E L S U A ~ A KM Blog Thinking Outside The Inbox by Luis Suarez

The Man Who Should Have Used Lotus Connections – On the Business Case for Corporate Blogging

A few days back you would remember how I put together a blog post on the topic of "The Man Who Should Have Used Lotus Connections – On the Misuse of Email" where I mentioned a wonderful video clip that one of my fellow IBM colleagues put together detailing the misuse of sending files through email and how so much more efficient, and effective, completing that very same task would have been by using a file sharing Web site, like Connections Files, right? Well, it looks like Jean Francois Chenier is back for more!

Remember that other blog post I put together as well a little while ago on The Second Coming of Blogging? Remember how I mentioned I was starting to see a second coming of blogging, whether on the Internet or whether inside of the firewall? Well, it looks like Jean Francois decided to tap into this very same thing as well and the second episode of "The Man Who Should Have Used Lotus Connections" is now based on blogging and the many benefits of having a corporate blog.

My good friends, both Luis Benitez and Stuart McIntyre, have already been blogging themselves about this second installment over here and here, respectively. And slowly, but steadily, it’s starting to get the rounds all over the place with dozens of downloads after just a few hours being out. I guess that’s what happens when you get to produce one of those video clips that you know is not only proving a really good point on the usage of social software to reach out and collaborate with other knowledge workers, while sharing your knowledge across, but at the same time it is hilariously funny!

If you can spare 3:40 seconds I would strongly encourage you all folks to have a look into "The man who should have used Lotus Connections 2", sit back, relax and enjoy the show! As you go through it, I bet you would be able to relate to quite a few things that Jean Francois included in the plot of various scenarios that we are all far too familiar with. Perhaps too familiar.

Over the course of those 3 minutes 40 seconds you would be able to see how he makes up for a really good use case on why corporate blogging is still as useful as ever, it not more! Not only as your Personal Knowledge Management system, or your brainstorming or collaboration and knowledge sharing tool on the stuff that you are passionate about and that matters to you, but perhaps one of the most powerful ones out there to help you work through improving your own personal brand. There is probably no better tool than that one, to be honest.

Just recently I participated in an internal online panel for New Hires on Choosing the Right Social Computing Tool and towards the end of the session the moderator asked us to choose which one would be our favourite social software tool from the ones we have been using all along. Funny enough for 3 of us, me included, our first response wasn’t Facebook, nor Twitter, nor Flickr, or Del.icio.us, but our own personal business blogs. For all of us!

In my own case, I wouldn’t have it any other way, to be honest. As I am on my way to make my sixth bloggiversary with my corporate internal blog, I just can’t help thinking that when times were really rough it was my own personal blog (With over 2.700 articles at the moment) that managed to help me make it through to the point where my last three jobs inside IBM were provided to me by my blog. Not my resume, not my previous work / experience, but my personal corporate blog alone where, even till today, I still get together, on a regular basis, with a bunch of other passionate bloggers sharing insights on what motivates us to try to make a difference.

Yes, folks, that’s what blogs are all about. That’s why while I may be a bit silent in various other social networking tools, blogging still is, to me, that core neuralgic focal point of entry that amalgamates all of my social computing activities. My preferred and default Personal Knowledge Management tool. One that everyone should have and one that Jean Francois nails it on why despite everything else, blogging, in 2009, is still as valuable as ever…

(A big and special thanks to Jean Francois for keeping the series running and for sharing episode #2 with us all and for teasing us altogether as he prepares his way for episode #3 of the series … I just can’t wait! Well done, Jean Francois! Looking forward to the next one!)

Tags: YouTube, Videos, Jean Francois Chenier, IBM Lotus Connections, Lotus Connections, Connections, Files, File Sharing, Blogging, Blogs, Metablogging, Weblogging, Luis Benitez, Stuart McIntyre, Collaboration Matters, Facebook, Twitter, Flickr, Del.icio.us, Branding, Personal Branding, Brands, Personal Brand, Corporate Blogging, Enterprise Blogging, Web 2.0, Enterprise 2.0, Social Software, Social Networking, Social Computing, Social Media, Collaboration, Communities, Learning, Knowledge Sharing, KM, Knowledge Management, Remote Collaboration, Innovation, IBM, Networking, Social Networks, Conversations, Dialogue, Communication, Connections, Relationships, email, Productivity, Re-purposing Email, No-Email, Challenge Your Inbox, Progress Reports, Thinking Outside the Inbox, Information Overload, A World Without Email

Can Twitter Serve as a Personal Knowledge Management Tool?

