Once again, I am on the road on to my next business trip, this time around with two distinctive parts; one of them to Helsinki, Finland, where I will be participating in a number of IBM sponsored events around the Social Enterprise, a really cool, inspiring and rather innovative initiative on “Redefining Work 925” and, believe it or not, Living “A World Without Email” (One of my favourite topics du jour, as you can imagine …) and the other one to Paris, France, where I will be participating, and moderating a couple of panels, at the always engaging, entertaining and rather thought-provoking Enterprise 2.0 Summit, which starts next week on February 7th, and that this year promises to be quite an amazing event! But more on that one later on …

Yet, once again, since connectivity while on the road has got a lot to be desired for, I have picked up the good habit of pruning my RSS feeds (Remember RSS?), spice them up a bit and enjoy offline reading while I’m disconnected. And while I am doing that up in the air, I bumped into this brilliantly provocative blog entry by Tim Elmore on “Confessions of a Ghost Writer … for Students“. Goodness! How low can we, human beings, get? Or, even worse, how can we still allow that to happen?

Indeed, in a rather sharp article Tim comes to question not just the ability of ghost writing for students per se, but the ethics, or, better said, the lack of ethics and morale, in doing so when students are employing those ghost writers to pass on their exams on subjects that may be of interest to them, or not. Showing, at best, how laziness, and perhaps that lack of morale or motivation combined altogether, can certainly damage the true spirit of hard labour (Even on the literal sense of the word!) in delivering something for which one would feel very proud of. At least.

The story of the ghost writer that Tim exemplifies in that article will surely give you chills going through your spine big time, as it highlights all of those traits that a bunch of us have been wanting to wipe out from the corporate world as well for a while now: hypocrisy, lack of ethics and morale, unwillingness to do meaningful work (that’s truly yours, not someone else’s), lack of responsibility and co-ownership, laziness, instant gratification for the sake of it, not the value you may be providing, etc. etc. You know the gist…

What’s really troubling though from the article itself is not what Tim portraits quite clearly of what’s happening out there right at this very minute with students and the work they produce (Or don’t produce, better said), but a rather poignant question that I thought I would include as well over here to see the whole context of where we may be heading:

“What will our world look like if these students become our leaders?“

Whoahh! Sorry, but before we try to venture an answer for that rather provocative question allow me to comment on it for a minute: No, we do NOT want to have those leaders governing in our world. Sorry, that may have worked in the recent past, but as we moved into a (business) world that’s more interconnected, networked, engaged, transparent, public, nimble, collaborative, trustworthy, engaged, committed, authentic, and whatever else you can think of, along those lines, that is, the last thing we need is to have a range of generations who become our leaders by doing something that doesn’t match, really, any of those traits: cheating (due to lack of ethics and morale).

Tim’s article clearly reminds me of a recent internal conversation I had with a bunch of fellow IBMers where we were discussing the concept of ghost writing on blog posts and social networking sites, specially, with senior leaders in mind, as a way to allow them to enter the world of Social slowly, but steadily, helping them adjust to new ways of interacting with the help of others, who may be a bit more versed. Well, now more than ever, and after reading Tim’s piece, I’m not convinced at all that ghost writing, even for executives!, is a good thing!

The Social Enterprise has always demanded authenticity, co-ownership, responsibility, trust, transparency, commitment, engagement, motivation, being the real you, your self, the don’t pretend to be who you are not, etc. etc. Around the world of blogging, I have always found it very difficult to try to justify ghost writing when authenticity and trust kick in, even for senior leaders and that article surely confirms that belief. If you can’t be you, please don’t get someone to be you. No matter how important you are, how busy you may well be, how much of a thought leader you are (and perceived by others), engaging in social networks requires your personal you to do it. Sorry, no ghost writing.

Yes, I can imagine such activity may have worked in the traditional world of communications and marketing, and, to a certain degree, I can agree with doing such activity when you need to deliver a certain corporate message, whatever that may well be, but when it’s just you (your thoughts, your beliefs, your ideas, etc.) what you are delivering we want to hear, read, learn from you, AND interact and engage with you!, no intermediaries, please. We had enough of those in the recent decades and I am starting to think we need to move on from that discourse. To the point where I am more and more convinced by the day that if you can’t engage with your real self in social networking sites, your blog and whatever other means of living social, I think it would be much preferred that you don’t engage at all. We want the authentic you, the trustworthy you; we want to have the certainty that we are talking with the real thing: your own person.

I guess you folks may be thinking that I am a purist and all, and perhaps I am (Don’t think I will have any issues with that notion in this context, to be honest), but read Tim’s article once again, move that context into the corporate world, and try to answer that question again: “What will our world look like if these students become our leaders?” … with that mentality, but, even worse, with that notion of ethics and morale about meaningful work, inspired by their so-called role models that have already starting shaping up that wrong set of core values. Not sure what you would think, but I feel we need to stop it. And very soon, before it is just too late!

How can we possibly justify ghost writing / engaging in social networks today when that lack of authenticity, trust, openness and transparency, amongst others, will clearly not just damage your reputation as a business (Remember businesses are made of people!), but also your engagement with your peers, subordinates, thought leaders, customers and business partners alike?

