Yes I do them both.

Day after day, I run into people who look at me funny when I start talking about social media tools.  “Don’t you have better things to do?  What is twitter good for, you are just wasting your time.  I don’t understand it.”

Well I love twitter, and am strongly encouraging the use of Yammer at my company. (Yammer is essentially Twitter for a private enterprise or community).

I tell people it is about personal learning and knowledge sharing.  It is about being part of a collective where you interact with people you otherwise don’t know.  It is about engaging with colleagues and staying in touch with the pulse of your company, and used correctly it can also reduce email!  Like blogging, microblogging is a great communication tool, even better maybe because you are posting quick messages for followers to read, and they can decide in less than a tenth of a second if it is of value to them.  It is the distributed office water cooler.

Luis Suarez posted a great article awhile back on the benefits of  micro blogging.  I am going to share some of my favourite points here.

1. Questions and Answers: Probably one of the most popular use cases for enterprise microsharing; give people an opportunity to ask questions and get answers. If I have a question I need an answer for, there is a great chance I will go and ask my personal network first, before going elsewhere. And that’s exactly what enterprise microsharing enables knowledge workers to do. Regardless of where you may be.
2. Informal Learning: Through the sharing of expertise across the board as well as links to other relevant content that other fellow knowledge workers would benefit from as additional reading. Right there, while they are at their jobs! On the spot, without having to go anywhere else and with their work context intact. Part of their work flow. Always learning new stuff by exposing yourself out there to all sorts of interesting resources, links and, above all, conversations.
3. Knowledge Discoveries: or rediscovering new value by chance, which is another nice way of putting it.  “Cool, I always wanted to know that!  (I have experienced this time and time again through microsharing tools like Twitter)
4. Find Experts: This is an easy use case for everyone out there; instead of hiding yourself away behind your Inbox, where no-one can see you and therefore everyone thinks you don’t have anything better to do than answering their queries, how about leaving your hide-out space, go out there in the open, start microsharing your knowledge and through narrating your work help raise the right level of expectations on how you could accommodate interruptions and handle them accordingly. In a way, experts are scared that they will get overwhelmed with queries, but, in reality, this is further from the truth! If they keep sharing and narrating what they do, they are already generating the right level of expectations of how and when they will be handling interruptions. Basically, if those seeking answers see how those experts are busy doing something else, there is a tendency they will respect that and go ahead and do something else waiting for their turn. Believe me, it works.
5. Help and Support for Technical Problems:  Where knowledge workers can ask questions and help each other on how to improve their respective overall productivity, knowledge sharing and collaboration tools suite. Much along the lines of getting answers for the typical “How Do I…?” type of interactions.
6. Announcements, News Items: Create an awareness with broadcasting messages, news items or major announcements that are going around you, instead of sending an email with those items. Ideal for top down, cascaded / forwarded emails no-one likes to receive! (Yes, I know, the ones you don’t even read anymore!)
7. Knowledge Sharing out in the Open: that way we transition from private by default to public by default and allow knowledge workers, through real-time search engines, re-find and re-use the content they would need, much faster, much easier and much more immediate. Right there, right then.
8. Personal Branding: Yes, I know most businesses may not feel comfortable with personal branding, but it is there. It’s your people. It’s your business. It’s your corporate brand. Your people are your brand. So microsharing will help them merge successfully both the personal and corporate brands into a stronger entity, one that can speak for you out there in the thousands and in short, but rather effective, chunks! Very easy to consume and digest, too!

I love the realization in people who start to use twitter – “I never got it until I started using it, now I understand!”  (Still waiting for that to happen in the office…). And when you start, don’t try too hard – pick some people and organizations to follow, and if you come across something on the web that you find interesting (like this blog!) then tweet about it.  I live in London, Ontario, and even in London, I can follow local tweets for news, sports, traffic, events around the city, as well as friends and others that I have connected with online.  Your number of followers doesn’t matter, start by joining the party and consuming what others are saying.  Mashable posted a great resource on twitter, and on the lighter side check out this video from the guys who should have used Lotus Connections (Great series on enterprise social computing).  And then follow me on twitter!

Last night I gave my very first social media presentation, along with 2 other people for SCNetwork in London.  What an experience!  Blogging is great, but talking about it, and engaging with people interested in learning about social media for various reasons is a great experience, and I had a lot of fun doing it.  Can’t wait to do it again!  A lot of great debate and discussion on the merits (and demerits) of the application of social media.

This is going to make for a long blog post, but if you are interested, read on to find out what I talked about!

What is Social Computing?

It is not a fad, it is a fundamental change in how we communicate and learn.  Anyone remember the switch from paper memos to email?  This is almost like that, but way more powerful.  Before email your network was the guy sitting next to you, and your secretary.  Email welcomed the rest of your company to your network, as well as a few people whose email address you had.  Social Computing has exponentially increased our networks!  You can get connected to people you would never have known.  There are many “degrees” of contacts you can make and potentially take advantage of.

Primary uses for Social Computing

There are 3 areas I like to describe:  Personal, Social Knowledge Management (Social KM), and Social Media Marketing

Personal – Your family, your friends, sharing pictures, discussions and groups (hobbys, sports, music, arts, etc.) with friend outside of work.  This is the easiest way to dive in to the world of social media.  Get to know what it is all about. Increase your personal and professional networks. It is an amazing personal learning and development experience.

