Tag Archives: Social networking

Social networking with schoolfriends in Poland

Posted on January 23, 2008 | 8 Comments

One of the sites making waves in Poland at the moment is Nasza Klasa, or Our Class. When we were there at Christmas, the whole family was getting very excited about it – reconnecting with old friends and giggling at old pictures. A lot of fun.

It’s interesting that this social network is even needed. Lots of local / native language sites and networks do exist, not only in Poland, particularly in the Far East for instance… this is one area where sites like Facebook sometimes fail. Poland in particular has its own instant messaging network (Gadu-Gadu, on which I have an account but never seem to be able to login using Adium) and other reinventions of the otherwise English-speaking wheel. Although some of my family are on Facebook, they are also enjoying using the Polish alternatives.

Nasza Klasa is suffering growing pains having gained several million users in a very short space of time… it’s particularly evident in the performance of the service, unfortunately. The site reminds me a lot of Friends Reunited, which I suppose was one of the earlier social networks. The idea is the same – reconnecting schoolfriends – and even the colours and layout are not dissimilar to the original Friends Reunited design. Looking at Friends Reunited now (part of the ITV empire, for some reason), it does look horribly dated. We complain about Facebook’s walled garden, but FR has absolutely no APIs or feeds, you have to visit the site to do anything, and you have to pay to be able to contact your friends. Thank goodness the web moved on.

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Do you have an Effective Internet Presence?

Posted on January 16, 2008 | 9 Comments

My friend Ted Demopoulos pinged me recently to let me know about his new ebook, Effective Internet Presence. It’s a free (CC-licensed) PDF download, and worth a read. It’s short (less than 40 pages), highly readable, and contains some really useful ideas.

Without stealing Ted’s thunder – I really do encourage you to take a look at the full book – there were a number of snippets that resonated or made me think. Ted starts out by noting that:

A senior hiring manager at a Fortune 500 company trained all his people how to look up potential employees online last year, going well beyond a simple search engine lookup. The results affect who gets hired and who doesn’t.

…

People google you all the time. They google you before they meet with you, they google you if they may be working with you, they google you if you’re dating their sister.

These are excellent points. Ted isn’t (just) saying that it is important have a blog, for example – but he made me consider my personal brand across my entire online presence (something that people like Hugh MacLeod also lead me to think about about). Am I consistent? Do I have profiles in the right places? Can people find out who I am?

[ aside: I had a call from a recruiter the other day who had an opportunity for someone with WebSphere skills, and asked me "can you do that?". I should have just said "go look at andypiper.co.uk" or "google me". I'll try to remember to do that next time! ]

If you are thinking about starting a blog or otherwise building an online presence – for example in a social network like Facebook or LinkedIn – Ted suggests avoiding contentious subjects like religion and politics… which is probably a fair point, unless of course you are trying to make a name for yourself as a commentator on one of these topics! Talking of social networks, he covers both of those I’ve just mentioned, noting that he “expect[s] Facebook to become much more search engine friendly, but it doesn’t compare to LinkedIn today for developing a quick Effective Internet Presence”. I’m not so sure that I share his view on Facebook here, I’m not certain that it will open up quite that much; but overall the important point is that “… Facebook is a great networking tool if for nothing else because everyone seems to be on it.”. Absolutely – the same reason I use Twitter rather than Jaiku, and Flickr rather than Picasa, for example.

It’s a quick read and a handy reference to some of the more useful ways to build up an online presence. Read what Ted wrote about it on his blog, and then go take a look!

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Stop Blocking

Posted on September 26, 2007 | 14 Comments

There’s a new campaign aimed at companies who obstruct employee access to the Internet (via Neville Hobson).

This is timely, given the recent hoo-hah about Facebook … see Dennis Howlett for some more balanced analysis.

So the blocking thing is something that affects me every day. One example – my blog is my CV. When I’m going to a new customer, and they want to know a bit about me, I point them here. Unfortunately, I recently found that some businesses block *.wordpress.com as a matter of course. That’s even more annoying when I’m trying to recommend that a customer reads some troubleshooting article on the Hursley on WMQ blog, for instance.

As a consultant, it is interesting to see how my different customers address the issue. The one that popped up today is that Dopplr is blocked under the category of “Personals and Dating”. Right. Clearly I’m trying to setup a date for next week, not share my travel plans.

After speaking at a conference last week, I was chatting to my colleague Karl on the way to the tube and we noted that we do have a huge degree of freedom in terms of our access to resources and information at IBM. That’s a good thing. It means we can share information and build relationships with one another, and others.

I’ll be following the Stop Blocking campaign with interest. I’m sure a lot of people will have contrary opinions, but I’d like to hope that a sense of responsibility can open up people’s access to useful resources on the Internet.

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IBM and Social Media

Posted on September 21, 2007 | 5 Comments

I’ve put my deck from yesterday’s conference up on Slideshare. I need to add some speaker notes too, please bear with me.

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Not-so-live from the conference

Posted on September 20, 2007 | 4 Comments

European Corporate Blogging Summit OK, so the live updates were hampered both by the pace of the presentations, and lack of access.

Here are my notes from the other sessions of the day. Again these may be in a stream-of-consciousness format.

Bryan Smith, Rio Tinto
Rio Tinto are a mining company who haved faced issues with activists.
Online reputation management – discussion of how to assess risks and decide how to respond to comments.
Rio Tinto map out who talks about them and how via visualisations. Analyse where clusters of bloggers are writing about them. Watch Technorati etc.

