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

Making Business Sense of Social Media and Social Networking – Twitter For Business

Yesterday evening, my time, I attended a rather interesting webcast with Sandy Carter, IBM’s Worldwide Sales Vice President, IBM Social Business, Collaboration, and Lotus Sales and Evangelism, along with Jeremiah Owyang, Industry Analyst at Altimeter Group, on the topic of Why Be Social?. It surely was quite an interesting event and, if you would be interested, you can catch up with the tweet stream by checking out the #sbweb hash tag; a copy of the slides both Sandy and Jeremiah used can be downloaded over here as well. Amongst some of the very insightful ideas shared throughout that one hour webcast was a reflection on how little most businesses seem to be spending nowadays (And not just money!) on providing education on making use of all of these social software tools, which I found rather intriguing, because it looks like we are bound to repeat the very same mistakes we did back then when something called email, or Instant Messaging, for that matter! first came about. Remember your email education and email etiquette? … No? Oh dear … Not to worry, I don’t remember it either! In fact, I never had it in the 14 years I have been using corporate email. No wonder then email gets so abused nowadays!

Will Social Software follow the same trend? Will social tools suffer from the same destiny of being abused left and right for tasks that they weren’t meant to be in the first place, just like we have done with email over the last decade or so? Will social networking tools become our next Pandora’s Box, just like email is today for most of us? Well, I surely hope not! I think we have got a unique opportunity that we didn’t have last time around, which is basically spend enough time to educate our knowledge workers into how to make effective use of these emerging collaborative and knowledge sharing tools within the social computing realm. Yes, I do realise how some folks have been claiming that these social tools are so easy to use that no-one would require education about them, and if they do the tools themselves have failed in the premise of keeping things simple and user friendly enough.

Well, not really; education on how social software tools work has got very little to do with technology nor the tools themselves, since you can always go through extensive features reviews, or in-depth overviews of capabilities, online videos, Web sites, screencasts, webcasts, etc. etc. Education on social tools is more aligned towards showing and demonstrating a change of habits; basically, shifting gears into new ways of getting the job done; figuring out new methods of becoming, even more, productive carrying out daily tasks and activities by injecting various 2.0 flavours. You know, sending an email is not the same thing as putting together a blog post. Using “Reply to All” in an email is not the same as having a group concurrently collaborating on a wiki page building up content in a collaborative manner; storing a bookmark your browser is not the same thing as doing it within your favourite social bookmarking tool. And the list goes on and on and on …

Effective Social Software education is all about adopting successfully new models of conducting work, where openness, clarity, transparency, publicy, trust, etc. etc. mix together quite nicely with other traditional collaborative and knowledge sharing methods. It’s not about replacing one with the other. It’s all about finding more efficient ways of doing the same job, perhaps spending a whole lot less effort, but with equal, if not, better results. Yes, what I have been coining over here for a long while with that “work smarter, not necessarily harder“.

Thus whenever I bump into such kind of education offerings I just can’t help but take the opportunity to dive right into them, because I have always felt there will be something new to be learned for sure. That was the exact same premise of how my team, the BlueIQ folks, our IBM internal social software adoption program, designed and developed an entire curriculum of 33 education modules, which is what we have piled up for 2011 so far, on how to get the most of social tools for our day to day productivity while carrying out various common tasks and activities; all in all focusing on the outcomes, the business objective and not necessarily on the tools themselves; I may be able to talk a little bit more about our BlueIQ Enablement Program at some stage, but today I wanted to share with you folks another IBM initiative that’s just gotten started a couple of weeks ago and which aims at helping educate fellow IBMers, as well as Business Partners, into using effectively social media tools.

Welcome to Making Business Sense of Social Media and Social Networking! Yes, that is right! This is a new education program, meant for IBMers and IBM’s  Business Partners, but, eventually, open to everyone out there who may want to spend one hour per week, for the next 6 weeks, covering various different aspects of social media. This series of education sessions is sponsored by the IBM PartnerWorld Community; my good friend, and fellow colleague, Chad Laws, along with the always inspiring and very enlightening Paul Gillin, have done a tremendous amount of great work putting together some outstanding materials for over the next few weeks. And best of all … all of the education sessions are free. Yes, FREE as in free!

