Everyone has a Dream in their lifetime, some have a few. It is so intensely personal that only you really know what your Dream is.
To define these Dreams are tricky as dreams are an overused, perjured term. What occurs in your mind when you are sleeping is not the Dreaming I mean. The Dream I mean is more aptly defined as an urgency to do something important to you. It is a feeling that you have even before adolesence and it is against this that you measure your purpose and success all your life. It is important to adhere to all those cliches when you are young about doing your best, doing what you love because they define the Dream and, more importanly, discard what is not the Dream.
At the individual level these Dreams are usually not specific such as “to be a ballerina” but more general as “to be a dancer” or “to be a builder” or “to be president”. One can hold these dreams and change them as circumstances dictate. So the ballerina Dream may change to becoming a mother. Even while many people die without fulfilling their Dreams many more give up on their Dreams. To truly know someone is to know what they have to become. It could be argued that your Dream is a function of the circumstances you grew up in and your earlies success, failings and influences by role models. It could be influenced strongly by culture or religion.
I’m purposefully steering clear of New Age thought on dreams as that methodology is to accept without qualification every and any idea (Provided that thinking did not occur in the Western world after the Dark Ages). Nevertheless it is important to point out that the Australian Aborigines believe their values and laws are shaped in the Dreamtime and Laurens van der Post was told by Kalahari San that “there is a dream dreaming us”. These ideas of imperatives arrived at by non-rational thought is in keeping with the idea.
Now I’ll take it as given that any performance activity is enhanced if the person doing it is fully engaged in it. They love the job. They are
committed to the process. They have strong personal stakes in the outcomes.
Can an organisation dream? Well, if we accept that a Dream is the urge to start something and carry on regardless whilst making use of the faculties
at hand then the original Dream is that of the founders.
The American Dream of the early 20th Century was well set out and coincided with the individual dreams of its people. People at that time,
especially immigrants, had a long European dream of personal freedom, open spaces. To me, the strength of this collective agreement was that
Americans of all backgrounds got together to fight ugly wars half way across the world. The American Dream went off track after world War 2 when the
US saw itself as a global player until Martin Luther King brought it more or less back on track.
A political organisation can Dream. It lays out its Dream as a manifesto in order to attract parts of the electorate. The electorate indicates a vote rather than the sum of individual dreams. Politicians may wax grandiloquently about “the Dreams of the People” but in reality its just a preference. Political parties that define themselves by being against a current view rather than for a new view are bankrupt of Dreams. The US Repbulicans and UK Labour spring to mind, being anti-Democrat and anti-Tory more than anything.
A government department cannot Dream. It is a function. Even if the government should change it is likely the functionaries will remain. Individual
Dreams of service are subordinated to process, which in turn is subordinated to policy, which is subordinated to the political organisation.
A military organisation cannot Dream. Again it is a function that was set up. Individual members in the military often share similar Dreams which
are taken for granted in the ethos: to survive, to stretch oneself, to achieve, to dominate, to belong. The organisation is therefore capable of
performance greater than the sum of its parts.
Can a business Dream? The founder has a Dream borne of a strong personal need. That need is personal and cannot be passed on. All that can be hoped for is that the dreams of subsequent employees may coincide with the relevant life-stage of the company. Employees can share in the founders Dream if it is clearly defined (think of Microsoft and Bill Gates’ vision of a PC in every home and business). Nothing spells a lack of a strategic plan for success than a dry mission and vision statement. Can a business have a Dream that is based in non-rational thought? Yes, it speaks of intuition if it is solidly backed up by the business case and the numbers.
In business environments I’ve yet to be asked what my Dream is. Goals yes, but goals could include “to get through this week”. Alignment of individual’s Dreams with functions could prove to be very powerful if we accept that an organisation that encourages Dreaming is highly switched on.
Everyone has a Dream in their lifetime, some have a few. They are so intensely personal that only you really know what your Dream is. Don’t you?
