Social media inside the organisation

Trevor Cook

October 2005

Unlocking potential

The hype is back! What’s different now - simple & easy;

links / communication; broadband; lower costs; mobility

Tim Berners-Lee – a “read / write” environment

One day most of us will have a phone number, email address & blog

Features of the best intranets

Unified, seamless user experience Personalisation, home page portals Productivity (online meetings, HR,

learning) Unlock collective knowledge

What can social media add?

Participation – (primarily – blogs) Personalisation – (RSS) Accessibility, Usability – (Tags, search) Bottom-line - from one-way to two-way;

from information provision to ‘conversations’ & communication

Blogs – bridges to the future

Website creation for non-geeks If you can email, or use a word

processor – you can blog WYSIWYG Simple CMS, no html Edited through browser

Some intranet uses of blogs Alerts – replace mass circulation emails Project blogs - record of decisions and actions.

Announce current status of the project and what was accomplished today.

Departmental – share news across the organisation. News – Employees can contribute industry or company

news. Brainstorming – employees in a department or on a team

can brainstorm about strategy, process, and other topics. Customers – employees can share the substance of

customer visits or phone calls. Personal blogs – sharing stories about work CEO blogs – personalising relationships with employees

Web 2.0 – the social web

“collection of technologies - be it VoIP, Digital Media, XML, RSS, Google Maps… whatever …. that leverage the power of always on, high speed connections and treat broadband as a platform, and not just a pipe to connect.” – Om Malik

Key social media terms

Weblogs or blogs – easy websites Feeds (RSS) – communication between

sites Aggregators – posts in your browser Tags – simple ways to sort material Social bookmarking – simple way to

share material Podcasts- audio files in feeds

Participation 1: Create & find

Create content: blogs, wikis, podcasts Opt in: RSS feeds The easy view: news aggregators Find more: tags, live searching

Participation 2: Reuse & remix

Flickr - quintessential Web 2.0 application. Its data and metadata is contributed by its users; while the interface is its own.

Del.icio.us - no data of its own. A metadata aggregator, for data on various sites, tagged by users.

The Journey

The pattern of adoption

First adoptors – geeks, students Next wave – includes politics, media,

academics Then business – maybe about 10% of

Fortune 500 companies were blogging in March 2005

Really Simple Syndication (RSS)

Dave Winer, others, late 90s Maybe - single biggest change

in the web, Sites communicate with each

other In 2000, a handful of feeds

now there are millions. Vista will include feeds

Feeds & aggregators

Subscription, push – user gets greater control

Meet the needs of individuals (information you want / need)

Easier to stay up-to-date (live notifications of new content)

Bloglines, Google Reader

Feeds make it easier

Feeds are everywhere

Early RSS adoptors

What RSS users read

Podcasts

GM’s podcasts

Folksonomies

“… simultaneously some of the best and worst in the organization of information. …fundamentally chaotic, … problems of imprecision and ambiguity ... (But they) are supremely responsive to user needs and vocabularies, and involve the users of information actively.” - Adam Mathes, Graduate School of Library and Information Science, University of Illinois Urbana- Champaign, December 2004

Tags

Wikis

Websites that can be edited, through a browser, by anyone

Uses - Project management Share links, information Examples – Wikipedia, The New PR Wiki Benefits – ‘many hands make light work’

The benefits of search

File systems are high maintenance – few people have the patience for it

The google generation - search is the way we do it now

Search is far more flexible Blogs are easily searchable

Moving forward

Build slowly Address cultural issues Look for opportunities to ‘unlock the

potential’ Position blogs as supplements &

complements Recruit enthusiasts