I have been using Twitter now for over two and a half years and, all along, if you have been following some of my recent twitterings, you would know how I seem to keep having a love / hate relationship with it. It still remains one of my favourite Web 2.0 tools out there on the Internet, but I must admit that some times it drives me just nuts! Completely! Not sure up to what point it becomes frustration, but time and time again it amazes me that we are putting to waste such great potential with this micro-blogging / micro-sharing tool. And yet we all keep getting back to it over and over again. Why? Well, because that’s where our communities hang out.

So when Bill Ives just recently questioned whether you could make use of Twitter as a Personal Knowledge Management tool I couldn’t help but wonder myself whether I am using it as well as my PKM tool of choice, along with my own personal business blog and a couple of other tools. And the answer back then was a big NO! I simply couldn’t consider Twitter in this area for the many various flaws that it has, specially its lack of searching capabilities beyond, roughly, a week old tweets, or its inability to allow me to keep an archive of all things I have tweeted in the past that I can access at my own convenience. And those are just a couple of issues. I am sure there are plenty more out there…

But here is the one that was starting to drive me crazy more and more by the day and the main culprit why I haven’t been twittering much as of late. Most folks out there using Twitter consider it their new, and enhanced, RSS feed reader, from where they grab their daily links or feeds to keep in the know and on top of everything that’s happening. I would agree that Twitter has got tremendous value in performing such task well, specially when most of those links shared are actually already validated by the folks who you follow and connect, those folks who you share a common passion with. That’s just fantastic!

But, Twitter, as a brilliant dynamic feed reader, has got such a huge long term memory problem, that, unless you are constantly checking it out, you will be missing out on most of those really interesting links that folks share across. And, of course, no-one has got time for that! So I started playing with a number of options and see how they would go and tried to figure out a way to give Twitter back some of that long term memory. And I think I have finally managed to make it work. Mind you though, Twitter alone won’t do the job itself. Thus here is how I am going to start using Twitter now as one of my Personal Knowledge Management tools.

Twitter as a Personal Knowledge Management Tool – Here is the how!

For a good number of months there have been two simple actions I perform in Twitter that I have grown rather fond of all along: Retweeting and marking tweets as favourites. To me that’s part of where this tool holds most of its meat, amongst a couple of other key elements (Like the usage of hash tags, for instance). So I needed to figure out a way to make those two actions a bit more permanent so that I would have a chance to search through the Archives over time and find the content I would need when I needed it.

And to such extent I have finally settled in bringing into the mix a couple of other Web 2.0 social software tools that I have found rather interesting and with a huge potential to explore further, along with starting to use both of them on a more regular basis:

• Evernote: This is one of those Web 2.0 tools that is rather simple to use, as well as amazingly pervasive, yet so incredibly effective. Typically, there are dozens and dozens of use cases for it, but the one I am using for Twitter in particular is that one where every now and then I display the page of tweets I have marked as favourites and I capture a screen shot with Evernote, which I can then annotate further, synchronise back to the server and from that moment onwards I can search the text throughout that screen shot as if it were just that: plain text.

  Have been playing with it for a few days now already and it seems to be working like a charm! Finally, I now have got an opportunity to search through my Favourites Archives and re-find what I need. Things are starting to take shape. Wonderful!

• Posterous: A couple of weeks back, I mentioned on Twitter how I was starting to play with another social software tool on the Internet that seems to be incredibly popular at the moment, as a (micro-)blogging fashion (Along the lines of Tumblr) but making use of the lowest common denominator that could get everyone making use of it without any excuses: email! Yes, I am talking about Posterous, indeed.

  Now, I haven’t started sharing any content just yet in my Posterous address, but I will be doing so this very same week. However, I can now finally share one particular use case with which I am planning to make use of Posterous itself, amongst several others, and that is sharing all of the retweets I collect over time in Twitter.

  Like I said, both Favourites and retweets are two of the features I treasure the most from Twitter and if I would want to see this tool become part of my Personal Knowledge Management tools suite I need to give it a bit more persistency as well as re-findability, and, although I can understand how some people may not be happy with me taking retweets out of Twitter, I do hope it will stick around. It would be too bad letting those retweets died a short, sudden death, just because Twitter doesn’t want to know better. We shall see how that goes… I will be reporting over time how things develop further.