Like I said, this rather interesting set of courses has already gotten started a couple of weeks back, so out of the series of 6 planned 2 of them are already done and dealt with. There are still 4 more to go! But the good thing is that if you would be interested in catching up with the two sessions that have already been provided, not to worry, there are recordings and presentations already available for download. So to get things going, both Chad and Paul covered Social Media Crash Course for Business Partners (Click here to access the replay of the session) and just a couple of days ago the second course, which is the one that triggered the creation of this blog post altogether.

That’s right! Last Wednesday, Paul did a wonderful job covering one of my favourite topics as of late: Twitter for Business and over the course of nearly one hour he covered all of the fundamental aspects of how to explore and take advantage of the huge potential behind microblogging / microsharing by using Twitter to reach out to your customers, fellow business partners or other knowledge workers / thought leaders from the industry and engage in meaningful conversations. A copy of the presentation can be downloaded over here and the best part of this series is that each session gets recorded, both the audio and the video, so you can have a chance, even if you couldn’t make it to the live event, like I missed the first one myself!, to catch up with the replay in a very handy format, a .wmv file, that you can download onto your machine and start playing it at your own convenience.

However, in this case, I was able to make it to the live event itself and I had a blast! I enjoyed it tremendously! I have been using Twitter now for nearly four years and I still learned a trick or two I didn’t know about it while Paul & Chad covered the slides. That was just brilliant! Whether you are new to Twitter and the whole world behind microblogging / microsharing, or whether you are a seasoned power user of Twitter, Twitter for Business is one of those education sessions you can’t miss! Worth while your time, for sure! I am 100% certain!

The recording of this particular one hour event can be downloaded from here and I can certainly recommend it, just as much as sharing with you folks a reminder that, every week, there will be a new session coming up co-presented by both Paul and Chad; so far they have been doing a wonderful job and I am sure it will continue to be like that for the remaining of the series of events; continuing next week already, which will be about one of my favourite topics for over the last 8 years and counting … Of course, I’m talking about Starting and Maintaining a Blog. The link to the slide deck is already available (Click here), but I just can’t wait for Tuesday next week, at 1:00 pm EST, to make it to the live event!

As a reminder, please don’t forget that these sessions are free and open to everyone and that if you would want to help prepare your way on becoming Social Minded, it may well be a good resource to get things going, more than anything else just because sending an email to someone is certainly not the same as engaging in an insightful conversation with your customers and / or business partners… on Twitter, as an example.

You know, after all, it’s all about Getting Social, Do Business, don’t you think?

Community Management Fundamentals – Where Do I Start?

If you have been reading this blog for a while now, you would know how there have been a good number of topics I have been covering over the course of the years and still going strong. All of them coming pretty close to my heart as part of that passion I seem to share for each and everyone of them. Knowledge Management, Collaboration, Learning, Social Computing within the Enterprise, Productivity, Work Life Integration, etc. etc. Well, there is one more out there that I have always felt very passionate about as well, but which, lately, I have been neglecting it inadvertently and haven’t had a chance to blog more about it. So today I am putting a remedy to that and will start sharing the odd blog post from now onwards on what I strongly believe it’s one of the major drivers of social software tools adoption, both inside and outside of the firewall. Yes, of course, I am talking about (online) communities and community building. But where should I start? There is just so much information and resources available out there, right? Well, how about some Community Management Fundamentals?

I have been involved with online communities and online community building, in general, for over a decade, ever since I first bumped into one of my favourite people, Nancy White, and her gold-mine Web site Full Circle Associates, and from there onwards I entered the world of online facilitation, which is one of my preferred terms when talking about managing online communities, having been involved already with Etienne Wenger‘s coined Communities of Practice, et al, as part of my involvement with traditional Knowledge Management programs, for a while already. Back in the day, of course. The interesting thing is that despite the tumultuous disruption of social networking within the corporate world, there is one trend that not only hasn’t gone dormant, on the contrary, is now buzzing more than ever before: Welcome to the wonderful world of community building!