To define these Dreams are tricky as dreams are an overused, perjured term. What occurs in your mind when you are sleeping is not the Dreaming I mean. The Dream I mean is more aptly defined as an urgency to do something important to you. It is a feeling that you have even before adolesence and it is against this that you measure your purpose and success all your life. It is important to adhere to all those cliches when you are young about doing your best, doing what you love because they define the Dream and, more importanly, discard what is not the Dream.
At the individual level these Dreams are usually not specific such as “to be a ballerina” but more general as “to be a dancer” or “to be a builder” or “to be president”. One can hold these dreams and change them as circumstances dictate. So the ballerina Dream may change to becoming a mother. Even while many people die without fulfilling their Dreams many more give up on their Dreams. To truly know someone is to know what they have to become. It could be argued that your Dream is a function of the circumstances you grew up in and your earlies success, failings and influences by role models. It could be influenced strongly by culture or religion.
I’m purposefully steering clear of New Age thought on dreams as that methodology is to accept without qualification every and any idea*. Nevertheless it is important to point out that the Australian Aborigines believe their values and laws are shaped in the Dreamtime and Laurens van der Post was told by Kalahari San that “there is a dream dreaming us”. These ideas of imperatives arrived at by non-rational thought is in keeping with the idea.
Now I’ll take it as given that any performance activity is enhanced if the person doing it is fully engaged in it. They love the job. They are committed to the process. They have strong personal stakes in the outcomes.
Can an organisation dream? Well, if we accept that a Dream is the urge to start something and carry on regardless whilst making use of the faculties at hand then the original Dream is that of the founders.
A country can dream. The American Dream of the early 20th Century was well set out and coincided with the individual dreams of its people. People at that time, especially immigrants, had a long European dream of personal freedom, open spaces. To me, the strength of this collective agreement was that Americans of all backgrounds got together to fight ugly wars half way across the world. The American Dream went off track after world War 2 when the US saw itself as a global player until Martin Luther King brought it more or less back on track.
A political organisation can Dream. It lays out its Dream as a manifesto in order to attract parts of the electorate. The electorate indicates a vote rather than the sum of individual dreams. Politicians may wax grandiloquently about “the Dreams of the People” but in reality its just a preference. Political parties that define themselves by being against a current view rather than for a new view are bankrupt of Dreams. The US Repbulicans and UK Labour spring to mind, being anti-Democrat and anti-Tory more than anything.
A government department cannot Dream. It is a function. Even if the government should change it is likely the functionaries will remain. Individual Dreams of service are subordinated to process, which in turn is subordinated to policy, which is subordinated to the political organisation.
A military organisation cannot Dream. Again it is a function that was set up. Individual members in the military often share similar Dreams which are taken for granted in the ethos: to survive, to stretch oneself, to achieve, to dominate, to belong. The organisation is therefore capable of performance greater than the sum of its parts.
Can a business Dream? The founder has a Dream borne of a strong personal need. That need is personal and cannot be passed on. All that can be hoped for is that the dreams of subsequent employees may coincide with the relevant life-stage of the company. Employees can share in the founders Dream if it is clearly defined (think of Microsoft and Bill Gates’ vision of a PC in every home and business). Nothing spells a lack of a strategic plan for success than a dry mission and vision statement. Can a business have a Dream that is based in non-rational thought? Yes, it speaks of intuition if it is solidly backed up by the business case and the numbers.
In business environments I’ve yet it inquired of someone what their Dream is. Goals yes, but goals could include “to get through this week”. Dreams are personal and embarrassing because uttering them invites fear of failure.
Alignment of individual’s Dreams with functions could prove to be very powerful if we accept that an organisation that encourages Dreaming is highly switched on.
* Provided that thinking did not occur in the Western world after the Dark Ages
Ok, the heading is misleading and would constitute baiting if I cared enough.
Found via Dianne Mueller and sure to become an internet meme. Explaining an accounting process need not be dry when you see these cartoons (click on the image). Sure to give the Plain English versions a run for their money.
From JICPA, the Japanese Institute of Certified Public Accountants.