Is this the new workplace of the future, we have been envisioning over the course of the last few years, that we would want to inspire within our younger generations, as well as our more senior knowledge workers? I surely hope not! There is something very wrong about this out there, in my opinion, and the sooner we all put a stop to it, the better. So next time that you may be thinking about doing ghost writing, or ghost blogging, please do think about it, think of the repercussions, of the implications, of the consequences, of the potential damage you will be creating. And, above all, be transparent and open enough about it and let us know you will be still carrying on with it… so that we can move on in search for those other leaders who want to be their selves inspiring lots of trust, authenticity, transparency, openness, engagement and whatever else, because, somehow, I feel we would ALL be much, much, better off altogether!

Business. Made Social. Earn it!

(Note: You see? This is what happens when you go away on holidays and your team decides to have plenty of good fun without you hehe and they embark on launching our first external blog to talk plenty more about IBM’s internal and external Social Software Adoption Program: BlueIQ, which this year will be making our 5th anniversary… Here is a cross post of my introductory blog entry over there, so you can see what you can expect from it, should you decide to subscribe to it and keep the dialogue going… I will probably be writing one or two articles per week over there, along with the rest of my team, so let the fun begin! … And thanks for reading!)

One of the many things that you realise about, while you are on vacation, and something that over the course of the years you tend to come to terms with is the fact that, while you are away, life goes on, work goes on; with or without you. And that’s just fine! That’s how things go by and probably very little left for us to do on that matter anyway. So, as I am ramping up the last few hours of my holidays, yesterday afternoon I found out, through my colleagues, that, after a long while, our IBM Social Software Internal Adoption Program is now ready to transcend the firewall and go external. And, as such, a couple of days back we have now launched an external blog, called BlueIQ at IBM where, from now onwards, my team, along with myself, will be blogging every so often about IBM’s own adoption of social networking tools, as well as our full transformation, over the course of the years, on becoming a fully Integrated Social Enterprise. Yes!, folks, BlueIQ, finally, goes external!

And as you may have noticed already, a couple of my colleagues (Including our boss) have already been blogging away earlier on this week setting up the stage of the kind of articles you can expect to read, and engage with, hopefully, in our team blog. The vast majority of the topics that we will cover will describe how BlueIQ works, what we do to help accelerate IBM’s own adoption of social technologies, both inside and outside of the firewall, and at the same time you will also find interesting and relevant articles around topics like The Social Enterprise, Social Business, Social Networking, Adoption, Collaboration, Knowledge Sharing, Communities and Community Building, etc. etc. Pretty much along the lines of the kinds of articles I have been sharing myself on my own personal Internet blog as well over the course of time.

The thing is that it’s not the first time that BlueIQ goes out there to the general public. In the past, there have been a good number of resources made available from our team on what we currently do at IBM, whether it’s our public wiki site available here, or the free whitepaper that both Jeanne Murray and Rawn Shah co-published a few months back and which covers our entire methodology on our social software adoption program (What’s worked, what hasn’t, lessons learned, program activities, metrics, etc. etc.), or the several presentations we have done at various conference events where we have been telling the BlueIQ Story.

However, this is the first time that we are working our way through our first public Internet team blog, where we are surely hoping to keep sharing further stories, experiences, know-how, lessons learned, hints and tips, and whatever other anecdotal evidence on what’s worked for us with our own social software adoption program and what’s happening in this very same space out there for other businesses. However, since this is also my first entry over here I thought I would point you folks to perhaps the most comprehensive BlueIQ Story we have got out there at the moment and which would certainly help serve as a good Introduction of who we are and what we are working on…

Yesterday, Rawn Shah, who, by the way, has now moved into another role within IBM as a Social Business Strategist, but you know how it goes, once a BlueIQer, always a BlueIQer tweeted about something that is pretty exciting for all of us at BlueIQ:

made Finalist for @profhamel ‘s Management Info Exchange “Beyond Bureaucracy challenge” @hackmanagement ow.ly/8rAYW

— Rawn Shah (@rawn) January 12, 2012

Indeed, over at “Cutting through BigBlue Tape: Using Collective Passion to Scissor Bureacuracy at IBM“, you will be able to see how our very own “BlueIQ at IBM” program is now one of the finalists on the “Beyond Bureaucracy Challenge” that Gary Hamel is sponsoring. And to say that we are incredibly eager and over-excited about the great news of even just being the final round would probably fall short pretty badly. We don’t know, obviously, who the winner will be, but to us all, on the BlueIQ team as well as our army of volunteers, the BlueIQ Ambassadors community of social software evangelists, it’s already a huge success and something to be very proud of.

But for you folks out there, you may be wondering what it is all about, right? Well, like I said, on that nomination paper that Rawn submitted, you would probably be able to find one of the most comprehensive and thorough descriptions of how, when, why, and for what purpose BlueIQ came into existence nearly 5 years ago to help fellow IBMers accelerate their own adoption of social technologies, both inside and outside of the firewall.

In a recent article I shared over on my Internet blog, I described a little bit IBM’s own journey to become a fully integrated socially enterprise, which would certainly be a rather nice complement to plenty of the historical and anecdotal evidence you would find also on Rawn’s piece of how IBM got started living social in the first place. However, what’s most interesting about that nomination piece is the various different sections that put together a rather nice picture of the kind of work we do and what triggered us to get started in the first place. So, to give you a taster of what you could find in it, allow me to include over here the headings of the various different sections, so you could have a look and read further on about them:

• Summary
• Moonshots
• Context
• Triggers
• Key Innovations & Timeline
• Challenges & Solutions (Which covers “Building an environment that fosters social collaboration”, “Enabling social collaboration skills by tailoring to specific needs”, “Gaining support from executives” and “Developing country-specific focus where needed”)
• Benefits & Metrics (With plenty of anecdotal evidence, and success stories from fellow IBMers who were facing real problems and found real solutions with social technologies)
• Lessons (Which covers “Keep the eye on the prize”, “Teach tasks, not tools, and help people learn socially”, “Engage your peers”, “Showcase executive participation”, “Use a deliberate approach”, “There is no “finish”")
• Credits
• Tags
• Helpful Materials”

Like I said, a rather extensive and pretty comprehensive resource, no doubt, that will surely give you all a pretty good base of what BlueIQ at IBM is and perhaps get also some other ideas you folks may want to give a try for your own internal or external adoption programs, and which we would all be more than happy to help out where we possibly can. Don’t forget to check out the extensive list of Helpful Materials as well, where you can find plenty more details about our overall program.

