by Thiru Murugan
Build Your Network Before You Need Them:
[Via Web Strategy by Jeremiah]
Jeremiah brings up some very important points. A network is not useful if you need it before it really exists. It needs to already be present.

Here’s a few things I’ve learned, and hope you intake, invest, and pass on:

1) You’re always looking for the next opportunity, simply shutting down what else is in the market is fool hearted. It doesn’ mean you need to jump ship before 1 month, or 1 year, but it means you should be talking to recruiters, companies, and hiring managers to see what next skills are needed now, and in the future. This will actually help your current employer, as you continue to skill up, take on new projects, as they invest in you. Remember, even if you work for someone else, you are a company of one.

2) Those who ignore the party/conversation/network when they are content and decide to drop in when they need the network may not succeed. It’s pretty easy to spot those that are just joining the network purely to take & not to give. Therefore, be part of the party/conversation/network before you need anything from anyone. Start now, and continue to build relationships by giving now: share knowledge, help others, and become a trusted node and connector, not just an outlying ‘dot’ of a comet that swings in every 4 years or so.

That is how things work if we need a network while looking for a job. An online social network is similar. It is much better to begin creating it now than to wait until a better time.

A small seed now can naturally grow quite rapidly. It is harder to grow if it is under a lot of other pressures.

Technorati Tags: Web 2.0

independentman
Getting Conversation Ready:

[Via Beth's Blog: How Nonprofits Can Use Social Media]

Holly Ross wrote a good reflection piece about public conversations on blogs and how to get your audience ready for that conversation. She makes the point:

What I am saying is that your audience may not be ready to have the conversation that social media enables. That’s because social media does not just enable conversations.It enables PUBLIC conversations.

I think we have to remember that it takes time build the community to have the conversation and that it doesn’t happen right away. You have to be ready as conversation facilitator. Alexandra Samuel did a workshop called “Bringing Your Community to Life” at Netsquared and offered some terrific practical advice about you get the conversation started.

Some key points:

Key points to encourage participation:

Focus on promoting conversation

Make it happen, don’t wait for it

Connect like-minded participants

Connect complimentary threads

Plan pro-actively, implement reactively

VIDEO: If the CIA can collaborate with Web 2.0 tools, so can you:
[Via Enterprise 2.0 Blog]

Having trouble trying to sell in Web 2.0-style collaboration to the higher ups in your enterprise organization? Are there VPs and CXOs that are shying away from wiki-style knowledge management because they don’t get it or they fear confidential information will be passed carelessly among employees and partners? Do they feel that the information is
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Intellipedia is a greta example of how well a wiki can work, even in organizations where access control is most important. The embedded video give some nice details on how to sell this technology and how their greatest detractors became their biggest fans,

Technorati Tags: Web 2.0

by Wolfgang Staudt
IBM Builds LOTS of Social Apps:
[Via chrisbrogan.com]

My friend Luke sent me this BusinessWeek article about enterprise social network tools. There’s lots here.

First, take away from this that the social network technologies you know about in the consumer space are being rebuilt inside the firewall for business. Why? Those apps are perfect for business, because they do a better job of communicating information the way humans figure it out.

Second, understand that there are people looking for more from their social applications than food fight and super fun wall. If you’re developing, consider what might make for good business applications.

Third, bear in mind that what you might be doing for fun and leisure right now on the social networks might give you an edge on using collaborative technologies in upcoming months. It might just be the thing you’re doing at work, and not just the thing you’re doing at home.

What do you think about all this?

Welcome to the new world. Entertainment is driving the leading wedge of Web 2.0 but the rocket it lights under social media is not escaping the notice of business. Being able to not only capture tacit information but also to help create new knowledge are two of the most useful aspects of Web 2.0

Perhaps even the largest of companies can learn from past errors.

Technorati Tags: Open Access, Social media, Web 2.0

by cowlet
Case study of the IR at Robert Gordon U:
[Via Open Access News]

Ian M. Johnson and Susan M. Copeland, OpenAIR: The Development of the Institutional Repository at the Robert Gordon University, Library Hi Tech News, 25, 4 (2008 ) pp. 1-4. Only this abstract is free online, at least so far:

Purpose -The purpose of this paper is to describe the development of OpenAIR, the institutional repository at the Robert Gordon University.

Design/methodology/approach - The paper outlines the principles that underpinned the development of the repository (visibility, sustainability, quality, and findability) and some of the technical and financial implications that were considered.

Findings - OpenAIR@RGU evolved from a desire to make available an electronic collection of PhD theses, but was developed to become a means of storing and providing access to a range of research output produced by staff and research students: book chapters, journal articles, reports, conference publications, theses, artworks, and datasets.

Originality/value -The paper describes the repository’s contribution to collection development.

Technorati Tags: Science, Web 2.0

I was discussing with one of our execs the progress we’d been making on social media proficiency internally.