On a related topic, the discussion is around Twitter replacing RSS as a news feed of choice for online media types. I dramatically cut my RSS reading time and use Twitter because the idea is germinated on Twitter before it becomes a post – So Dianne tweeted about this, and then did her post.
Apart from the fact that ou can pull RSS into Twitter, expecting users to congregate around a news reader to passively consume media is actually, despite RSS and other add-ons, a very Web 1.0 concept. We ought to know better.
A year ago saw me trying to explain microblogging (when the Twitter Fail Whale was but a guppy), after having got the blogging presentation finally right. The Twenty20 Cricket World Cup was the rage, and I simply joined the dots: Twenty20 cricket is to 50-over cricket as Twitter is to blogging. It’s shorter, more intense and has engagement value. Not to mention the constant innovation required to get over the limitations — all the inventive shots come out of the bag.
To extrapolate, Test cricket is like web publishing. By this I mean a non-blog, static page where you are simply disclosing, informing, reporting and presenting. More traditional skills come into play here, namely proofreading, supporting diagrams and possibly running it by the organisation’s legal beagles or the human remorses officer.
After the IPL and the constant ineptitude of cricket’s governors, one may think that all must be abandoned and channelled into T20. Witness the recent Test, South Africa against England at Lord’s: five days’ batting and no result.
In this instance, I think Test cricket comes to the fore. Few other sports demand the mental endurance to bat for two days to save a Test. I used to be bored stiff by the format, but as I get older I appreciate the weighs and balances of battles within battles.
Think of the ICC as the board of a company, or the marketing department. Old-fashioned web publishing (we publish, you consume) may seem dead compared with the sexiness of microblogging, Qik, Seesmic. These guys were only recently introduced to blogging and now you’ve given them a 140-character text field, no supporting images and TinyURL. An example of a knee-jerk reaction was the creation of an annual report blog. You really oughtn’t to create dialogue around a historic document that, by definition, cannot change.
Just as Test cricket brings out various strengths and delights, static web pages do too. Microblogging is a different tool for, sometimes, a different audience. I think we’ve just scraped the surface of presence and microblogging being used in the workplace.
| this article originally published July 2008, Techleader
I was digging through some old files and found my old blogger install file. I had an account on Geocities (Yahoo!) from 1998 and uploaded my CV to it, and then dabbled with blogger in 2000. I didn’t update it for many years and Yahoo! closed the account.
Just for kicks and posterior analytics, here are my first blog posts.
Trekked through the sandy underbrush on a sweltering Saturday to Sandy Bay, Cape Town’s legendary nudist beach. We almost got lost, but were pointed in the right direction by a potbellied old chap’s free willy.
What a beach _ clear, spacious, with the water bearable for a whole two minutes. this may fast become one of our favourite beaches.
Got the basic look and feel of the blog section up and running. I plugged the cv link into my old flash cv which needs updating, and my links have to start pointing to things pretty soon. Starting to get sick of the blue I pasted all over travago, but its just so easy because I know how it relates to everything.
User-defined stylesheets are in progress, and maybe a bone will be tossed to the communicator chaps.
I can’t believe this article from the bbc. They want people to speak proper English. Sure, but as defined by whom? If the Brits and their grandchildren get the US to replace the ‘u’ in color, they’ll probably cheer up for the first time since Jerry was put out of bounds. fools.
Today was a public holiday (voting for municipal elections). For the first time since i could, i did not. had a great conversation with a hairdresser who, to strike up a conversation, asked if i voted or not. I said i was from Jo’burg first, as an excuse, but really got into. She saw my point of view and my theories about who the bombers are and all the variables that preclude meaningful voting. We were expanding.
At the end she charged my 60 bucks. Wha..? of course, i said I was from Jo’burg…
K has had some people wanting her to send her some of the stuff she draws. We have to move those pics onto a better server, downloading it is like trying to get blood to my feet after Saul’s big Saloon burger orgy.