From here onwards, I would just personally want to thank Rawn very much for the wonderful piece of work done on that nomination piece and for making it into the finalists and I do wish him, and us, I suppose lots of good luck with it, knowing that we are already feeling winners just being on that final round, after checking out some of the amazing initiatives other people have been working on. Exciting times to be working on the Social Business space, for sure, and even more exciting when next week our entire team will be in Orlando, Florida, attending this year’s IBM Lotusphere 2012 event, where we hope to see all of you, face to face, to keep the conversations going about the Social Enterprise and its / our / your own adoption of social technologies.

Oh, and don’t forget we will be posting several articles per week in this blog with the whole purpose of keeping the dialogue going, before, during and after the event, because as Rawn mentioned, “there is no “finish”"

“Innovation never stops, and culture change takes time. Understand that victory is in the daily accumulation of social exchanges, content, and connections that lead to value. Understand that serendipity happens because the seeds of collaboration are sown throughout the organization. And understand that innovation never stops. You are not reaching an end line with social business adoption. Rather, you are creating patterns of behavior for collaborating and connecting that will transcend today’s innovations and position your business and your people for tomorrow.“

And if you would want to meet us up while at Lotusphere next week, to talk about adoption, enablement and share / exchange some further experiences around social technologies, here you have got some contact details from yours truly on where you can find me online, and, with me, the rest of the team as well …

Luis Suarez a.k.a. @elsua
Blog: http://elsua.net
Google Plus Profile

Welcome everyone to BlueIQ at IBM! Glad you could join us on this exciting journey!

As I am about to enjoy my last day on vacation, since tomorrow morning I will be heading over to Orlando, Florida, to embark on the regular yearly pilgrimage trip to attend IBM’s event of events around the world of Collaboration, Knowledge Sharing and the Social Enterprise (Of course, I’m talking about the one and only: Lotusphere 2012), I just couldn’t help putting together this blog post about an article that, when I first bumped into it, I found it incredibly innovative, rather refreshing and very re-energising, but after finishing it up I just thought… “Gosh, that’s a given! Why are we not doing it in today’s corporate world on a wider scale?” … “Give Your Employees Unlimited Vacation Days” may sound all to unrealistic and utopian at best, yet, to me, it’s the ultimate goal for any employer out there around Employee Engagement: Trust your employees to do the right thing!

Indeed, in a rather inspiring and incredibly thought-provoking article, Joe Reynolds (From Red Frog Events) shares the story of how over at his company (Red Frog) they celebrate vacation. They encourage it and they ensure that once work is done and you are covered you are happy to take as many holidays, as an employee, as you would want to. And interestingly enough he comments that this new system has never been abused so far. Surprise, surprise. Well, not really. Why should it?

I mean, last time I brought this subject up, perhaps not over here in this blog, (Although I think I may have hinted it earlier on over at “Reflections from 2011 – Is Employee Engagement Still a Myth?“) but certainly in multiple conversations all over the place, unless you are a rather special business, you have always got a tendency to hire the smartest of talent out there; truly hard working networked professionals who know exactly what’s expected of them and how to excel at their jobs. I know that most of you out there would get a good giggle out of this one, but last time I checked no-one out there is hiring jerks nowadays, and, if you are, you certainly have got a rather problematic issue with your own HR hiring process that needs fixing really soon, that has got nothing to do with social networking tools nor how people use them, by the way. It’s more of a fundamental, organisational issue altogether.

So considering that you have got a whole bunch of hard working networked knowledge workers, why wouldn’t you allow them to take as many holidays as they would want to? It’s not surprising, indeed, that the system won’t be abused, as Joe mentions on that article. On the contrary. If your knowledge workers are truly motivated, and rather passionate, appreciated, recognised and rewarded for their exceedingly good jobs, not only are they going to be willing to take their extended holidays, but there is also a great chance that they would come back to work sooner than expected! That’s what passion does for you. You can’t think any longer whether work is holiday, or whether holiday is work. It’s no longer about striking a good balance between work and life, but more moving things into the next frontier: work life integration.

Yes, that’s right! It’s all about finding that flexibility of doing your job in an effective manner, when you need to do work, and treasuring your personal life when you would need to do so as well. More than anything else because, as Joe mentions, the traditional concept of office work (From 9:00 am to 5:00 pm) is now a thing of the past! Things have moved on and we are at the stage where more and more employers are starting to lower down their own center of gravity, and the power of decision, and leave it down to employees to make the right decisions for the work they are doing. Main reason why? Well, as a starting point, they are beginning to trust their employees much more than whatever else in the past. And this is an important matter, because we are seeing, finally!, that social transformation where knowledge workers are no longer treated like sheep, as in sheeple (and, as such, they no longer behave like sheep either!), and, instead, they are treated as what they are: people with enough motivation and passion for their jobs to want to go the extra mile, if you offer to go the extra mile yourself. So why not offering that opportunity of unlimited vacation days then? It does make plenty of sense, right?