Yes, indeed, online communities are hot! They have been for a couple of years already. In fact, I would claim they have always been hot; it’s just that for a good number of years they didn’t enjoy the attention, nor the support and sponsorship by the business that a good number of them enjoy today, which has been an interesting trend to watch how they have gone from an scenario where they were clearly the underdogs from every business into the major drivers of attention, sponsorship and leadership they enjoy nowadays from most companies out there. Community managers anyone?

The interesting thing though is that we seem to keep coming back and forth in cycles around the topic of online communities. There are times where the demand for wanting to know more about how they operate, how they are built, facilitated, supported, lead, managed, etc. etc. is just so high that one cannot longer neglect them or divert the conversations elsewhere. Time and time again there is a chance that relatively new online facilitators (Again, my preferred term for community managers) keep asking the same questions that seasoned community builders (Another one of my preferred terms for community leaders) bumped into back in the day, say, 10 to 20 years ago. The good thing about it, and as opposed to say, 10 or 15 years ago, is that nowadays there are plenty of resources, guidance, good practices, know-how, experiences, lessons learned around community building that one perhaps finds it too hard to keep up with. But that’s a good thing, in my opinion. Better to have multiple, valid resources than none of them, or a very limited amount of them, don’t you think? That’s one of the great things that better community tooling, as well as social software tools, have managed to change over the course of time.

One of those fundamental resources on online communities, whether internal or external, is that wonderful peer network of Community Managers and Social Media Practitioners known as The Community Roundtable, whom, over the course of the last couple of years, they have been producing a substantial amount of great content, made available out there, for all online community facilitators to enjoy and reuse. If you would remember, a few months back, over at IBM’s CommunityBuilders community, we had the great pleasure and true honour of having with us both Rachel Happe as well as Jim Storer, co-founders of TheCR, present on the topic “The State of Community Management 2010“. So when I first bumped into “Community Management Fundamentals“, over at Slideshare, a few days back, I just couldn’t help but find the time to put together this blog post and share such a wonderful resource, once again.

“Community Management Fundamentals” is one of those slide decks that people who are new to the art of managing and facilitating online communities would find tremendously helpful and rather insightful! It covers all of the key aspects involved with community facilitation: first, define what is a community, and, most importantly, what it is not! (When you go through the slides you will know what I mean with this one!); then moving into some basic definitions of what a community is and how it behaves organically, how it differs from other online groupings, followed afterwards by a good bunch of slides on how to build healthy, mature, productive and self-sustainable online communities, covering responsibilities, common tasks, traits (i.e. skills and attributes) of what would make a good community facilitator, etc. etc.

An interesting section of the presentation is that one of tackling the various risks of not having community facilitation / management in place, which is quite an interesting set of observations, because in most cases I have always believed that online communities have been there all along, whether more or less visible, whether more or less dormant / active, whether more or less engaged, there is always this tendency from us, social human beings, to gather around and share our knowledge and experiences in groups on a particular topic or common interest. Perhaps what has been missing all along is that business sponsorship and leadership towards those online communities, which is something that has definitely been changing quite drastically over the last couple of years.

However, the rather interesting and very enlightening part of both Megan Smith‘s and Rachel Happe‘s presentation is that section dedicated entirely towards sharing a whole bunch of superb tips on how to build a thriving community, which is really fascinating, because whether you are new to the whole concept of community building or whether you are one of those seasoned online community facilitators, you will always find something new in there that would help you in your day to day job! Just brilliant!

Just as much as concluding the slides by sharing along the Community Maturity Model they have been talking about for a little while now. Worth while a look, if you haven’t seen it just yet. If you are looking for new ideas, I bet that single slide will keep you busy for some time!

Thus, without much further ado, I thought I would leave things as is for today, already piling up a whole bunch of ideas I will be blogging about over the course of time on community building, mainly on experiences I have developed over the course of the years, but, mostly, as well, based on other interesting relevant topics I keep bumping on online facilitation. For now, here is the embedded code of this wonderful resource put together by Rachel and Megan, so you can start playing it right away:

(Oh, by the way, in case you may be wondering … one other rather inspiring and amazing resource available out there for online community facilitators / managers / leaders / community builders is the Twitter hash tag #cmgr, where a whole bunch of folks keep sharing on a daily basis plenty of golden nuggets to keep you busy for a while, including, numerous job offers and vacancies, just in case you are on the move … Highly recommended, to say the least!)

