Gary Vaughan's Collaboration Times

More Social Media Tool Tips...!

Business Coach Steve Dorfman gave a thoughtful presentation on social media at this morning's Leadership Breakfast in Reston.  I picked up another few good ideas to add to my own social media toolkit:

• Facebook's book club groups, visual bookshelf, plus option to publish a fan page;
• Q&A capability on LinkedIn
• importance of video in better conveying your thoughts than dry text (viz YouTube). [along those lines, I think I already have one cool video of my being interviewed before the 2009 SharePoint Users Conference...but more could be done...what do you think?]

Finally, Steve listed several, free web social media resources.  A couple I had not heard of before:

• Ping.fm, which allows you to make one post and feed various social media platforms at once; and
• WiseStamp.com, which enables you to personalize and give social media linnks to your email signature file.

Experimenting with LinkedIn Groups

For about the past month I have been experimenting with LinkedIn Groups on the Web.  At present I am a member of some 16 groups, mainly in the areas of SharePoint, project management and international development, plus some others on Web 2.0, ECM and knowledge management.  See my LinkedIn profile for a listing of the groups.

 

In addition, I am a member of GovLoop and their discussion groups on project management, Microsoft Office and knowledge management.  I also have started using Twitter "micro-blogging" and Facebook threaded discussions, mostly for professional purposes, in addition to relying on email notices, newspapers, and continued face-to-face attendance at conferences, users groups and staff meetings.

 

I manage all these online discussions through alerts to my hotmail account, and to date I find I spend on average about a half hour reviewing or responding to them, mostly prior to the beginning and after the end of the work day, plus about 45 min each weekend.

 

The one "thread" that holds all this learning and interaction together is my personal blog, published on the Web on this Typepad blog.  My overall approach was inspired by consultant colleague Dick Davies' success in mixing blogging and group discussion (see my prior February 28 blog post).

 

Based on LinkedIn and other discussions I have engaged in to date, utility seems to be in two-way learning, making new contacts, and reinforcing existing relationships.  Downsides are multiple sign-ons and need to sift through email alerts to multiple discussions for points of interest and engagement. 

 

To be continued...! 

Web 2.0: Back to basics...

Here is a simple and succinct explanation of Web 2.0 technology in a paper by a company called MicroAgility and entitled "What every CXO should know about Web 2.0."I recently came across the paper through a posting on the LinkedIn Government IT Community.

The article provides a very basic description of Web 2.0 for either the neophyte, or for a manager prone to either dismiss its importance, or to not see the "forest" of Web 2.0 potential given all the "trees" of competing tools and vendors. Indeed, the article stays away from noting specific tools, and instead imparts basic technical concepts such as wikis, blogs, RSS, as well as the importance of customer business needs and process in driving technology implementation.

Dick Davies' Blogging Approach with Open Source Tools

I recently had lunch with a former college classmate, Dick Davies, to discuss his business application of Web 2.0 tools.

 

Dick is making excellent use of simple tools (LinkedIn, Google Apps, Blogger) in broadly sharing his expertise (he is an independent sales/marketing consultant) on the Internet. 

 

The heart of his approach is to publish an insightful blog with at least 2 posts a week.  He then replicates his blog message (along with other comments)  as posts among some 20 different Web 2.0 or sales-oriented LinkedIn groups.  He keeps in touch with reactions to his posts or comments by scanning alerts on his Gmail.  Using very lean web design, he also provides key information about himself and his work  on a simple web site.

 

What I found fascinating about this was how Dick was able to tie all these tools together, allowing him to sustain dynamic conversations with thousands of professional contacts, which are far beyond his normal circle.  His time investment in keeping up this web presence seems reasonable, but weekly discipline is key.  He balances this virtual outreach by personally keeping up past contacts along with attendance at D.C. area conferences, trade shows and meetings. 

 

I am still not sure how exactly one could apply this approach inside large government organizations, but I do plan to reactivate my TypePad blog on the Web... and in time broadening my participation in LinkedIn groups.

 

In the meantime, feel free to check out Dick’s integrated web marketing approach:  he sums it up in this chart.  His individual sites and tools are listed below:

 

· His web site (Google Apps)

 

· His LinkedIn profile page (LinkedIn)

 

· His blog (Blogger)

 

Recent conferences and key take-aways

Over the past six weeks I attended some interesting events worth noting:

- A seminar by Facebook's Director of Internationalization, Ghassan Haddad, on "How Facebook Makes Crowdsourcing Work: And how you can achieve a similar success" held at the IDB on Feb 4. An interesting presentation on how Facebook is applying crowd-sourcing to translating its social networking service to a wide variety of different countries and languages, and jump-starting its own growth in the bargain.

- An open discussion sponsored by DevInfo on "What’s New in Online Sources of Information on International Relations" and held at the NED in D.C. Area librarians exchanged views, web resources and applications on how to simplify users' access to data, often by a new approach of personalizing attention through the use of area specialists.

- A luncheon presentation/discussion on "Content and Records Management, Getting Stakeholder Buy-in", by John Montel, former senior director of General Dynamics and sponsored by AIIM in Rosslyn on Jan 14. My key take-away: records management for the federal government is a daunting proposition, and best attempted in small pieces that can show demonstrable results.

More later, as I prepare for my trip to Bogota, Colombia in early March, and my plans to research for State local public and private sector organizations on performance and useability for SharePoint and related social media technologies.