Of course, it does! If not, have a look into the main reasons that Joe mentions why this rather creative initiative is working out really well for them:

• “It treats employees like the adults they are
• It reduces costs by not having to track vacation time
• It shows appreciation
• It’s a great recruitment tool“

Plenty of common sense altogether, no doubt! But perhaps this quote from Joe’s article is much more accurate in describing why such innovative policies will be key, critical, and essential, to attract and retain top talent in a world where we are starting to see plenty of fierce competition on the subject:

“Through building a company on accountability, mutual respect, and teamwork, we’ve seen our unlimited vacation day policy have tremendous results for our employees’ personal development and for productivity“

Both of my good friends Beth Laking and Paul Gillin pretty much nailed it a few days back as well when they tweeted their thoughts about this very same article:

Trust your staff and they will reward you…Give Your Employees Unlimited Vacation Days bit.ly/wSbQN1 @IncMagazine

— Beth Laking (@bethlaking1) January 6, 2012

From Inc.: ‘Give Your Employees Unlimited Vacation Days. It’s true. Ppl take fewer days if you don’t limit them. ow.ly/8o8Rk

— Paul Gillin (@pgillin) January 10, 2012

The rather interesting and exciting thing though is that Red Frog is not the only company doing this. One of my favourite people, and really good friend, the always insightful and rather smart Maggie Fox, has been doing that at Social Media Group for a good couple of years now and has been having tremendous success with this initiative highlighting how it exactly works out for all of them. She wrote about it a while ago under “Why we decided to offer unlimited vacation at Social Media Group” and it’s even more surprising how the only negative reaction towards that initiative is that most people, specially, new hires, don’t believe that there could be such a thing! Goodness! If that’s all, perhaps we also need to start shifting gears ourselves, knowledge workers, thinking that it is also possible working for employers who truly respect and very much appreciate us, employees, to do what we do best, i.e. our jobs, and be rewarded with that much deserved extended holiday break.

After all, it’s thanks to that flexibility, passion, engagement and commitment to our jobs, in keeping excelling at what we are already pretty good at, that clearly demonstrate how not only do we love what we do, but also how we love our lives even more, like Elizabeth Lupfer talked about over at The Social Workplace just recently in a beautiful blog post, which I would highly recommend you go ahead and read through it all, to ponder further and digest on some golden nuggets like this one, which clearly sets the stage of how the corporate world is, finally, starting to come to terms with embracing that new concept of Social Transformation of Your Business – The Workplace of the Future:

“Organizations that create cultures that value balance, and assist employees to achieve life balance will be rewarded with highly engaged employees. Work-life balance does not mean  that employees are not loyal, nor committed to their organizations, it means that employees want to lead whole lives, not lives solely centered on work“

To me, replace “balance” with ”integration” and we are already there! Don’t think about striking a good balance between work and life, because you will never achieve it (Work will always eat that balance up any given time, before you even notice it!), but more a full integration of your personal life into work and work into your personal life. That’s the key, the sweet spot. That’s what really matters.

I just had one of the most amazing holidays I can remember; mostly disconnected, unwinding from everything online, re-charging my batteries fully, getting plenty more energy levels, full again of optimism and outrageousness, and yet, I can’t wait to get back to work tomorrow, on my way to Orlando, Florida, to attend Lotusphere, even if that happens over the weekend… Already looking forward to seeing over there lots of smart friends and customers wanting to Live Social. Do Business.

There used to be a time when I was very much in love with Twitter. It was my favourite social networking tool by far. It was quite an exhilarating experience being constantly exposed to some of the most amazing conversations and informal learning at its best. To me, it was *the* place to provoke plenty of facilitated serendipity to take place and keep in the know with all of that stuff one gets passionate about over the course of time. But then, after a short while, I started hating Twitter. Perhaps a bit too harsh of a word, maybe loathe could do.

Over the course of just a few weeks Twitter managed to destroy, in a very pernicious manner, not only the overall user experience, but the entire ecosystem as well that made it a success in the first place: Third party apps. And it totally hit me when I saw my all time favourite Twitter client (Nambu) disappear into thin air just because of that series of misbehaviours. Fast forward to the end of 2011 and I am back in love with Twitter again, not because of all of the various different new features and capabilities they have been putting together, but because I have finally found The Best Twitter Client On The Net: Janetter.

Yes, that’s right! It surely looks like Twitter continues to be keen on destroying not just the Third Part Apps ecosystem that made it incredibly popular in the first place, but also some of its own desktop clients like Twitter for Mac or TweetDeck, where the latest upgrades have deteriorated the user experience for both of them tremendously altogether! Or so I am told. The thing is though that ever since I started making use of Janetter my overall user experience has seen quite a profound transformation.

It was through my good friend Rachel Happe that I first heard (Of course, on Twitter!) about this very special Twitter client that works both in Windows and on the Mac. She liked the experience and right away I thought about giving it a try myself, after having been actively searching for a good substitute for Nambu throughout all of this time playing with a bunch of other Twitter clients whether on the Mac or on iOS devices. And right off, within the first few hours I knew that Janetter would be my new, much preferred, default Twitter client on the Mac. What a beautiful experience, indeed!