Part-time employees or those on placements can blog… and sometimes do with a potentially negative impact on the image but they are often young, gone before they appear on the radar that is tracking online reputation.

[ my own thought on this... if youngsters on placements do blog like this or act irresponsibly in social media, it could impact their own future prospects... although that may be hard to explain to them at a younger age ]

Bryan has previously posted on his own blog about the “Bill Marriott approach”. There’s a view that if a senior exec has content scripted and created like this, it is of no value. Equally, investors may sometimes question why senior execs blog at all.

Lee Bryant, Headshift
Use cases for social tools within the firewall
The ‘MySpace generation’ expect the same tools at work and at home [ this is one of my themes when I speak about virtual worlds, incidentally ]

Slide on enterprise social tools… broken out into individual blogging tools like MovableType and WordPress, wiki platforms like MediaWiki and Confluence, and RSS applications. Lee also listed Lotus Connections under the heading of “Combined Suites”, along with a couple of others.

Concept of the “social stack” – an interesting way of looking at how these things stack up – presented here from the bottom of the stack to the top.

  • feeds and flows (RSS data)
  • bookmarks and tags (link to the news items in RSS)
  • blogs and networks (pick out individual items and comment on them)
  • group collaboration (social filtering)
  • personal tools (organise the blocks of information on personal portals, manage feeds and networks)

Contrast this new social stack with traditional static intranets where it has been hard to persuade people to publish and share.

How feeds and tools contribute to peripheral vision.
Attention metadata is the future – how do we gather information about what people look at in order to improve recommendations?

Use cases. Important to come up with some in order to avoid people starting to use new technologies purely for novelty value!

  • knowledge sharing in teams
  • business social networking – finding expertise internally (LinkedIn, Facebook)
  • innovation using social networks – surface ideas through social conversations
  • distributed learning communities – mentornet – wiki-based learning
  • collaborating beyond the firewall – connect with partners
  • internal comms

Re-inventing the intranet… “Intranet 2.0”… wiki-based publishing on intranets… blogs, profiles, tagging, social bookmarks (hey, sounds a lot like Connections!!)

… example … a wiki-based Intranet that Headshift built for a customer based on Confluence… doesn’t look like a Wiki though, graphics etc., mashups of Google maps.

Paul Squires, New Media Manager at eon
Paul talked about eon’s experiences with blogging and podcasting, internally and externally.

[ side note, I was amused that only a few people said that they had heard of The Cluetrain Manifesto, given that Robin mentioned it first thing... ;-) ]

Examples of eon’s use of podcasting – short (15 minutes), focused. Each episode split into short segments.
Discussion of the podcast production process.
Issues: some corporates limit downloading of MP3s through firewalls, people not allowed to plug in USB devices, etc.

Field staff can be great corporate advocates, and podcasts are a good way to reach them, especially when they are on the road all the time [ true - I dip into podcasts when I'm on the road, too ]

Currently using CommunityServer for their blogs.
Used Twitter for the Tour of Britain event sponsorship. Fed a newsfeed to Twitter. This Twitter feed ended up being the only place to get news on Tour of Britain, not even the BBC were carrying reports.

Interesting issue over regulated industries. Regulators want to see complaints being recorded and handled – so customer service reps wanting to help customers resolve issues via external blog comments can cause regulatory issues.

[ note: it's a shame that so few of the presenters have been here all day - there would be much less duplication and more conversations arising from the similar points being made ... for instance, Paul mentioned Cluetrain and a few other things that had been talked about earlier ]

Mark Harris, College Hill
Blogs in crisis management
Why monitor the blogosphere? Well, numerous companies have had issues. Range of stories about how some real examples panned out.
Your organisation may be under attack, but your competitors might be under attack too – and this matters as it may affect how your company might be seen. Are your employees blogging? Do you know about it?

Consider the scope of a crisis generated through blogs. Is the poster a prominent author, is the item heavily linked?
Need care in responding to a crisis. Lawyers letters get posted to blogs, don’t bring things to the mainstream media if it isn’t there already.

When posting… use clear and defensible facts, and link to source material; Be respectful; Correct your own mistakes and acknowledge them [ note: these things are embedded in IBM's blogging guidelines already ]
Mark is happy to hear from each of the presenters today that their companies have blogging guidelines… but what about new starters? Worth checking on existing electronic footprints, and tell new starters about blogging guidelines, find out if they have a blog etc.
Blogs can complement how an organisation responds to criticism.
If a blog is used to respond to an issue, keep it going, don’t drop it.

Summary – blogging “is part of the comunication tool kit”, but not all of a communications strategy. Blogs can play a part in crisis management.

Conclusions
Overall, a very interesting day. I was particularly pleased with the range of viewpoints on offer – every presenter had a slightly different take on social media, ranging from my probably full-on enthusiasm[1] at the start of the day, through the more cautious notes from legal and regulatory angles, to how to drive these technologies into enterprises. Fascinating stuff. I also really enjoyed talking to the attendees… most of whom are not already blogging, and had not heard of sites like Technorati… it was good to spread the word and (hopefully) contribute to a wider understanding of this space.

[1] so much so that I completely forgot how to form a sentence at one point – I’m blaming that on too much enthusiasm rather than lack of caffeine.

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