And that’s it! That’s how I am planning to convert Twitter from here onwards into one of my most powerful Personal Knowledge Management tools on the Internet. With the extra help of both Evernote and Posterous I think I am off to a good start, one where I will finally be able to state time and time again … "I love Twitter!"

Oh, and in case you may be wondering what would be my preferred Twitter tool to interact with on a daily basis, over the last few weeks I have grown very fond of Mixero and so far I think it’s probably one of the best Twitter clients out there that I have played with all along (Including both TweetDeck and Seesmic Desktop, too!).

If you are into groups, searches and a really clean interface Mixero is worth while all the way. However, if you one of those folks who don’t care much about groups my other old time favourite desktop client has been, all along, Tweetie for the Mac (On the iPhone it still is my default Twitter client while on the move!). Phew! So, there you have it! Those are the tools I keep using on a regular basis to interact with Twitter and I guess at this point I will probably need to put together a short screencast to show folks how it eventually works out for me … Stay tuned! hehe

Oh, wait, you don’t know just yet what Twitter is? Really? You haven’t heard what the fuss is all about? Not interested? Perhaps you may not have found a good enough explanation that will help you decide whether to give it a go or not? Well, how about this incredibly powerful, and helpful!, YouTube video titled "Twitter in 60 seconds" put together by Jim Gates:

Not bad, eh? Perhaps we may be able to see you there very soon! Why not, right? Your community is waiting out there for you to arrive! And, of course, I can assure you the waters are lovely! Dive in!

Tags: Twitter, Micro-Blogging, Micro-Sharing, Bill Ives, Personal Knowledge Management, PKM, Personal Knowledge Sharing, RSS, Atom, Feeds, Newsfeeds, Feed Reader, Retweets, Favourites, Retweeting, Evernote, Clippings, Web Clippings, Posterous, Tumblr, Twitter Clients, Twitter Tools, Mixero, TweetDeck, Seesmic Desktop, Tweetie, Mac, MacBook Pro, iPhone, Apple, YouTube, Jim Gates, Videos, Enterprise 2.0, Social Software, Social Networking, Social Computing, Social Media, Collaboration, Communities, Learning, Knowledge Sharing, KM, Knowledge Management, Innovation, Networking, Social Networks, Conversations, Dialogue, Communication, Connections, Relationships, email, Productivity, Productivity 2.0

Evangelist: Think!

Today’s blog post is actually a reflection I started writing about yesterday already for which I still don’t have a good, final answer I would feel comfortable with; and perhaps I never will; but more often than not it’s keeping my mind busy somewhat trying to figure out whether it would even need to be answered at all in the first place or not. Or whether I would feel comfortable with it by and large altogether. So I thought I would drop a few thoughts around that idea and see where it would take me…

Most of you folks know that I have been working as a Social Computing evangelist at IBM full time for the last two and a half years now and still going strong; before I was doing plenty of Knowledge Management, Collaboration and Community Building and social software evangelism was an additional activity coming out mostly out of my own private time. During all of this time I have been thinking about my role as a technology evangelist, specially in the area of Social Software, and its impact within the corporate world. And how the change towards a new, more social, democratised, humanised, non-hierarchical, networked (A la wirearchy as Jon Husband would say), community based Enterprise can’t come about fast enough!

Yet, it’s not happening! It wasn’t happening 6 years ago, when the corporate world was starting to pay attention to social software in the Web 2.0 consumer space; it wasn’t happening when Andy McAfee coined the term Enterprise 2.0 in 2006 and it is not happening either in 2009 when plenty of businesses are starting to invest rather heavily in their own Enterprise 2.0 efforts (And I am not just talking about money here, by the way, in case you are wondering … ).

So, perhaps it won’t be happening. Perhaps that change we are all anxiously anticipating (And working really hard for), specially those folks who identify themselves as 2.0 evangelists, is not meant to take place at all. At least, in our time! Maybe we are just planting the seed for that change to take place in 20, 30 or 50 years from now! Maybe we are all just trust agents preparing the way for a change we won’t see eventually taking place, nor our kids, nor our grand-children.

