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Thoughts and things I care to shareEnterprise workers don’t have the bandwidth for social media
In past posts on the topic, I’ve often wondered when the average worker would “get” blogging. I have to admit that I finally “got it” recently, but from a different perspective. While working with larger firms, I’ve again had the chance to observe the average office worker. In doing so, “it” occurred to me while explaining how social media adds value to an organization that many folks just don’t have the bandwidth to participate.
It’s not that they wouldn’t want to, rather, it’s that the modern organization is so optimized on searching for productivity gains that there is little room to add back the socialization tools to the mix. To do so without finding the reasons for using more employees’ time doesn’t add value to the organization. Many existing efforts to engage the employee meet with mediocre results because people don’t have interest in helping their employer know more about them.
Another aspect of social media in the enterprise is buy-in. There simply is a certain demographic that will be averse to participating. The reasons for this can be nearly anything, but usually comes back to the fact that many people can’t grasp the value of participating. They may exhibit this perspective in many other aspects of their life as well by not joining community groups or friends in other activities.
So, for those organizations that are trying to leverage the knowledge of their employees, the challenge is to find the channel that they will respond to. It’s more than that however, because just like working to connect with consumers, the business needs to connect with their staff. They need to eliminate the gap between business and employee by being themselves. Executives & veeps need to show their personalities, not their “game face” that they use for business. The employees know about that all too well, they need to see that the business is made up of real people.
Social Media in general has this issue – that people aren’t willing to invest the time, or don’t see any value in participating. It’s not unique to this new way of engaging people. Similar challenges faced radio and television at one time as well, newfangled things that they were. These new community building tools & techniques are still in their infancy and will be a large part of the infrastructure of the new economy that is developing as we speak – the trends in the market prove that out every day.
Photo credit: ShadowStorm
Fathers Day 2008
For all the hours you worked
For all the knowledge and advice you share
For setting the example and showing me how to be a man
For teaching me how to respect people
For being there when any of us kids stumbled
For always listening
Most of all, thank you for being my dad.
Migrated to Firefox 3… finally
I’ve finally made the switch to Firefox 3 (RC3). While previous betas and release candidates didn’t feel quite finished, this one sure does. From the talk around the ‘net about it, it sounds like this may be the last RC before going gold. Yeah, I still have a number of plug-ins that are not supported yet, but in the week since I switched to RC3 there have been three plug-ins updated for compatibility!
My main plug-ins that I can’t live without are there and the stability, memory management, and feature set have made it worth the change. Kudos to the Mozilla team on the work so far – you’re real close, and I know you’ve got a longer list of things to finish up than I’m aware of.
So yep, to those who give a darn I’ve moved to FF3 and am happy with the upgrade. Good stuff.
The working mistake
I’ve fallen into the trap again. Allowing myself to loose focus on getting things done around here and writing for my blog. The last couple weeks of May and the first week of June allowed me to get a lot done around here and start laying groundwork for moving forward.
This week I blew it. I let work get in between myself and my goals. Sure, getting paying work is an important part in attaining those goals. However, it really smarts when a person let’s it completely absorb all your time. I did that this week, and have little to show for it but inspiration for the weekend.
No, I don’t have grand ideas to make up for lost time, instead I’m simply picking up my plans that I think I left in the front seat of the car under an empty soda can and a bag of stale chips. Oh, never mind about that 😉
Honestly, I find it funny how easy it is to repeat past mistakes and not realize you’re doing it until you can look back over time and see where you missed a step. There are many steps still ahead, so I’ll just keep walking down the path I’ve chosen. See you this weekend!
Rick
Social Media Breakfast – Twin Cities 4
The fourth SMB in the Twin Cities of Minneapolis & St. Paul, Minnesota is scheduled for Wednesday, June 11th. Sure, that’s tomorrow and I coulda/shoulda/woulda posted about it a week ago, but decided to let the posts here, here & here do their work.
We’re hosting the event at Concordia University in St. Paul for the second time, as the facilities work well for our group. Though I do believe there’ll be some suggestions to shake it up again in July.
I can’t wait to see what directions the conversation will go in this meetup tomorrow. There are always such great ideas that the group never has enough time to really cover them all. We’re lucky to have a bunch of outgoing people, ready to bring their opinions & perspectives to help others. It makes the meetups more valuable that way.
Agenda? Oh yeah, we’re trying to have a little more structure – at least for starting points of conversations.
- 8am to 15am: Meet & find seat
- 8:15am to 8:30am: @Desaraev from Twitter will be presenting “Social Media Roll Call”
- 8:30am to 10am: Conversation Topics
So, we’ll have another great breakfast – hope to see you there!