Microblogging (Twitter, Jaiku) has caught the imagination of millions as a revolutionary communication tool. Many have grokked the uses of microblogs for the enterprise, but nothing has transpired as yet, excepting Google rousing and snapping up Jaiku. Perhaps corporate IT are still getting to terms with Web 2.0 and microblogging is a late entrant. Perhaps we’re focussed on trying to pinstripe Twitter, and are limiting the brief of what enterprise microblogging can be.
So this is first in a two-part series. While we redefine the benefits of enterprise microblogging here, the next instalment will be a wishlist of what we want in such an application. I refer to microblogging here as evidenced by Twitter and Jaiku, although make it clear that they are not enterprise-ready.
Convergence
As you know, you can email, IM, blog, SMS updates to your Twitter profile. In the spirit of Web 2.0, you can retrieve them all in the same way. Bear in mind the following:
91% of mobile phone owners keep them within arms-reach 24-7 (Mary Meeker, Morgan Stanley)
IM has been identified as the web-based enterprise technology CIOs feel has the most business impact
SpinVox recently announced voice updates to Twitter (and Facebook and Jaiku)
Every Facebook user (everyone you know) is extremely familiar with posting short status updates, checking for updates from others and possibly even mobile posting, RSS updates and IM
Urgent news Dissemination
The fires in California have seen a tipping point in Twitter adoption. Weather, fire news and authority news can be relayed to people in all the formats mentioned above. The LAFD has had a Twitter site for months.
If your enterprise relies on this kind of rapid dissemination, you would do well to replicate these systems.
Presence
Facebook and Skype, and now Twitter, have taught us that constant status updates pre-empt unnecessary calls or emails. When you know someone is in Brazil or otherwise not available, you don’t waste time trying to contact them. Easy notification of employees’ availability is not just to enforce presenteeism. Call centres have been identified as a critical operation that relies on presence: the agent can check expert or supervisor availability, escalation options and customer query progress.
Easy adoption
Using Twitter is as difficult as using SMS. Digital natives will bring it into your enterprise anyway, for personal use. After you block it (which you will) and they move it to their mobile devices (which they will) we will have enterprise microblog apps and they will teach you how to use them while other companies have advanced (which we will).
On that note, IBM has moved on this with their BlueTwit application. Unfortunately, that’s all I know about it: the name.
Lifestreams or rolestreams
Many digital natives and meta-bloggers (bloggers blogging about blogging) are suffering from information overload as they manage various profiles, websites, RSS feeds and try out each new application. Out of necessity, they often aggregate all their own RSS feeds or RSS subscriptions into a microblog, and may even synch their calendar with the blog due to its dispersion methods via SMS or IM. This lifestreaming is a river of the knowledge snippets which make up their day.
I bet many knowledge workers feel the same. Too many rely on Outlook to manage all their information, yet the information therein is hardly portable to other notification applications. Microblogs are built to leverage RSS, and could be a live, AJAX scrolling alert system that sends up flags or alerts based on hierarchy or importance (Oops, I’m straying into the wishlist article).
The added benefit of a lifestream, or rolestream, is that its time based and easier to round up billable hours at the end of the business day..
The Wires
The instant information retrieval nature of microblogs mean that companies can bypass traditional wire services. As IR WebReport recently blogged:
“In essence, [microblogs] can be a notification system and an editorial system. It can tell someone news is available and provide a link to it. For example: “Sun reports Results for Fourth Quarter and Full Fiscal Year 2007 http://tinyurl.com/2h5osq”
It can also be an information system by delivering the news in a concise format: “Sun Beats Profit Target Q4 Revenues $3.835 billion, EPS $0.09 vs consensus $0.05 http://tinyurl.com/2h5osq”
Sun’s recent decision to bypass PR wire services for its earnings releases is but a baby step in what is coming.
Ticker
The relation of a microblog to a blog post is often compared to the snippets of news on the ticker below the main news story on CNN or Sky TV News. Often a few pithy words is all the information you need to convey, and it does not detract from the main stories which are actually a different media. Stock traders have a need for some figures and a word or two to describe sentiment to make million-dollar decisions. Sure, often the source of that information is an analyst who has gone through reams of data and submitted a lengthy report. Its wholly complementary.