I realise most of you folks would notice how I hardly ever get to talk about (Productivity) Tools and such on this blog, since I have always thought that they usually come and go and it’s very hard to get attached to any of them over the course of time, because you never know when they will go ahead and disappear. But since a bunch of people have been asking me what I like so much about this particular Twitter client why not put together this blog post and share some of the most compelling reasons why I have been enjoying it since day one that I installed it. At the same time, there have been a few other folks who have tried it out themselves, after I mentioned on Twitter myself how much I enjoyed it, and they didn’t like it at all. They actually thought it was a horrendous experience, so perhaps this article would help me share across some of the main reasons why Janetter is, to me, as good as it gets with regards to Twitter clients on whatever the platform. Hopefully, with that input it would give you a pretty good idea on whether you may want to give it a try or not.

So here are some of the most compelling reasons why I heart Janetter as my all time favourite Twitter client, even way above than Nambu, from back in the day:

• Cross-Platform: Indeed, no matter whether you may be using Windows, or Mac, it would work in both just beautifully! Time and time again I kept finding it a challenge recommending a Windows client that would not be TweetDeck, which is, I guess, what most folks tend to use at the moment. And now we have got a pretty good and rather impressive rival: Janetter. (Yes, I do realise there isn’t a version for Linux users at the moment, so those folks may need to continue using whatever tool they may have at the moment)
• Scalability: You could probably say that I’m a power user of Twitter, and perhaps of several other social networking sites, too, and one of my favourite features from Janetter itself is how scalable it is! It’s amazing! I have been using it rather heavily over the course of a few weeks now, with large networks and rather complex searches, and not a single glitch to be observed with the overall performance of the application or the machine altogether, which is not the same I could say about a bunch of other Twitter clients or even other social networking sites’ Apps. That’s a winner for me, specially, if you are a heavy user of Twitter yourself. Worth while a try just for that!
• Reliability: Another one of my favourite features from this Twitter App. Like I said, I use it daily rather heavily and, probably, in the most extreme of circumstances hacking different behaviours and I have yet to see, and experience!, the first crash on the Mac! And that’s been weeks of long and lasting use already! Like I said, not a single one!! Not sure what you would think about it, but that’s what reliability is all about in my books, don’t you think?
• The Look & Feel: This may well just apply to Mac Fanboys, but one of the things you would very much like from this Twitter App is that it behaves and works in pretty much the same way than any other native Mac App, which is a lot to be said for an application that’s developed to work cross-platforms. The time dedicated to make it look and feel like a native Mac App is just priceless. It doesn’t give you the impression, at all!, that you may be using a Windows copy! No way! A big Yes!!
• Customisation: This is an area that I know most folks would not care much about it, but I love it. Being capable of customising my own user experience of what I see and play with is just a tremendous bonus! The wide range of Skins with multiple colours, displays, fonts, etc. etc. and the extensive User Preferences to tame the experience to your own likes and dislikes, needs and requirements surely is quite a treat! And something that you hardly ever see on Twitter Apps at all these days.
• Like TweetDeck: But … without the hassle. That’s pretty much how I basically describe Janetter when people ask me about it. It’s like TweetDeck but without all of those issues that keep crumbling the overall experience of Adobe AIR Apps (I had enough of the Kernel Panics, so I no longer use AIR on my MacBook Air and everything running smooth again!). Any kind of problem or issue you can find in TweetDeck it’s fixed in this Twitter App, for real! Seriously, if you are looking for a pretty impressive alternatively to TweetDeck on the Mac, or on Windows, take it for a spin and see how it would work out for you. I can probably guarantee you won’t be back ever since…
• The Timeline: I guess at some point I should probably go ahead and put together a short screencast of how I use the Twitter Timeline to quickly scan through tweets and pause through those I would really want to digest and muse further about and when to speed up and move on. But if you try out Janetter youself you will see what that experience looks like to me at the moment. As easy as it can get and using something so relatively simple, yet so powerful as keyboard strokes to advance on reading tweets, as well as natural scrolling (Up or down or both!) without seeing the application come to a hault! No matter how fast you go! Just brilliant!

• The Groups: This is probably the one single feature that most folks who use TweetDeck today, or any other Twitter client that allows you to gather twitterers by groups, would enjoy very much and by far! Creating groups in Janetter is just such a breeze! Groups as in Twitter Lists, obviously; if you have created them already, it’s just as simple as displaying them and they will stick around pulling a bunch of initial updates to let you know how things are going, and then move from there. You can mark them all as read, if you would wish to as well, and you can have a whole bunch of columns without a single glitch on the overall performance itself. Very powerful and strongly recommended for power users, for sure! 