50 Uses for Twitter
Awhile back, I’d started a list of "101 Uses for Twitter", but never seemed to get past 27 for some reason. Of course, it had been last autumn since I brainstormed on it. While I don’t think that I personally could come up with 101 uses, I’m sure there are many more than that.
So I thought about this again for awhile this morning and did think of 50 uses that I’ve seen or participated in. So here is a list of 50 uses for Twitter, I’m thinking of more as I write this, so maybe there is a chance at that "101" post sometime.
- Keep in touch with my
Twitter peepsfriends - General news item links
- News & links on my industry or area of interest
- Fast answers to quick questions
- Professional networking
- Links to nearly everything
- Marketing
- Personal branding
- Corporate & product branding
- Haiku’s
- Making friends
- Feel "plugged into the web and it’s various personalities"
- Replacement for instant messaging applications
- Chat tool
- Promotional tool for my blog
- Providing new reading opportunities
- Fun stuff!
- Meeting new, interesting people to communicate with
- Collecting links
- Finding sites related to social networking
- "To listen in on my contacts rants"
- A web worker "water cooler"
- Micro-blogging
- A personal "techmeme"
- Lightweight text broadcasting tool
- Easy way to annoy your spouse
- Promotional tool for my brand
- Ranting
- Idea generator
- No-cost non-profit announcement system
- Bring a sense of community to your home office
- Tracking status of friends
- Status message generator for other social networks
- Frustration generator (at least when it is down)
- Thought publisher
- Promotional tool for my organization
- Following public discussions
- Travel guide
- Controlled discussion between friends
- Uncontrolled discussion between friends with viewers
- List generator
- Meeting agenda generator
- Coffee shop locator
- People search
- Promotional tool for my company
- Product reviews
- Trip planner
- Backchannel for events
- Feedback generator
- Authentication mechanism
So what are you uses for Twitter? I’m sure I didn’t capture them all, so add your ideas and things you use Twitter for below.
10 Minute Review: Acrobat.com
Just a quick weekend look at Adobe’s new "online office" product – Acrobat.com. At least, that’s how I found it referred to in some of the news bits today. Overall I was impressed with the first release of Adobe’s Acrobat.com efforts. With a slick, Flash based interface, it has good performance and is visually appealing.
They seem to be starting out with some good features, but are missing many. Zoho is closest to providing an online office suite that compares anywhere near Microsoft Office. Adobe is starting out with a word processor, document sharing ability with a generous 5GB of space, a document to PDF conversion tool, and a really nifty web conferencing application.
The word processor, called BuzzWord, is what you’d expect. It has the basics and is similar feature wise to Google Docs. PDF conversion is straight forward, you can upload a doc to convert and it saves the resulting file in the My Files applet. File sharing is accomplished from the drop-down context menu and provides the ability to embed the doc into a site.
The most impressive app included here is the web conferencing, called ConnectNow, which has features similar to WebEx. Adobe provides each user their own room, assigns a conference phone number to it, allows for desktop sharing, meeting notes, group & individual IM, and WebCasting with an optional web cam. Good stuff.
Just a couple bullet points:
- Look & Feel: Wow – the Flash based interface is impressive
- Consistency: Needs some work, changing applications launches too many windows
- Integration: Very little between "applications"
- Functionality: Depends on feature – some are quite rich, others very basic
- Features: Document sharing, Word Processor, PDF Conversion, Web Conferencing
Overall it’s a good start. There is a long way to go to compete evenly with Google Docs & Spreadsheets, but then Google doesn’t have a web conference tool. It’s not going to compete with MS Office, or any of the others for some time. With that said, however, if you want to convert some documents to PDF, host documents that you can link to in email or from a website, or a decent free web conferencing tool, it might be a good adjunct to your current solutions.
Blogging – New Phase, New Theme
Wow, what a wild ride the last few months have been. I’ve been planning to refine the direction of my blog and revamp the appearance for some time and it’s finally completed!
Well, it’s almost completed – I’ve got a replacement for the About page almost ready to publish, and I’ve got one last page that I’ll add a little later. Seems I just can’t get it to come out quite right in the past week while working on other things – so I’ll get to that real soon.
Direction
The great part is that I’m refining my direction. Since I’ve come out of corporate, with a strong background in information technology, I’m going to focus on helping those organizations with social media. I’ve changed the description of the blog to "social web & the enterprise". I believe that to better describe the direction that I’m going.
Friends
First, I really respect a number of bloggers for their work & influence on me. So, instead of the old blogroll, or a list of links, I created a new Friends page. This page is people I have come to know, respect, learn from, work with, and I wanted to do more than just link to them. You’ll find a description of each blog and a thumbnail of their landing page.