Social KM – This is my favourite aspect of it. Take your Social Computing tools and knowledge and embrace them at your workplace to better collaborate, empower and enage with your colleagues.  Start by using a common intranet platform to commonize the process, documents and tools that your entire company uses (and your employees search high and low for).  Then use document management tools to track documents and handle revision control (Who has the master of that document?  What is the latest rev?  Who approved it?).  Add in wiki tools to collaborate on documents, and provide easy to edit web pages for employee contributions ( A “welcome to the company” web page collaboratively written and kept up to date by existing employees?  Could it be that simple?).  Use Q&A forums to capture questions and answers, around different departments, processes, products, technologies, etc.    (How many times have you answered the same question over and over again?).  See my Email is where knowledge goes to die blog post.  Combine that with tagging and rating features to let users build a folksonomy, categorizing and identifying the content that is useful.  How about using blogging and microblogging for employees to communicate with each other?  (Blogging is an amazing way for executives to communicate!)  And then on top of all that, build employees profile pages that define who you are and your expertise by your contributions  (Say goodbye to employee directories and cumbersome matrices that are never up to date!)  Now you can aggregate only the information you want, by subscribing to certain tags, knowledge groups, and people.  If your colleagues aren’t interesting, then just like on twitter, they are going to be “unfollowed”.  A new employee has a question about something? Everything is searchable.  Use these tools to find the answer, document and experts in the area relevant to your question.

Social Media Marketing -  Using social media tools, a business can smartly and completely market themselves online for next to no cost – period.  Lookup the story of Tom’s Shoes.  But for every success story there are a thousand failures (I did say smartly).  And you have to be genuine.  Walmart fake blogged about 2 people RVing across the states staying in Walmart parking lots.  They were found out, but its Walmart, so probably not a big impact for them, but a huge impact for a small business that just violated the trust of its followers.  The other side of this is marketing yourself for a job, or a recruiter looking for people to hire.   What does Google think of you? Have you Googled yourself? Because that is the first thing people do (or should do) when they want to see who you are.  Google your company.  What are people saying about it?  What is your web presence like? One Comcast employee is credited with turning around their customer service reputation, using twitter.  Customer Service. Brand Awareness.  Loyalty.  Thought Leadership.  Marketing.  To a global internet audience.  But you still have to convince them to listen.

Getting Buy In

The best and most successful social media applications are driven from the ground up, not from the top down.  Don’t get me wrong, you need executive buy in, but when a couple geeks from Best Buy started up the beginings of blue shirt nation on a PC under their desk, creating a store associate network where emplopyees could share ideas on tech issues, sales techniques and products, the executive team soon noticed. And because they were smart, they wildly endorsed the idea.  There is a new generation that has been entering the workforce expecting the use of these tools.  Pretty soon companies are not going to have a choice in the matter.  For businesses marketing to consumers, that time is already here.  Business to business is next.  Bottom line is that you can bring these tools into your groups, start pilot projects, and if you are passionate enough about it and have a win (no matter how small), you now have a story to tell.  And as soon as it filters up to the top (and I don’t mean middle management), smart executives will recognize your small wins can become bigs wins over a larger scale.  I would argue that buy in needs to come from your peers, and that guy down the hall that hoards his knowledge like his job depended on it, and of course your IT guys.

At the end of the day it is one big change management project, and we all know how much people like change.  It is the little stories, the small wins, and the campaigners that will increase buy in, and get other people engaged.

Awhile back I posted a blog entry about stackexchange and I was waiting to get into the beta for a site I wanted to create.  Well 2 months ago that time came and I got my site configured and launched.  I work in the systems integration industry so the goal of my site is to bring control systems integrators together, to share knowledge in one spot, and build a huge Q&A knowledge base online around controls and automation.

If you are reading this and don’t have a clue what controls and automation is, that’s okay because there are other sites you can join. Everything from parenting to finance or even math.   See stackexchange sites.com for the complete list of communities that have been started (there are 108 of them!), or you can even start your own.

Fog creek software (Joel on software) decided a couple years back that their programmer community needed a Google friendly Q&A community.  They are in the computer programming business, and sure, there are a ton of PC forums out there, but they did not want a forum or a discussion board, and they knew exactly why.  It had to be open, free, easily read by Google and most importantly, allow a user to easily ask a question and get an answer, and of course, easily answer a question.  They built stackoverflow.com which is now the #1 tech site on the internet, reaching an estimated third of the words programmers (and that number is from quite awhile ago).  There are almost half a million questions (and even more answers) on stackoverflow.com!

I am really excited about my new site and others like it.  Systems Integrators are knowledge based companies. The knowledge of their people, and their efficiencies are what makes the company successful – and that is true of any service based company.  There are so many different controls platforms out there, so many different application and solution combinations, and combine that with old and new technologies and regulations,  it makes your head spin.  And most companies don’t talk to each other for competitive reasons.  But the basic stuff out there is not even close to rocket science and there is way too much stuff out there for any one or any company to know it all.  Don’t share your trade secrets or IP of course, but the little stuff.  The annoying little questions that you know someone has the answer to, someone has done what you are trying to do already.  Give yourself some web presence and free marketing, and participate!

The stackexchange engine is the  next generation of discussion board, incorporating all the features of web 2.0 and removing all of the bad features of discussion boards.  You can ask and answer questions without even signing up. You can vote, tag, subscribe, comment, and edit questions and answers.  The best questions and answers rise to the top because the community votes them there.  No searching though pages of threads to find an answer.  And you get reputation points for the Q&A you provide and badges for sticking around and doing things.

It is a fun way to share knowledge and build a community, so if you were looking for a way to join in, there is bound to be a site that peaks your interest.  Go ahead and try one out!  And maybe you won’t be able think of a question right now, but there will be a time when you have one, and just maybe you could have some fun with it and ask the community, and even find a question to answer to earn some “rep”.

I guarantee you will never look at a discussion board the same way again.  They are soooo last decade.