One of my favorite IBM social networking tools is now available for other companies! This one visualizes your social network. =D Alan Lepofsky has screenshots and a blog post about IBM Atlas for Lotus Connections. Good stuff!
“Know the differences between Technology, Features, Benefits, and Value,” Jeremiah Owyang advises in his blog post about effectively talking to executives and clients about social media. He goes on to provide concrete examples of all four approaches, and suggests how to establish trust and respond to indicators of interest or disinterest. Good stuff.
I’m an emerging technologies evangelist focusing on social computing in the enterprise. Some people come to me with a technology focus. They want to use a blog or a wiki, but their objectives aren’t clear, and they don’t know where to start. Sometimes they start on their own, but they quickly lose interest in it when people don’t reply to their posts or update their wiki. Part of my role as a technology evangelist is to get them from focusing on the technology to focusing on at least the benefits as soon as possible. In order to do that, I need to know who they are and what matters to them. What are they looking for? What words do they use to describe what they do? Listening is a huge part of evangelism. (This makes me want to find another term, actually, as “evangelist” brings up images of people who just talk at other people.)
When I talk about benefits or value, I talk about WIIFM: “What’s in it for me.” It’s a good idea to lead with personal benefits, and let the social benefits follow. Blogs, social bookmarks, wikis… All of these things should pay off for you on a personal level, because the social benefits might not kick in for a while. When I talk to people who are new to blogging, for example, I emphasize how it’s useful as a professional notebook for recording lessons learned and questions to explore. I talk about how the practice I get in thinking about what I think makes it easier for me to talk to other people. I talk about how my blog helps me remember what I’m passionate and excited about. When the personal benefits are established, then I can talk about the social benefits: the unexpected connections, the deeper conversations, the online and offline interactions. But personal benefits have to come first. Otherwise, it becomes a chore and you won’t be able to appreciate the social benefits.
Kids are a great way to show some of those benefits, because kids pick up the technologies that have good WIIFM value. Here’s an example: At a recent kick-off meeting, one of the clients mentioned that he saw his daughter using del.icio.us to coordinate a school project with some of her classmates. Using del.icio.us, they could quickly put together and share relevant sites. And hey, if his daughter could do that, maybe people in his company could, too.
The caveat is that it’s also easy to get locked into thinking of social media as just for the kids, or just for our personal lives. That’s why it’s also important to tell stories about older people using social media. (My mom shares business tips on her blog!) It’s important to tell stories about the business benefits of social media. (I got my job because of my blog, my bookmarks, and my other social stuff!) We need to tell those stories so that we can help people see what’s in it for them and what’s in it for their company.
So how do you talk to people about social media?
(xpost: The Orange Chair (team blog), personal blog, personal internal blog; thanks to Stefano Pogliani for the link)
Instead of restricting access to Facebook, Serena Software is embracing it. How? And Why? From Bill Ives blog posting:
Serena is really replacing its existing intranet with Facebook as a front end linked to a low-cost content management system behind the firewall. Here are the reasons why and what they have seen so far. …the firm is just over 800 employees but is still globally based (operations in 18 countries) with 35% of their employees working virtually.
They are going through a major transition as they move from more traditional enterprise applications to web 2.0 mashups. The leadership wanted all employees to be better connected so they could be on the same level of understanding, excitement, and commitment to this transition.
They also thought that using a web 2.0 tool, like Facebook, represented the best way to take the whole company into this new space.
Like many companies their existing intranet was a poor platform for document finding, much less sharing….. I have also seen many unsuccessful intranets that cost large sums so I could certainly understand what René was talking about. One of major flaws of existing intranets, even when they work to find stuff, is the lack of social context. It is difficult to find anything about people. Serena wanted to promote a greater connection between people.
(The emphasis is mine.)
For more on this forward thinking approach, please see Bill Ives’s blog entry here: Portals and KM: Serena has Adopted Facebook as their Intranet
William Gibson said: the future is already here. It’s just not very evenly distributed.. The same thing could be said about Web 2.0 and how are clients are using it. For our clients, Web 2.0 is already here…its just not very evenly distributed.
Some of our clients are already looking at building out Web 2.0 infrastructures to support significant efforts in social networking. Others are exploring some of the technologies associated with Web 2.0 for the first time. And some are saying: I hear alot about Web 2.0 but I am not sure how it can benefit me? There is no one level that everyone is working from.
Our goal is to evenly distribute Web 2.0. Or at least to help everyone make progress wherever they are. Even the clients that are much more advanced could find new and better ways to use Web 2.0 and social networking approaches and technologies to do things.
Conference reports are a great way to help share knowledge and justify
the expense of conference travel, but attendees are often so busy
learning and networking that they don’t have the time to send detailed
conference reports from the road. Postponing the report-writing to the
plane trip back could mean many lost insights and lost momentum.
Liveblogging can help. With a little preparation, conference
reports can be posted and shared with coworkers and the rest of the
world within ten minutes of the presentation. Ethan Zuckerman and Bruno
Giussani have put together a collection of terrific tips for conference bloggers, which you should read before you head out to your next conference.
(crossposted: personal blog, external team blog, and internal personal blog)
Check out Portals and KM: Blogging at Society for New Communications Research Awards Meeting for quick links to Bill Ives’ excellent posts on success stories shared during the Society for New Communications Research awards meeting. Find out about how GM uses social media, how Sun became cool again, how Coke embraced user-generated video content, and how Dell promotes quick offers through Twitter. Good stuff.