Resume
Also page that can now be found in the top navigation area is the Resume page. I’ve had a variant of this Social Media Resume up for about 9 months, but never advertised it on the blog. I’ve revamped a number of pieces of the page as it used to be a completely custom HTML page forced into a WordPress theme template. Now it fully fits the theme, with a special resume.php template that allows different sidebars and such. Much better. I’ve pulled the video that I had on it, but will replace it with another one to fit the direction of the blog shortly.
Advertisement
You’ll also notice that all advertising save two things have been removed from the blog. While I make enough to pay for hosting, I believe that the ads detracted from what I’m here to accomplish, so they’re gone. The two items I mentioned that remain are badges for Personal Branding Magazine, and for Avatar Consultants. Their of personal interest to me, I’m involved in writing for one, and the other is my consulting firm.
Nowhere But Up
So if the picture in this post didn’t give a hint, my motto as I revise my direction and enter a new phase, is that there is nowhere to go but up. Join me as we bring the benefits of the social web to organizations of all sizes. Come along and help individuals realize the power and strength of their brand. Let’s make each day the best it can be!
I want to give a special thank you to Mykl Roventine for patience, ideas, and a great design – I wouldn’t have gotten this completed without his work. Thank you.
Got feedback? I bet! Don’t hesitate to leave your thoughts in a comment below.
Photo credit: Leo Reynolds
Blog Updating – Watch for falling posts
Just want to share a bit of news. I’m in the process of updating the theme & design of the ol’ blog tonight, so if you see anything odd, broken, or inoperable it’s probably being worked on. A teaser thumbnail of it running on the development system is included just for fun. 
However, if you want to let me know of specific things that aren’t working and such, please feel free to do so. You can ping me on Twitter (I’m @rickmahn) or via email (rick {at} rickmahn.com).
This is pretty exciting for me as I’ve been planning on a new design for several months. I’m very glad to have had Mykl Roventine heading up the redesign based on a free theme called WP Premium. The look & feel is clean and simple and suits me quite well. A big thank-you to Mykl for the great work.
That’s it for now, I’ve got a couple of things to finish up before flipping the switch so I’m off to get those done! Talk soon folks!
Rick
Corporate Blogging – What’s The Plan?
It’s been awhile since I’ve written a post on corporate blogging, and I thought it was high time to continue what I think may become a series. The needs of many companies are little different than the needs of an individual. However, the process in which most should approach blogging is as unique as the organizations themselves.
For the most part, it’s like most other business decisions. Decide what the purpose is and what the organization expects to achieve by doing it. Many businesses are not ready to use social media on external facing systems to engage customers. Some are almost ready to use it for internal continuous improvement processes that engage their employees. Both these models require that the organization accept negative feedback along with the praise, and that is a very bitter pill to swallow for anyone – businesses or individuals.
If you are an agent of change in your organization and are trying to figure out how to approach the business with a blogging or social media proposition, you need to understand how to present the idea. It’s not unlike trying to sell a new business strategy.
Here are a few tips on preparing to present blogging or other social media ideas to your company:
- Learn about social media by participating personally
- Research similar companies in size and target market to see how they’ve used social tools
- With these learning’s in mind, determine if it’s the right time for your company to invest in social media. Is the climate right, are they receptive to new ideas, are they looking to improve service?
- Identify areas, or even departments, within your company that could benefit by using select social media tools. Be specific about the benefits. Understand the negatives.
- Write a simple overview to capture these things and provide a structure for you to build a case for using social media to augment the business.
- Have samples ready to demonstrate, and be able to talk about how these new tools and ideas help solve real business problems.
There are many ways to pursue social technologies for your company, and many tools, services, and software to choose from. What works for one company, doesn’t always work for the next. Keep looking for the right fit, not necessarily the biggest, or most well known of them are best for your business.
What successes have you had in bringing social media to your company? Does your company actively engage in the social media space? What can you recommend to others who are exploring these tools for their company?
Photo credit: juhansosin
😢
“We are not enemies but friends.”
Live your life.
Completely.
Without fear.
Live it with Love, compassion, empathy, tolerance and joy.
Treat every person with the kindness, respect and dignity they deserve by the very virtue of being a human being.
Out riding this rainy, wet spring. Got 1,000 miles on the clock with more to come this season. #IMRG #IndianMotorcycle
Watching early seasons of #GoldRush. Fun seeing @GoldrushRick in season 3! Hope his new season is off to a good start!
Oh yes I did! https://www.instagram.com/p/BsRDO9ogSO0/?utm_source=ig_twitter_share&igshid=1kha5yzhjq3ot