Presentations
Creating a microblog for a live conference, that’s projected on the stage, allows the audience both at the event as well as external to pose questions or make statements. I worked on a financial presentation for a dual-listed company where we wanted to synch Twitter or Jaiku with the webcast. In the end, the lack of moderation and branding confusion made me just hack a WordPress blog to deliver live comments. Enterprise microblog? I could not have paid enough for it.
Brevity
TinyUrl and pithy sentences lend themselves to a new form of communication where rambling is not respected. Just the facts. A global furniture concern got me to develop a secure application where they all executives could share snippets of strategic information in their respective markets. It was restricted to 250 characters and the administrator was notified by SMS with each entry. This was in 2006, they were microblogging.
We recognise that email is an indispensable office tool, but email overload is as real as the lack of importance we place to information trapped deep in an email’s body.
Knowledge Management
Much like enterprise bookmarking, enterprise microblogging can allow employees to send quick “hey, look here” updates. Others can act on it or be enlightened by information snippets that would have been beyond their reach. Sending an email to a vague, amorphous group, CC’ing other employees with a subject like “interesting link” and, in the body, a link that is not human readable, are all signals for the recipient to disengage with this communication.
Networking
Follow the travails of Twitter and you’ll come to hear that its a form of social networking. Sure it is, but that’s a spin-off to its larger benefits as highlighted above. Anyway, you have a social network, its called your Company. Or office, or team.
I wouldn’t suggest a that a major benefit of microblogging is that it brings your employees closer or improves morale. That would be trite. I do think you’ll have benefits of moving conversations off email and project leaders will be able to swarm all project members, developers can scrum and sprints will be slick relays. That should be a given. However, you can use it to create dialogue with your customers or stakeholders. You can also track usage in the Twittersphere and be alerted whenever anyone mentions you, your brand or your interest.
Buzz
You can use your channel as a media outlet and a buzz engine for product releases. Twitter is pretty viral and following a stream is a one-click process. These buzz strategies are far better detailed in Jeremiah Oywang’s post.
Web 2 has always been about communication, not technology. About using all different methods of getting accurate information, collaboration, dissemination. What better time to put it to the test in an organic, non-rational, human situation: the california fires.
Mashups of maps, microblogging and user-generated video are some of the uses. Remember the London bombings 2 years ag, where mobile phone images where the first used? Virginia Tech bloggers? This is not mall-meetup technology.
Love it or hate it, Facebook and other social media are here and they’re changing the online habits of your employees and customers. It would be churlish to dismiss social media as a fad with no impact on your organisation other than being a tool for employees to squander their billable time; at the same time, Facebook is not going to propel your company into an early listing just because it has the undivided attention of tens of millions of users. Right about now, you have a IT policy in place regarding use of social media or are undecided about what action to take.
Time to take a step back and do a business case on this phenomenon. The purpose of this article is for you to realise what lessons and habits your employees and online customers have learned in the last few months while being introduced to social media. Consider these , and then discuss them within your own organisations. Don’t be stuck on Facebook, your employees are probably using other Web 2.0, or social media, applications on an hourly basis.
1Web publishing is simple
Ten years ago the message was “anyone can publish a web page. Learn a little HTML, some Photoshop, some odds and ends about HTTP and web hosting and there you go!”. This spawned a cottage industry of web designers and web design courses, but lets face it: it required a steep learning curve in languages and standards that were changing every few months.
Blogs are far easier to set up, but people from non-creative industries or non-media types have to think long and hard about design, posting, commenting and plug-ins. Its no surprise that most blogs reference “web 2.0″ or “social media”. While blogging is a tsunami, it doesn’t get everyone publishing.
Enter Facebook. A simple setup process, no level design playing field, click-n-play plugins and publishing in a manner more similar to text or instant messaging than email or word processing.
The business case: employees will finally be able to take short cuts and ask questions like: wouldn’t it be simpler to put this online? Can’t we create a mash up of our sales figures and geographical areas like the travel apps in Facebook? (The answer to both is Yes).