And he asked a great question that made me think:

“So, has anyone fundamentally changed their work processes because of the platform?”

And I realized this is the next frontier on what’s turning out to be a large-scale social engineering project.

Getting Business Value Out Of Our Social Software

As we make progress in this journey, I’ve got my eye out for different catagories of business value we’re seeing.  I suppose, at the same time, I should also be keeping my eye out for business value we’re NOT seeing yet.

And, as I’ve mentioned before, we’re seeing business value — in many forms — across the board:

People with specific interests are finding other people with similar interests
Rather than searching big content repositories, people are asking other people for help and answers
A pan-organizational “social fabric” has been created that wasn’t really there before
Folks who spend time on the platform are better educated — and more engaged — in EMC’ business

And more And, just to be clear, there’s no shortage of business benefits — I still stand behind the broad assertion that this has been one of the most ROI-positive IT projects I’ve seen in my career.

Interesting “value nugget” of the week: 

EMC runs a healthy program to bring a large number of interns and co-op students into the company.  They started introducing themselves to each other on the platform.

What started with “name, rank, serial number” blossomed into a wonderfully diverse set of conversations about careers, favorite hangouts, what it means to work at EMC, what is everybody doing, and so on.

I would argue that — whatever millions that EMC spends on this intern/coop program — we’ve now made it 10-20% more valuable, simply because we connected people to each other, and connected them all to the broader company. 

At zero incremental cost.

But we want more. Much more.
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If the data are plotted as the cumulative adoption of the innovation, it looked like this:

Both of these types of curves have been seen again and again when the diffusion of innovation is examined. They seem to be derived from basic forces present in human social networks.

Ryan and Gross made several key contributions besides the identification of the S-shaped curve. One was the process by which the innovation diffused. The other was the type of farmer who used the innovation.

They found that there were five stages in the adoption of an innovation by an individual: awareness, interest, evaluation, trial, and adoption. And there were at least 4 different types of farmers, of which the early adopters were the most important.

Early adopters heard about the corn from traveling salesmen and tried small plots to see how well it worked. Later adopters relied on the personal experience of other farmers, usually the early adopters. When there were enough positive reactions from the early adopters, when there were more stories of personal experience, the adoption rate took off.

It was the human social network that was critical for the rate at which the innovation was adopted. The more social connections an early adopter had, the more cosmopolitan they were, the more likely it would be that others would adopt use of the innovation.

Everett Rogers was instrumental in codifying many of the principles of innovation diffusion. Here is his famous rendition of the distribution:

Only 16% of a population is usually made up of the early adopters, the ones that are critical for spreading the innovation to the early majority. The key to the adoption of any innovation is the rate at which early adopters can transmit the knowledge of the benefits to the early majority. In the case of the farmers, it would often take 4 or more years for this to be converted form awareness to adoption.

In many areas of our world today, this is much too slow. Technology is disruptive, meaning that the people who adopt this technology actually deal with the world in entirely different ways than those who do not. It is similar to a paradigm shift, in that those on either side of the shift have a hard time communicating with each other. It is almost as if they inhabit separate worlds.

This can cause some problems because the early adopters are required to communicate with the early majority if an innovation is to diffuse throughout an organization. If they can not, it creates a chasm, which has been described by Geoffrey Moore in his book.

The organization has to take strong action to recognize that this chasm is present and to span it, either with training or, more effectively, with people who have been specially designated as chasm spanners. In many cases using Web 2.0 technologies, they are called online community managers.

Disruptive innovations seem to arrive almost yearly. Without a directed and defined process to increase the rate of diffusion in an organization, if just standard channels of communication are used, innovation will diffuse at too slow a rate for many organizations to remain competitive.

Because there is usually not just one innovation disrupting an organization at a time. Life is not that clean. There can be multiple innovations coursing through different departments, moving early adopters even further away from the rest of the group and expanding the chasm. This only makes communication harder.

It can no longer be possible to simply let the early adopters go through their 5 stages of adoption and then tell others about it at the water cooler. Designated online community managers, with the training needed to enhance communication channels, will be critical in getting this information dispersed throughout an organization.

Technorati Tags: General, Web 2.0

by Randy Son Of Robert
8 Things We Hate About IT:
[Via HarvardBusiness.org]

You may think that hate is too strong of a word for feelings toward a corporate department. I don’t. Yesterday, I was interviewing an executive on his perceptions of IT and he couldn’t spit his frustration out fast enough. He said, “In the quest of getting things organized, they are introducing a bunch of bureaucracy and, in the process, they’re abdicating their responsibility for making sure the right things get done.” This is completely typical of management’s frustration - no, management’s hatred - of IT.

It’s hard to remember the time when criticizing IT was controversial. Now, it’s ceased to be even interesting. The now-classic HBR article “IT Doesn’t Matter” resonated so clearly because it underscored the pervasive belief that IT mediocrity is the norm. And how bad is an industry’s reputation when a major outsourcer, Keane, can get away with insulting its target market with the slogan, “We Do IT Right”?

