October
An article originally posted on
We’ve been delighted to welcome Thomas Vander Wal from Infocloud solutions for a few days with us in Belgium. Thomas is a senior consultant in social software and personal knowledge tools, also known for coining the term “folksonomy“. It offered a great opportunity to share perspectives and visions of the future with the whole team including our visionary friend Scott. 
Thanks Thomas for your visit and for your eye-opening presentation! It was also a pleasure to put a face and voice on a blogger previously played by our Feed jockey.
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October
An article originally posted on www.cio.com.au
“Too many organizations choose to block what they don’t understand - it makes their environments easier to control. But what might the benefit be of truly understanding social media tools and allowing their use accompanied by a strong and appropriate proper use policy?”
Read the full article at www.cio.com.au
A worthwhile 12-step guide to getting the most out of Web 2.0 tools and making it safe-for-purpose.
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October
An article originally posted on mashable.com
“As the corporate adoption of microblogging tools like Twitter continues to increase, it’s only a matter of time before companies decide that there is something there worth exploring. Well-known startups like Mahalo have a 50% adoption rate of Yammer. Companies like IBM are using similar functionality on their Facebook-like internal communities. With so many potential benefits, why wouldn’t a company want to give this a try?”
Read the full article at mashable.com
Microblogging in the enterprise has been getting a lot of attention lately and speculations are made about its usefulness (or the opposite). To my mind it won’t help manage your information, but it will definitely help it flow and get people out of their e-mail boxes. Informality is another aspect of microblogging which helps quickly materialize knowledge that they would otherwise keep to themselves, yet without locking them into the silos of point-to-point instant messenging as microblogs are logged and shared.
Finally, one of the most important factors for adoption is the “what’s in it for me?” question which also gets a straightforward answer: if you know what people are up to, you’ll be more effective at finding the right person at the right time in order to get your own job done right. It also creates more opportunities for interaction and helps gathering feedback on your own work.
To those who blame these tools for additional information overload and attention diversion, what are you afraid of as long as the tool provides sufficient network/topic/project filtering features and its users stay professional? Receiving 20 status updates is far more useful and less disturbing than being disturbed by 3 people who are looking for information you can’t provide.
At the end of the day, you’ll only know if you try it out for yourself. So if you have the opportunity, I strongly recommend you give these Instant Messenging derivatives a shot. How? Well first choose a tool candidate requiring a minimal setup procedure (this article compares several amongst which my current favorite – Yammer). Find a few motivated folks in your workplace to test drive it but guide them with usage examples to avoid creating just a playground or another “information pit”. Finally, gather their feedback before considering a possible wider deployment.
Remember, even a small communication benefit over zero implementation effort leads to infinite return. So why wouldn’t anyone want to give this a try ? And if you have, what were the hurdles and solutions you encountered ?
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September
An article originally posted on Library Clips
“I feel that people will indeed post to a micro-blog as the content is the length of an SMS, ie. a max of 140 characters. This is not hard at all, and the format encourages a type of informalness. Another low barrier is posting via email or some sort of app that’s real easy to get to and post, perhaps via the browser or a desktop widget. Actually micro-blog posting via IM feels right, it feels more casual and something people may be inclined to do, unlike a blog they are not fearing that lot’s of people will see their published post, in fact micro-blog streams fall off the radar quite quickly.
This is not a mirror replacement for typical blog content, using micro-blogs we also tend to share stuff we wouldn’t blog, more akin to IM…so this makes blogs and micro-blogs (or presence networks) very complementary.”
Read the full article at libraryclips.blogsome.com
If you are wondering whether microblogging can be a useful tool inside your company and can complement existing blog/wiki platforms, read through this post as it gives concrete examples of messages/conversations which can be captured and further fill in communication gaps between employees.
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September
An article originally posted on blog.hbs.edu
“Imagine that an organization has deployed a full suite of emergent social software platforms (ESSPs) for its members— blogs, wikis, discussion / Q&A forums, upload facilities for photos and videos and etc., Digg-like utilities to flag and vote on digital content, prediction markets, some kind of enterprise Twitter, and whatever else a ‘full suite’ consists of, now or in the future. And imagine further that the leaders of the organization are sincerely interested in pursuing Enterprise 2.0 and getting their people to actually use the new tools. What would they then do? What would be their smart course(s) of action?”