2Facebook is a start page
Enterprise applications like SAP and Microsoft Sharepoint allow one to set personalised home pages on their intranet start pages or as their default browser pages. Facebook is similar, except the information on it is mostly of a personal nature.
The business case: you may want to consider pulling Facebook’s notifications as an RSS feed into your existing employees’ start pages. In that way they can keep abreast of friend’s movements at a glance from within their business application. This may sound abhorrent to some policy makers, but ask your IT to do a test implementation for you and you’ll see how innocuous it is. Will it keep employees of the phone and emailing? I don’t know the answer to that question, but consider this option if you don’t want to ban Facebook outright.
3Social networking online
When you send your sales, marketing and client service to a conference, do you exhort them to network their buns off? Probably not in as many words, but that’s what you want. Surely your enterprising employees will use online social networks to initiate joint partnerships or get valuable information, perhaps even to disseminate your company news in this channel (for free). If you manage IT staff you would be foolish to discourage them from joining sites like Experts Exchange, Slashdot or Tech Republic. When they hit a coding snag they can submit the question online or nose around the forums for the answer, rather than spend two days trying to reinvent the wheel.
Facebook has most likely informed your employees about how to leverage their social network (even though some will only use Facebook to organise parties and send chain mail!)
The business case: Social networking online is a way to make customers gather around product (Amazon), supply you with invaluable ideas (Dell Ideastorm) and engage with approved demographically-selected profiles (eons).
4Naked communication
A person’s personality comes through on Facebook more so than in any other medium. Those who boast offline, boat on Facebook. Those who sent chain letters with Hello Kitty drawings at age 8 do the same on Facebook at a more advanced age. That is the power of the medium, people manage not only their relationships but their personas through it. This naked communication builds stronger online and offline relationships.
The business case: like Amazon’s recommendations, Digg’s articles and del.icio.us bookmarks, users trust content generated by their peers, known or unknown, more than what businesses tell them to believe. This is evidenced in Facebook and other social media, and your business ought to have a strategy in place to interact and monitor this channel.
5Friends
Can a22 year-old be friends with a multinational car manufacturing corporation? Can Barack Obama be friends with thousands of potential voters? In Facebook you can. You can even have stronger relationships with entities than with friends you see every weekend for dinner. It may be a perversion of the concept of friendship, but its the term we’re saddled with when we try and explain these relationships. Users and customers can be friends with your brand, usually around a competition, cause or campaign. This is free permission marketing, are you still complaining?
The business case: we learned that people trust the official line when published in a blog format more so than when it comes as a press release off the wires. In the same way, an intranet modified into more of a social network, a customer care section of your website or a graduate recruitment site will benefit from bringing your brand to the level of peer rather than patriarch.
6Always-on culture
Generally speaking, the last two generations in the workplace don’tlike the commitment of formal telephone calls. They weren’t taught telephone etiquette and the concept of “taking a message” is beyond them. Sometimes one uses a SMS or IM message as a status checker: are you in? can you make it? The pressure is taken off having to tell a white lie, which is not as easy when speaking to someone in real time over the telephone.
Facebook’s status updates allow you to mention in a brief, pithy manner about your whereabouts, mood and recent events in your life. Friends are notified immediately, and will act thereupon by contacting you directly, leaving you alone, or not bothering to schedule a meeting for you as you have stated that you’re ill or on leave.
The business case: Churches are increasingly blogging their sermons to their communities. Some people just don’t want to attend church but they want the information, much like workers who hate meetings but want to participate in the project nonetheless. What if your board gave brief updates to the other members or subordinates in a secure environment once a day? They could pass on critical leads or thoughts that others could action or research the merits thereof. Teams could get rapid updates rather than gathering in time-consuming meetings, analysts could offer rapid assessments of stock and send out to subscribers in all the various formats.
When getting approval from a client around some material or dealing with a supplier, you’ll find IM is faster than email. You can store the conversations for later reference. The stand out in this area is Rackspace, the hosting provider. After spending a few minutes on their site, a window pops up with a sales assistant asking if you need help. You can then ask questions and answers to them, with audio or simply through the IM interface.