Social Business – Rethinking Innovation, Organization and Leadership

Over the course of the last few weeks I have been engaging on a good number of conversations around the subject of Leadership (Which I am hoping to be talking about plenty more very soon, by the way, once a publication makes it out there in the next couple of weeks…), and how social networking is changing the way we view traditional management / leadership moving along from a command-and-control attitude into one of leaders as servants, which clearly comes to define, in my opinion, the next generation of leaders 2.0 for the 21st century. But, I am sure you may be wondering, what would it look like, right? How do we identify those new, emerging leaders both within the workplace, as well as in our own societies? How do we make them stand out and help them lead us in such a complex, global and diverse environment? What would we have to do to transition successfully into that kind of new leadership? I know, lots of questions, right? Well, here is one potential answer to them all: Social Business – Rethinking Innovation, Organization and Leadership

I can’t get enough of it, I tell you. I *love* it when some of my favourite people bump into those little golden nuggets and precious gems on some really thought-provoking subject(s), specially, related to Social Computing, and they share them across openly to inspire others to get involved in the conversations. Well, I just had one of those moments! Yesterday afternoon, in our microblogging social tools, my good friend and long time KM & Collaboration extraordinaire, Scott J Smith, shared along this absolutely wonderful YouTube 4 minute video clip under the heading “Social Business – Rethinking Innovation, Organization and Leadership“:

And from there onwards, it’s been making the rounds time and time again all over the place. It’s one of those fantastic short video clips that you know you need to bookmark somewhere, as you are bound to make use of it as a superb icebreaker for upcoming workshops or presentations you may be delivering around the subject of social business. The clip itself describes, pretty nicely, the background of the emerging social networking world as part of a larger ecosystem where complexity, globalisation, people movements, the financial crisis, urbanisations, outsourcing, women in the workplace / society, collaborative software, disruptive innovations, etc. etc. are helping provoke the necessary changes of how we conduct business nowadays.

However, traditional management doesn’t seem to be keeping up nicely with those rampant changes we have all gone through over the course of decades. On the contrary, in pretty much all over the corporate world out there, some of our management systems are still very much thinking along the terms of the industrial revolution and not the digital one we have been living over the last decade, for instance. Somehow, it looks like that change is now more necessary than ever. And that’s just exactly the premise behind this very short, but rather inspiring, video clip; here is an excerpt of the description that was put together for it:

“A more open and transparent world challenge us to rethink the way we do business, the way we organize and the way we lead. Globalization, Tranparency, Social Media, Collaborative software – all part of a social revolution that forces companies to engage in Social Business Innovation and Open Business Leadership. What can we learn from LEGO, Google, Starbucks, Proctor & Gamble and Nike?“

If someone would ask me to explain what the Future of the Workplace would be like, my definition would probably come pretty close to some of the main messages you will see permeating throughout the video: openness, transparency, a growing need for CLOs (Chief Listening Officers – Goodness, gotta love that job role!), trust, engagement, work organised around networks and communities versus organisations and traditional hierarchies, social capital as *the* main driver of interactions, etc. etc. In short, a new kind of leadership inspired by social business innovation and driven by those very same knowledge workers who are willing to shape up the next generation of their leaders, the next generation of business.

Like I said, this short YouTube video clip will surely make you think twice about how you view work, how you interact with other knowledge workers, and how social networking, both inside and outside of the firewall, is helping shape up some of those various different interactions, making them clearer, more transparent, more open, more public defining the way we are going to do business from now onwards. The good thing, as the clip shows, is that we won’t have to wait much longer. It’s already there! It’s already happening in multiple places and it’s just a matter for us to decide how we would want to facilitate that change to take place, because whether we like it or not, we are at that point in time, where change is inevitable; so we may as well embrace it and make the most out of it, don’t you think?