• The Mentions: If you have been following me on Twitter for a while, over at @elsua, you would probably know how Twitter Mentions is my most simple, and long standing, grieving of my overall Twitter use. I have been complaining about how poor the accuracy of the Mentions is overall and time and time again we have seen how Twitter itself seems to be not very keen on wanting to address the issues and fix them. Well, no longer needed. Janetter did just that for me, allowing me again to catch up properly with those Mentions by not missing any of them! Pretty consistent and rather reliable! Not sure how they do it, but it just works! And thanks much for that!!
• The Searching Capabilities: Whether you are searching for specific terms, whatever those may well be, even with complex searches, or following a particular hashtag (Like I am about to do with #ls12 and #connect12 when I get back to work – More on that soon!) Janetter’s searching capabilities and real-time searches are just superb! Not matter how busy the Search timeline may well be, it will keep up with it and provide you with all you need. Just like that. No need to figure why this or that search doesn’t work, or why it doesn’t pull off updates. It just does it and beautifully! And in columns, too!! Which means that’s rather easy to keep up with them in a single view without having to go click, click, click.
• Following Conversations in Context: For those of us who have always considered Twitter one of the hottest places out there in the social networking sites realm for holding conversations on a wide range of topics, this Twitter client would be incredibly helpful and very powerful, because as you engage in conversations with other twitterers you would have an opportunity to catch up with them without having to go elsewhere. They are right there, embedded as part of the tweet stream, and in a rather beautiful and elegant manner, which is certainly everything, but disruptive, and that is what it should all be about! No longer will you be missing out on conversations in context while you are tweeting away! Fantastic and very much needed altogether!
• An ecosystem on its own: Where viewing and displaying Twitter related data from other Twitterers, like their profiles, their latest tweets, the following, etc. etc. or the pictures and videos they keep sharing along works like a charm; embedded right there within the same window and with an opportunity of, once again, not having to go anywhere else, which means you can keep tweeting along without having to worry as to which window you were at at that very moment. Love how it takes tweeting in context into a new level altogether!
• Muting Options: Yes, I know, I know, plenty of times I have been enjoying some serious rounds of twitterrhea myself, specially, when I am live tweeting conference events, and time and time again folks keep wondering how to mute me for a (long) while. Well, Janetter offers that opportunity, right there, in the Application itself and with a good number of options. So if you ever need to mute any of your social networks it will do the job just beautifully, which means you can keep your focus where you would want it to be, instead of getting distracted unnecessarily. Priceless, don’t you think?
• Support of Multiple Accounts: Ohhh, and if you have multiple Twitter accounts, this App would help you manage each of them rather elegantly as well. Now, I now longer need to worry about that one myself, but if I were, I would surely make use of it, instead of having to go for more costly options to try to achieve the very same thing. Very nicely done altogether!
• Local Cache: This is perhaps my all time favourite feature from any of the Twitter clients I have used over the course of the years. From what I know it’s not even available for the vast majority of them, but, to me, it’s become an essential key feature I cannot longer live without. We all know that it’s almost impossible to keep up with the Twitter streams, so we eventually get to dive in every so often to see what’s happening. Well, Janetter takes that into a new level. It allows you to cache all of the tweets, so you can catch up with them, if you would want to!, at your own pace and rhythm. If you have got a special group of twitterers that you would always want to read all of their tweets this client would allow you to do that easily!

  I love it particularly when I’m travelling, or away from the computer for an extended period of time, and would come back wanting to learn what’s happened on my Twitter streams and there it goes… all of them (In the hundreds, or the thousands!) available with a single scroll! Yes, I know you are not supposed to read them all, but sometimes, whenever time allows you to, you do, and it’s just such a treat having an App that fully supports it that overtime it’s become the one single main reason why I couldn’t live now without Janetter to keep up with those folks I’m keen on following up with. 

  Really powerful altogether to give you, the end-user, the ability to decide how much you would want to dive into your tweet streams without going crazy, but having a good grasp of what’s happening. Can you imagine Twitter allowing you to do that natively on their Apps or the Web interface? No, indeed, not a single chance! Massive kudos to Janetter in this regard, for sure!!

And, finally, perhaps the one single key favourite feature of them all. After all of what I have mentioned above, all of the reasons, features, capabilities and huge potential it offers to us heavy twitterers, I still find it quite amazing that Janetter is made free, as in FREE!!, for all of us. No doubt, even if they would ask us for money I think it’d be the best money spent on any Twitter client out there by far, I would buy a copy of it in a split second and without thinking too much about it!, but the folks behind it have made it available to us all free of charge, which is just probably as good as it gets!

That’s about it, folks, here you have got in a single blog post the various many reasons why I’m now back in love with Twitter, not because of Twitter itself, or the technology behind it, but because thanks to the absolutely delightful user experience of Janetter I’m capable of doing something that in the last few months I kept struggling with time and time again: following, digesting, and learning plenty more in good context from the tweet streams of my favourite social networks, which, eventually, is the main reason of why Twitter exists for most of us and I am happy to see how this Twitter App is making that possible. At least, for me. Hope for you, too! If you have found this blog entry useful enough to take it for a spin, let me know in the comments what you think and whether it’s helping you transform the way you interact with Twitter, like it has done with me so far and big time …

Ohhh, and in case you may be wondering what would be my favourite iOS clients for both iPad and iPhone, for when I am on the road, away from my MacBook Air, that would be Osfoora HD for the iPad and the native Twitter for iPhone client. But, once again, they are not the same as the real thing, which is why I do seriously hope that some day we would be able to see Janetter entering the iOS world helping us redefine that mobile Twitter user experience once again! I very much look forward to that!

