Feedly, which allows you to put all your RSS feeds in one package so you can look at them all at once. My Feedly package contains about 100 RSS feeds separated into categories according to topic. I look at the categories I want to see, and what I like, I post. People have asked me how I can post so much information without it being mistaken for spam. Well, if you send something out every 15 or 30 seconds, it seems like spam because people don't want to receive posts from you that often. At first, I made the mistake of posting too many things at once, but now I manage posting times using a program called Buffer. Buffer schedules posts to go out to specific sites at specific times of the day so that you don't inundate people but instead post at times when people are most likely to read things. I've noticed that people like to read things around 9 a.m., at lunch and at 3 p.m., so most of my posts are scheduled for those times. Buffer can also be tied with Feedly for more direct transfer of information, and the basic version is free. There's also another program called Dlvrit. If you want to post regularly to a website, you can put the RSS feed in Dlvrit and it will deliver to certain websites on a regular basis based on your preferences. It also has a scheduling component. PS: How can one manage RSS feeds and website updates without getting overwhelmed by the number of alerts popping up every day? James: Feedly minimizes the information you receive. Pick five to 10 groups that you want to follow and use those exclusively. Since Feedly also allows you to organize RSS feeds into categories, you can easily manage information about multiple topics. Feedly also has an app for iPads and iPhones for easy access while traveling. My book was an almost 3-year project with my coauthor, and during the writing process we accumulated about 3,500 documents, 99% of which were found on the Internet primarily through RSS feeds. This is the benefit of using RSS feeds for research. For example, if researching OSFIA for a paper or writing a procedure, one should find a website that generates OSHA or NIOSH information and subscribe to its RSS feed. It is amazing how much new information can be integrated into a project from this. PS: Explain the concept of mind mapping and how social media can be utilized for research purposes. James: Mind maps can be used in several ways to allow you to visually organize thoughts and link to documents. I have started to use a mind map to categorize items on my hard drive. I don't need to search subdirectories anymore; I just use the mind map to click on a link to the information I'm looking for. Another way to use a mind map is to organize plans. When we developed our book, our entire brainstorming process was outlined using a mind map. A mind map allows you to select chapters or sections of a document and reorder them by dragging and dropping. A word processing program doesn't offer that flexibility. A mind map also helps a user locate specific information within an article she has written. Mind maps also link to PDFs. For example, when I download OSHA articles, I'll highlight the PDF. The PDFs are annotated, so to say. Then, I bring those PDFs into the mind map and they are displayed within the appropriate category. PS: What are some of the best tools for mind mapping and preparing documents? James: One free mind-mapping tool is Docear Literature Suite, a piece of software from Germany. It's complicated to leam, but once you leam it, it's a lifesaver. Many of us don't do a very good job of documenting references and citations because we don't understand how to do it. When we gather information from a website for internal purposes, we don't tend to cite it and reference it properly, yet when we transfer that information to external projects such as books and presentations, citations are needed. The Docear software eases this process because it has a plug-in that connects to Word documents. Mind maps in Docear can be organized so that your computer screen contains your projects on one side and a reference builder for Word on the other. When you load references into the reference builder and format them, the reference builder then integrates with Word to add citations and fill the reference table automatically. When I change or add a reference, it automatically updates my bibliography. Another useful software tool for writing articles is Scrivener, which costs about $45. When you write a 10-page document, trying to locate specific information in that document can be difficult. In Scrivener, side menus display content lists for easy access to information. Using Scrivener, I've increased my productivity by about 90%. Scrivener also allows you to use what are called snapshots of previous versions of a given document. This lets you view multiple revisions while eliminating the need to save them as separate documents. For presentations, I started out using PowerPoint, but I soon found that it gets boring. I now create presentations using several different software programs. One great tool for presentations is Prezi, and I use VideoScribe to create live video scripts. VideoScribe lets you create morphs of multiple images that transition into each other, making people wonder what's going to happen next. PS: How can safety professionals best use social media to advance their careers? James: Linkedln is the best tool for this. So much good stuff out there can help you find a job. Finding a job in the safety profession can be difficult because most people do not understand it. You will see job lists that say, "I want a qualified safety professional," or "I want a CSP with 3 years' experience." Or, they'll write a job description stating that the safety professional will be responsible for everything, or responsible for reducing injuries and fatalities. What I would tell a young person is, "Remember, you are part of the leadership team. You should not go in there having to do everything yourself." That is how I felt when I was trained, and it is a big problem in our industry right now. I tell my students that they need to be treated by their coworkers as peers, not gofers, and the way to do that is to integrate themselves with the leadership team and get their guidance. Sure, you have to do some things on your own, but you can also utilize the supervision of the leadership team. PS: What apps would you recommend to safety professionals? James: I use some apps but not many. Some job hazard analysis apps are very helpful, such as the Job Safety Analysis app by BreakThrough Applications Pty Ltd., CSL Risk Assessment App, and Canvas Job Safety Analysis OHS Checklist. These are important because job hazard analysis is not widely understood. However, I would caution safety professionals to not use those exclusively without also thinking outside the box. When traveling, Dropbox and CloudOn are apps that can be used to edit documents. Dropbox is a virtual memory tool. Some say that basically it is the cloud. If one travels without his/her computer and needs to change a document that is saved to a flash drive, if s/he has access to a computer and Dropbox, s/he can load it in Dropbox and it will remain saved there for access by any device that person uses. Anyone can sign up for a free account and get 2 GB of free memory. Dropbox can also be used when sharing documents and folders. A document that is 15 MB may be too large to upload to a website, but one can share that document with others by putting it on Dropbox by giving colleagues a link. CloudOn is an app that integrates with Dropbox and allows you to open Word, Excel and PowerPoint files on an iPad. It is one of the best apps I can recommend to anyone who travels because it lets you make changes to documents on your iPad and save them back to Dropbox. It also integrates with Google Drive. "You do not have to be afraid of the Internet and social media if you use them properly. What I'm trying to teach people is that there's a right way and a wrong way." James Roughton James Roughton, CSP, CRSP, CET, R-CHMM, Six Sigma Black, is a safety professional with acquired productivity skills in social media and digital curation. He is the author of several published books, including Safety Culture: An Innovative Leadership Approach, Job Hazard Analysis: A Guide for Voluntary Compliance and Beyond and Developing an Effective Safety Culture: A Leadership Approach. He was named Project Safe Georgia Safety Professional in 2008 and received ASSE's Georgia Chapter Safety Professional of the Year Award for 1998-99. His websites include www.safetycultureplus.com and www.jamesroughton.com. (c) 2014 American Society of Safety Engineers |