It’s not personal – nobody hates the people in IT – it’s the system that’s broken. And here’s the rub: IT doesn’t like it either. One global Fortune 200 CIO describes leading IT as “a sucking vortex.”
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Harvard Business is never shy about stoking controversy. Let’s take a look at some of these items.

• IT Limits Managers’ Authority
• They’re Missing Adult Supervision
• They’re Financial Extortionists
• Their Projects Never End
• The Help Desk is Helpless
• They Let Outsourcers Run Amok
• IT is Stocked with Out-of-Date Geeks
• IT Never Has Good News

The eight things almost all deal with an unwieldy section of a large company having to deal with rapidly changing circumstances. I believe that most of the eight things mentioned above derive from the two opposing aspects of IT in many companies.

So, many IT departments are driven by diametrically opposed needs. No wonder they do such a poor job of satisfying everyone. Stability necessitates limiting what the rest of the company can do. But innovation often needs large amounts of money to complete a project right now in order for the company to remain competitive.

I agree with F. Scott Fitzgerald. The people in IT usually possess first-rate intelligences but the requirements that are often put on them make it very hard to function effectively.

There will have to be changes in how IT is actually managed, how it is integrated into the corporation, in order for many of these problems to be attacked.

But maintaining these two opposing needs is the very definition of insanity.

Technorati Tags: Knowledge Creation, Web 2.0

by longhorndave
Adobe Adds Features to Boost Collaboration:
[Via Enterprise 2.0 Blog]

Adobe has introduced two new products, Acobat 9 and Acrobat.com. The goal is to transform the way people collaborate—Adobe’s new Acrobat 9 PDF tool now uses Flash to let you embed video, audio, animation and all manner of files, which is very cool. Another new capability lets you leverage web conferencing from Adobe to mark up documents on the fly, in real time, without launching a full-blown conference. Both people can take turns walking through the document, there’s no need to pass the baton, making it very ad hoc. If you decide you need to, you can launch a full-blown web conference (via Acrobat Connect) with a single click.
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Adobe is now making a wide variety of collaborative tools available online with the launch of Acrobat.com. Buzzword allows people to create collaborative documents. It looks like it has version history, access control and real-time controls. Nice.

These tools offer some pretty compelling ideas. I will be examining them to determine just how useful they really are. There is more information at the Adobe site.

Technorati Tags: Social media, Web 2.0

by aussiegall
What’s Your Internal Social Networking Strategy?:
[Via Enterprise 2.0 Blog]

Nemertes recently noted that eighty-three percent of organizations are now “virtual” meaning that members of workgroups reside in physically separate locations. The emergence of the virtual workplace has radically changed not only how we communicate and collaborate, but how we build social bonds among employees.
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Informal interactions are very important in any social network. They provide secondary routes for information to bypass chokepoints, they permit radically different viewpoints to influence the creation of knowledge and they are just plain fun.

It will be important for any defined internal online social network to provide this outlet. Because, frankly, if it is not provided, people will either ignore the network or find ways, perhaps inappropriately, to create such an outlet.

Technorati Tags: Knowledge Creation, Social media, Web 2.0

by b_d_solis
Appreciating A Seth Godin Post:
[Via chrisbrogan.com]

The other day, Seth Godin wrote about the new standard for meetings and conferences. I loved the article (but couldn’t comment that I did), and have been thinking about it ever since. I talked about it twice with two different people over the last few days, and part of the sentiment Seth put out there found its way into my jumping over a mountain post.

So, I’m presuming everyone reads Seth, but if not, check this out, or as Clarence would say, “marinate.”

Because Seth came by and commented reminded me to show that I am reading and paying attention to him. A side lesson to this: comment where you’re reading. It makes a difference.

Part of the way information flow is enhanced by Web 2.0 tools can be seen here. Someone comments on a post that was initiated by someone else’s thoughts. Each of us in the chain adds our own viewpoint, helping to not only transmit the information to a greater audience but also adding our own context.

He extends this to meetings of any sort. If we are going to take the time and expense to meet face-to-face rather than use social media to accomplish our goals, then we had better take advantage of the benefits those sorts of encounters provide than simply information transfer. Like using our hands to talk.

Seth says this:

If you’re a knowledge worker, your boss shouldn’t make you come to the (expensive) office every day unless there’s something there that makes it worth your trip. She needs to provide you with resources or interactions or energy you can’t find at home or at Starbucks. And if she does invite you in, don’t bother showing up if you’re just going to sit quietly.

What are some of the benefits of face-to-face encounters that can not be accomplished with Web 2.0 tools? I think engagement of real time thoughts and processes is one. Taking advantage of the simultaneous juxtaposition of time and place that can not happen online. Snacks and drinks are another.

Any other ideas?

Technorati Tags: Social media, Web 2.0