(WARNING: I do realise that I have already included a warning and word of caution throughout this article about the length of it, but I thought I would let folks know as well how if you would just want to check out the yearly progress report you would just need to read the first section and move on to other things. While putting this blog entry together, maybe the longest article I have ever written anywhere, I now realise that the main purpose of why I wrote in its entirety in the first place was more than anything else as an exercise for yours truly to go down the memory lane and see what happened during the course of 2011 in this area. That’s why I’m including this entry as part of the “Reflections from 2011″ series. Please do not feel obliged to read through it all, if you wouldn’t want to. Perhaps the best option would be to read each section every other day. I thought initially about splitting it up in multiple parts, but I wasn’t convinced by the end result, so eventually decided to leave it all as one piece. Hope folks enjoy it just as much as I did putting it together and bringing up some great memories from last year! Yes, after this one I’ll be taking a short break… to give you all a breather … Don’t worry hehe)

It looks like the series of blog posts on the “Reflections from 2011” meme that I have been putting together over here in the last few days keeps moving further along nicely to the next take with an article that I do realise is very much long overdue not just by weeks, but by months altogether! Goodness, if I go back to the last blog entry I published on this very same subject, it was almost a year ago: “A World Without Email – Year 3, Weeks 29 to 51 (The Email Starvation Continues…)“. Yes, indeed, nearly 12 months ago was the last time that I shared over here further insights on how that initiative of mine around living “A World Without Email” was coming along and report on due progress. Yet, for one reason or another, it didn’t happen. I mean, the progress report, because the initiative itself has been working wonderfully all right all along. So I guess it’s probably a good time now to finally provide folks with an opportunity to find out what’s happened in the last year of #lawwe. Are you ready? Let’s go! Let’s do it!

Ok, before I get started with that progress report, a word of caution though, I am actually going to do something different this time around. Not only am I going to provide an account on what’s happened in the last few months of living “A World Without Email“, but also I am going to be sharing a good number of insights on what’s happened around me, out there on the Social Web, and how other folks have been thinking, and taking action, too!, about living their own “worlds without email“. As such, this blog post will be a rather massive one, perhaps the longest I have ever written, so I have decided as well to split it up in sections; that way it would be much easier to consume, but please do allow me to warn you ahead of time that this post will try to summarise nearly one year of what I would call now a world wide trend to continue Thinking Outside the Inbox.

A World Without Email – The Progress Report

To get us started I thought it would be a good entry point to refer folks to the last article I published on this topic over here in this blog, where I covered the latest progress report up to Year 3, Week #51. And what a better way of finishing that year end report than sharing with you all the last week, i.e. week #52, along with the overall yearly report itself. All in a single place so that you can take a look into how things developed further during the course of 2010. I know, a long time ago, but still worth while sharing across before we catch up with 2011′s, don’t you think? Here it goes:

As you would be able to see from the above screen shot, for week #52 I received 14 emails during the course of that week, to make up for a total amount of 929, coming from 1167 in 2009 and 1647 in 2008, as seen in previous reports. And that basically means that I have consistently gone down on the amount of incoming corporate emails year in year out. Starting off in 2008 with an average of 32 emails per week, to 22 emails received per week in 2009, to then, finally, 18 emails received in 2010. I am not sure what you folks would think, but that is not so bad after all considering how when I first got started with this experiment I was receiving between 30 to 40 emails per day, which sounds like a rather substantial reduction over the course of time taking place very steady and at a good pace. I am sure you may be rather intrigued by now about what happened in 2011, and till today, and whether I have been able to keep things going at such rate as well … Or not.

Before we go on to that though I thought I would also share something rather interesting that I have discovered over the course of the years and that’s how the peak days and lowest days of incoming email have been reducing its figures just as much. Going from 63 max. to 3 minimum in 2008 to 44 and 2 in 2010, respectively.

So what happened in 2011 and till last week, since the progress reports are running from February to February every year and I am still a few weeks away from that cut-over date to finish off the progress report for 2011? Not to worry I have got some pretty good news and I can share with you folks some really good statistics as to what’s happened from week #1 to week #47 of Year 4 – 2011 of living “A World Without Email“. Here’s the screen shot of the report so far:

Well, there it is. I am very pleased to let you folks know that, so far, I have received 767 incoming emails for those first 47 weeks of the year. And that, basically, means that in Year 4 of reporting progress the average of corporate email I’m receiving on a weekly basis is now down to 16 emails per week. Yes, indeed, only 16 emails per week! And still going down, judging by what’s happening this week so far with another rather low number. Ohhh, and talking about low numbers, see how the highest peak of incoming email went down from 44 to 30 emails and minimum to just 1. That’s not bad either, since that eventually means I am almost there to enjoy a full week where I won’t receive a single email at my corporate email address. Wooohooo! Yes, almost there!

I am not sure what will happen with the remaining weeks till week #52, but somehow I feel that things will continue to go down consistently, to the point where I may reach well below the #15 emails per week mark that I envisioned a few months back. And that wonderful thought implies just an average of 2.1 emails per day! Double w00t!! Needless to say that I will keep folks updated on how things are moving along, hoping that this time around I am not going to take that long to give you that particular report. Fingers crossed things will go all right and will keep those numbers going down …

Improving the Overall Email User Experience

Ok, time now to move into the second of the upcoming sections I mentioned earlier on I was going to split up this blog post on, to make it somewhat easier to digest overall. I am sure that at this point in time plenty of folks out there are wondering what my thoughts are right now with regards to corporate email and to venture to state whether it’s got its days numbered, or whether we are going to have email lingering around for a long while. Well, 4 years ago if people would have asked me that very same question, I would have probably said that email would be dying a very painful and slow death over the course of time, as the Social Web and Enterprise Social Software tools continue to take by storm the corporate world as the preferred methods for knowledge sharing and collaboration.

Yet, first hand experience, and a few years later, have shown me that we may not be there just yet. Email is not dead right now, and it won’t be for a good number of years. At least, not yet. Like I have been saying in a good number of occasions, there are a couple of incredibly good use cases for corporate email to still survive nice and dandy: 1) Managing Calendaring & Scheduling events and 2) Hosting 1:1 confidential, or rather sensitive, conversations in a private manner. For the rest, there is no reason why we couldn’t have the vast majority of those email driven conversations hosted elsewhere, which is essentially what’s been happening in the last few months.