7The Internet is a raw document repository
Google taught us that you can find anything online. Wikipedia taught us that information about everything can be found online. Facebook taught us that anyone you would want to find is probably online. This is a simplification, as others have identified class differences between MySpace and Facebook, not to mention those who are not even online. If you are reading this, however, and can identify with the issues, then you know that your kindergarten playmates or high school sweethearts are a click away from discovery.
The business case: managers tried to block the internet and they tried to block IM. That was until they realised the benefits for productivity and communication inherent in both. Facebook and other social networks may have business applications that are not immediately apparent.
8Microblogging
I believe microblogging will be the preferred communication method of the near future. The current providers allow one to text, IM, email, blog or phone updates to your personal blog. The updates are then disseminated by notifications like RSS, email, IM, text etc. Publishing and dissemination are therefore combined in one medium through many devices, something which standard websites and phones cannot replicate. This is where Enterprise 2.0 will be focussing its attention right now.
The status updates of Facebook and the wall posts as well as the notifications of your friends are just as in microblogging.
The business case: microblogging allows for sending and receiving key updates through all technical devices. Project updates or urgent information release (See the LA Fire Department’s microblog) are native to microblogs.
9Fad
Sure, Facebook is also a fad. Remember at school you had fads like marbles, collecting cards, hairstyles and clothes styles? They were great, then the powers-that-were moved on them and banned them. The fad usually went underground and the fad mutated into a cult. Feelings against the school management were probably soured for a while. Things may or may have not been written on lavatory walls. Tongues in cheek aside, the same is happening in corporates world-wide.
The business case: everything in social media is, for the corporate, a threat and an opportunity. What usually tips the scale into the overall positive side is that everything is measurable. People can blog about you, but you can blog about yourself and respond to them too. And you can track when somebody mentions you in a blog post. The same principle applies to Facebook and other social media.
10Knowledge gathering
Since employees have been given internet access to perform their tasks better, they have usually been updated with links and jokes and websites and now Facebook. They’ve been exposed to more disparate information and interest groups than they would probably have found in that evening’s newspapers. This is a part of the great tradition of the Enlightenment, and as mentioned above, they will place worth in content not only coming from the traditional news sources.
The business case: if you are in a creative field, I would suggest giving employees limited or unlimited internet access, underpinned with a performance contract. I would also set aside two hours for a meeting at the end of the week where everyone has to report on what they found online that could contribute to the business aims of the organisation. A reward of more access could be considered? Then your internet and bandwidth can be assessed as a valid business tool, and you and your employees will be reaping the benefits that social media is infusing into our traditional media channels.
Corporations have had to react to the phenomenon, ranging from banning use of Facebook outright, through to limiting use thereof to the marketing departments, to creating an official presence on Facebook and tying the company profile into graduate recruitment and news dissemination.
Don’t base your Facebook decision on appearing cool to your employees or external stakeholders. Rather look at the points made above, distribute to staff and convene an open discussion with their own points of view. You could see financial or productivity rewards, or perhaps you may only establish a better dialogue with staff and your customer base.
Remember, this is social media. A top-down approach to information distribution usually lands bottoms up.
Google buys out Jaiku, the microblogging platform that is a bit more serious than Twitter and Pownce.
Why? Well, Twitter is the popular kid and has all the gadgets and messaging interfaces, but you cannot extend it beyond its mass appeal interface. Pownce was always aimed at the teen market with its buzz and image-video upload.
No sirree, Jaiku is the effort of some Finns, the most always-on culture on the planet (this is an abysmal sentence…). Threading and an element of moderating allow it to be used in serious apps.
My interest in microblogging is across various theatres (of war), but especially for the enterprise. Real time status updates, always-accessible team members (phone, email, site, IM) and a bit of sharing on the side.
You know which microblogging service is really underrated? Tumblr. Its more microblog than the others. The others should really be termed something like Gadget-Bridge or PresenceBlogs.