Read the full article at blog.hbs.edu
Interesting article from Andrew McAfee on his blog in which he tries to come up with a rather simple weight-free yet multidimensional model in order to qualify/rate the contribution of individual end-users (both taking into account quantitive as well as qualitative criteria) to social software platforms; this will for sure evolve into a more in-depth model that many organisations will be able to use/finetune for their environment.
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September
An article originally posted on Social Computing Magazine
“It used to be a little surprising how long it’s taken for Web 2.0 to begin to have serious impact on or even high-level interest in the business world. However, the ideas have had staying power and have also largely been validated; there are now fundamentally different and very powerful new models for engaging with customers, designing our products, and applying technology in general to our business that are proven and have growing bodies of knowledge. The Web has become the single most important driving force in many fields of endeavor as well as the leading source of both innovation and potent new modes for communicating, collaborating, socializing, and working together. It’s taken a few years but businesses are now feeling the change in the air.”
Read the full article at web2.socialcomputingmagazine.com
In this article, Dion Hinchcliffe’s suggests an interesting diagram on the topic ‘General Transformation Process of Business to 2.0′, and also details 10 key aspects of a Web 2.0 strategy. These are very important to know for any head of enterprise desirous to encourage his team’s usage of 21st century tools.
From my point of view, it is clear that beyond these tools, it is above all a question of company culture, leadership mentality, sharing between colleagues and open-mindedness.
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September
An article originally posted on Read/WriteWeb
“A new report about Enterprise adoption of Web 2.0 technologies, by Awareness, Inc., shows that employers are increasingly allowing staff to use social media applications in working hours. Awareness puts the figure at 69 percent of businesses in 2008, up from 37 percent last year.”
Read the full article at www.readwriteweb.com
Which enterprise doesn’t yet use a wiki or have a blog?
Social media and web 2.0 are invading the enterprise landscape. They are more and more used internally as well as externally to enhance respectively knowledge sharing and communication with clients and customers.
This study statistically shows that web 2.0 technology results in essential company tools and provide best practices to adopt them.
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September
An article originally posted on www.chrisbrogan.com
“PAB 2008 One of the things people will get wrong when trying to determine how to make a more human-shaped web for their company is sharing. Sharing is something that was left out of the business books for the last forty or fifty years. Your company isn’t set up to share. It’s not in the genetics, and as such, the people responsible for figuring out how to collaborate and do something in this whole new web are going to run into a problem quickly.”
Read the full article at www.chrisbrogan.com
Interesting article of Chris Brogan about “sharing” which seems to have become a new business tool that you just can’t get away from. But is it appropriate to share everything?
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September
An article originally posted on Web Strategist
“With the popularity to Twitter and other Microblogging tools, we should expect to see a flurry of simliar tools for project and program management for the enterprises (..).
Stemming from commodity technology, I’m sure I’ll have a hard time keeping this list up to date over a few months –expect IM vendors, blogging vendors, community platforms, enterprise 2.0 vendors, and a flurry of startups to offer similiar features, first read up on the pros and cons as well as some potential use cases.
It’s interesting to see the need to justify enterprise needs of such tools that are already being adopted by consumers, typical of enterprise settings (I’m a former enterprise intranet manager). With that said, let’s start the definitive list.”
Read the full article at www.web-strategist.com
A good starting point if you are looking at deploying microblogging inside your company. A few backlinks also give you an idea of pros and cons, as well as potential use cases.
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September
An article originally posted on www.ibm.com
“IBM’s Enterprise Tagging Service cost $700k to develop and deploy across the worldwide intranet as a sidebar to a number of key web properties: traditional search engine results, top content pages, and web applications like the IBM internal social brainstorming tool, Thinkplace(..)
The ETS team instituted a survey to ask users how this tool helped them. What they found was amazing when you look at it in context: the average person saved 12 seconds, across the 286000+ searches performed through ETS each week. This sums up to 955 hours saved each week across the company. In terms of cost savings, it amounts to a rough estimate of $4.6 million a year, in terms of productivity gain. The reusability of this page widget also resulted in $2.4 million in cost avoidance (reimplementing this for each site).”
Read the full article at www.ibm.com
In a recent McKinsey survey I commented on, business executives didn’t seem to regard tagging as a very useful web 2.0 tool.
These numbers from IBM should make them think again.
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