Now, would you be comfortable with that thought? Knowing that you won’t see all of that daily hard work as an evangelist coming through that very soon? That perhaps two or three generations will need to pass by before we see it become a reality? That maybe this change we are all looking forward to is going to be taking place at a rather lower pace that whatever we could have imagined  and that we are just starting to surface perhaps the .001% of its completion and general availability? … … I think I would.

I am starting to be more and more convinced that transformation of the corporate world into a more humane enterprise is not going to take place in my working lifetime. Yes, basically, I won’t see it. And, probably that means you won’t either. And although you would think that it’s rather worrying, I actually think that it may not be. At least, the etymological meaning of an evangelist will prove to be rather accurate (If you look into other evangelists in our recent past…).

So why am I pondering about all this, you may be wondering, right? Well, like I said at the beginning of this blog post, I have been thinking about this for a while now as something I have been witnessing all along. How even despite all of the goodness behind Enterprise 2.0, things are moving rather slow. Perhaps too slow. In hundreds, if not thousands of businesses, it’s not even part of a conversation yet, on whether they would need to pay attention to it or not. Yes, there are several thousand businesses out there still thinking along those lines! You even may be reading this blog post at your home computer or mobile device because your company may have even blocked access to social software tools. I know how this very same blog is actually blocked in several countries out there.

I know and realise that this may come through as a relatively negative blog post, and by all means it is not meant to be. It’s just a reflection that perhaps all (technology) evangelists should start realising, and come to terms, with the fact that the change towards a World 2.0 that we are all anticipating may not be coming through that quickly. And that we may need to decide whether we are comfortable with that situation or not. And what would we do if we don’t. My good friend, and evangelist (If I may dare use that word, not sure whether he would consider himself as one, but, to me, he is), Euan Semple nailed it earlier on in an interview he did with Dennis Howlett (Which you can read more on over here & here) where he gets to describe how it may well take up to 50 years for this 2.0 general transformation to take place, before we can say that it has truly transformed not just how we work, but also how we live, transcending both our personal and work related lives.

Euan Semple on the New Web from Dennis Howlett on Vimeo.

A worth while going through interview for sure with plenty of golden nuggets, but that one in particular struck me as rather revealing, again, on that role of a social computing evangelist that nowadays can’t see this work coming through fast enough. To top it off, another good friend, David Tebbutt, posted a very thought-provoking and revealing article under "Evangelist: beware" that I would also recommend everyone out there to check out. In it you will find precious little gems, like this one, as his final conclusion:

"The answer has to be to filter them as quickly as possible. Find out who pays for their evangelism in money or in other ways. Ask them what alternatives they know about in detail. And get them to tell you what the long term implications of their advocacy are likely to be. Some will slink away from the interrogation. Some will bluster, so you can take your leave of them. Those that will remain probably have a good and well thought out story to tell" (Emphasis mine)

You see? This is now when that thought I have been pondering about is starting to take shape. And eventually comes around as well with a superb tweet that David Terrar shared a few hours back quoting Euan again: "@euan on being evangelical – "I don’t want them to think like I think, I just want them to think"".

And that’s why I am continuing to think that perhaps our role as social computing evangelists is not so much to provoke that corporate change and transformation, but eventually to provoke a much more profound and significant change on how we operate and behave as human beings towards other human beings. And I can certainly see decades going by before we all start getting a sense we are heading somewhere. After all, it’s all about a continuous learning path on being better at what we do, and who we are, and most of the times it’s going to take us quite a long time to try to absorb and apply such drastic change, not only for ourselves, but also for others… I guess I will ask my grand-kids one day whether we were successful or not…

Tags: Evangelists, Technology Evangelist, Social Computing Evangelist, Technology, Social Enterprise, Wirearchy, Jon Husband, Andy McAfee, Trust Agents, Chris Brogan, Euan Semple, Dennis Howlett, David Tebutt, Change, Change Management, Transformation, David Terrar, Innovation, Life, Work, Humanity, Human Beings, Think!, Culture, Culture Shift, Culture Change, Enterprise 2.0, Social Software, Social Networking, Social Computing, Social Media, Collaboration, Communities, Learning, Knowledge Sharing, KM, Knowledge Management, Remote Collaboration, Innovation, IBM, Networking, Social Networks, Conversations, Dialogue, Communication, Connections, Relationships, Productivity, Reboot