The Future is Social and Integrated

I've been waiting for Google to make a big splash in the social space. In fact, the original inspiration for this blog was iGoogle Social Features. What seems to be working for Google isn't the big news items like Wave or Buzz. Google has put several pieces together and until recently I didn't see the whole picture. Then I went to Taco Loco.

Social Media Success

How can you tell if your social network is working?

There can be many measures of success for social media. It can make a connection that helps you land a job or make a sale. It can be a channel that enables you to help others. It can build your personal or corporate brand. For a business it can be a marketing channel. Some results of Social Media are tangible while others may be more difficult to measure.

There Are No Social Media Sea-Monkeys®

The 7 Harsh Realities of Social Media Marketing
I read a great post on Copyblogger and it was wonderfully enhanced by one of the comments.

“Unfortunately, there are a few faux gurus selling the equivalent of social media sea monkeys. Just add water, makes its own success!”

LinkedIn Connections Hockey Stick

Today I hit an inflection point. I’m OK, It didn’t hurt. I connected with someone on LinkedIn who is really connected. Since my post, LinkedIn to More Than a Million, I’ve been watching my LinkedIn network creep up from 1,000,000 people to almost 50,000 more.  Today I am connected to 1,814,100+ people on LinkedIn.
I connected with an individual who has more than 5,000 connections. Compared to my 116 connections that is absolutely insane. Now my network is going to explode. Let’s assume that each of his connections has 100 connections (I actually have no idea so this is just an example). That would be 50,000 people that are two degrees away from me. If each of these people make 1 additional connection 50,000 people join my network. That would be equivalent to the entire growth of my network in the past month. I have a feeling things just changed.

For Better or For Worse

Right now I don’t know if this is a good thing or a bad thing. I expect the connection I made will be great, otherwise I wouldn’t have made it. Since I haven’t experienced a network this large I can’t tell what it means if anything. I am making an effort to do a better job at networking so this could be very helpful. If it is true that it isn’t what you know but who you know, I may have just met a game changer.

EACH Strategy for Social Software

Forrester Research, Inc. uses a methodology they call POST to help clients properly formulate their social media strategy. Briefly summarized on the Forrester site:

Forrester's POST methodology enables you to make smarter marketing decisions with social technologies. POST is a four-step process:

• People. Review your target customer's social behaviors and attitudes.
• Objectives. Decide on your social technology goals.
• Strategy. Determine how your objectives will change your relationship with customers.
• Technology. Choose the appropriate technologies to deploy.

For social media at work we can borrow the methodology and adapt it to quickly work through most of the steps.

Employees

Internal use of social media is focused on the enterprise. This solution is not intended for customers or even partners. The people in this solution are employees.

Accomplish

The purpose of enterprise social software is to improve your organization’s performance. Performance improvement may be realized as increased efficiency and/or higher quality. The objective is what the company wants to accomplish. This is one of the more difficult parts of the EACH strategy.

Collaboration

To work together. Don’t mistake this for what you want to accomplish. Collaboration is not your goal, it is how you will accomplish your goal. The strategy the enterprise will use is employee collaboration. There was some internal debate that this step should be communication. I got tired of arguing with myself and decided that even if it were communication, in order to be social it would have to be collaborative. For instance, I communicate with you by writing this blog. Once you comment, it turns into collaboration.

How?

This step remains the most similar to the POST methodology. Once you have properly determined the first three steps, you are ready to analyze the tools that can be used to implement your strategy. If you want the VP of Sales to communicate with the sales force have her blog. If you want to capture the institutional knowledge of your organization set up a wiki.

It’s So Easy to Say It’s So Hard

Thinking of the big picture makes enterprise social software very intimidating, almost overwhelming. What do we need? How will it work? Who can we trust? Like any project, it is vital to understand the goals you want to accomplish.

The Purpose of Enterprise Social Software

The primary reason to use social media within a company is to improve quality and efficiency. Isn’t that the reason for all the tools you use at work? Today many individuals work is collaborative. Making it easier to find the right individuals and simpler to work together improves efficiency. Being able to discover experts, and information, that helps you with your current task helps improve quality. A person doesn’t have to struggle to find an answer when they can ask an expert. The purpose is improvement, and this improvement occurs through better communication and collaboration on an as-needed basis.
There are additional benefits and some will be more tangible than others. An organization’s use of social media may help foster a culture that will appeal to potential employees. The use of social tools at a company will influence how the company is perceived, especially by younger workers who are used to the type of interaction the tools enable.

Just Don’t Be Friends With Crazy People

“You’ll be OK, just don’t be friends with crazy people.” That was the advice my colleague gave someone who had just signed up for Facebook. I laughed out loud. I certainly understand why some people don’t participate in social sites. It can seem dangerous to make even more information available to the masses. Isn’t Google frightening enough without adding more personal information to the mix?

My take is to try and feed the web what you want to be there. For years I didn’t make it easy to find out who I really was online. It could still be done but I hesitated to make it obvious. I would use nicknames or handles and seldom posted items with my full name. Now I want people to see that I’m me. Although there are many individuals with the same first and last name who could be confused with me I try to make it easy to see who is behind the short username.

I do understand there can be consequences to being yourself online. As another colleague found out, old girlfriends can find you on Facebook. This might be bad if, as in his case, they are people you would rather not find you. So I think the crazy people advice is right on the money. Be careful about who you associate with online, but be open to meeting new friends. It is easier every day to find like-minded individuals with whom you would enjoy sharing ideas. Search out people you would like to be associated with while being careful to accept as a friend those you know nothing about.

Experience: The Blog: Who Matters Most in Social Media? Not You!

It has been said before but I think it is worth saying again, it isn't the quantity (or frequency) that matters it is the quality. I think this post nails the idea that Social Media is a new medium for communication but communication hasn't necessarily changed.
Experience: The Blog: Who Matters Most in Social Media? Not You!

"Yet"

Yes it is a weak title for a post but it was all I could write.

Today at work a colleague sent an email to a few people with a link to a blog post about the importance of mobility to social media. Then he went on to express regret that he was emailing the link because he didn't have internal resources that could be used to make the information available to a wider audience in an appropriate manner. It was a perfect example of the opportunity to deploy solutions internally at an organization in order to make information readily available to those who can benefit from it.

When he wrote that he didn't have the tools, all I could answer with was "Yet."

Social Media at Work

Social Media at Work means at least three things to me. How do you get social media to work? How do you use social media for work? How can social media be useful at work?

To answer the first questions requires a "how to". The second question is a "what for". And the third one really gets interesting. Is there a way to deploy social media inside the corporate firewall to better enable employees to create solutions to business problems?

I intend for this blog to record my discoveries as I strive to answer the questions I have about social media at work.

What is Webitty? I don't know yet. So far it is a domain name that was available for registration. I'll see where it goes from here.

Ed Tennant