What we are seeing then is how email is morphing, and moving away, from being the King of Communication and therefore a rather powerless content repository (with a good number of issues I’m sure we are all rather familiar with – i.e. mail jail, finding missing content, losing email archives, mail quotas exceeded, attachments, Reply to All, etc. etc.) into an incredibly powerful social messaging and notification system of content that’s stored elsewhere, i.e. social networking, collaborative and knowledge sharing tools eventually.

What’s rather interesting from this transformation is how, nearly 40 years later, email is just going back to basics, and in full force! And what’s even more exciting is that it’s starting to happen at the right time, for once, because over the course of the last few months we have been exposed to a good number of different relevant reads as to why plenty of knowledge workers keep considering corporate email a time waster, a hindrance of one’s own productivity, or rather costly to the business, not to mention the potential security issues incurred or a rather growing issue of email overload altogether.

But, like I said, and perhaps worth while repeating over here as well, once again, email, per se, as a communication system is not that bad; it’s actually a rather effective tool overall. What’s been happening though all along is how we have consistently abused it ourselves, left and right!, to adjust its way of working to our very own way of working (i.e. secretive, private, opaque, political and power struggles, cover your a**e, proof of work, etc. etc.). So if there is something out there that it’s killing our very own productivity, it’s not email itself, but our abuse of it that’s killing such productivity. Why? Well, because we don’t know how to properly make use of it. Hold on, let me correct that, yes, we do know how to properly use it, it’s just that we don’t do it any longer, because we have grown rather comfortable living with the current status-quo it provides: a corporate weapon for delegating work on to someone else, just as much as that full inbox of to-dos from people’s work and no longer your own. So perhaps we do deserve that misuse of email, since we don’t seem to want to break the chain and starting using email smarter, not necessarily harder.

The good thing is though that we are making progress. We have finally understood and came to terms with the fact that we could no longer sustain that method of working in an environment where we now know there are much much better collaborative and knowledge sharing tools out there with social software. We are finally embracing that notion that we need to smarten up in our very own use of email, even if that implies playing games, and start considering how email is no longer the king and master of the corporate world, but just another useful tool for certain types of interactions where it is rather suited for the job.

That’s why over the course of the last few months we have seen a rather large, and growing number, of really interesting, relevant and worth while reading articles that can certainly help folks tame the email beast even more, so that we can fine tune not only the amount of time that we spend processing our daily work email, but also how we can find that sweet spot that email needs to land on in that complex collaborative environment with the emergence and adoption of social tools within the corporate environment. So plenty of the links I am referencing in this particular section of this article deal exclusively with various different hints & tips, productivity hacks, tools to use where appropriate, new intriguing and relevant initiatives and so forth. Yes, as you will be able to see, there is something out there for almost everyone and the least I could do is to share along those links that I know I, too, would have found rather useful if I were still relying somewhat heavily on corporate email. Hope folks enjoy them, too!

Research on Redefining Email AND Our Use

But it doesn’t end up there just sharing those good practices, productivity tips and whatever other hacks on making the most out of email. Over the course of the last few months we have witnessed how something is happening with email. After several decades of very little research on our user patterns, as well as some more research on redefining how we could best improve the overall email experience, we are starting to see various different studies, initiatives and some additional piece of research that are starting to gather around some pretty interesting data and key findings that I am sure over the course of the next few weeks, perhaps months, we are going to see how not only are they going to shape up our very own use of email, but also the various different email systems that we are currently using at the moment, and which, you would all agree with me, we could do plenty more innovation on that space alone!

I know how at this point in time you may be wondering whether I would believe, or not, if email could turn all around and become a whole lot more social. Well, I’m going to reserve the answer to that question for a little bit later on in this article, but I can certainly anticipate that Yes! we will, finally, see that full transformation from email into social email, although I can tell you, right now!, how we are no longer going to call it email, but something different… Keep reading till we reach that final conclusion on what it would be like …

The Naysayers & Denialists

Back in February 2008, and throughout the whole year, since I started this initiative on living “A World Without Email“, it never ceased to amaze me how very little email was questioned about whether it was still the king of corporate communication and collaboration. Or not. It was a given. No-one even dared to bring that up as a topic, and if you would do that people would think you would be crazy! (Like I was told several times …). How could we survive within the corporate environment not using work email to stay in touch, to keep in the know, to communicate, collaborate and share our knowledge across, store our very own content, etc. etc? How could we do things without email? That must not be possible! It cannot be. There cannot be any other way out there, for sure!, I was told time and time again … And fast forward 3 years, into 2011, and the number of articles, blog posts and whatever other publications trying to defend email from not falling off its corporate pedestal has been quite an amazing experience watching it through all along!

Notice how I am putting together this section over here, on purpose, before anything that will come later on to provide that counterpoint, but I have always thought that if you feel threatened enough to write about advocating for something else that is coming your way in full force, it’s probably because there may well be a few good reasons for you to worry, or, at least, to start thinking about it. You know how it goes, right? Where there is plenty of smoke out there, there’s gotta be fire somewhere! And that’s exactly what has happened during the course of 2011 at such a rampant pace that it’s been rather difficult, and quite tough, just to keep up with those writings from various publications, blog posts, industry analysts, power users, corporate thought leaders and a rather long etc., advocating for how essential and critical email continues to be within the corporate world and how we are going to have it for plenty more decades! Regardless of the huge, and rather disruptive, impact from corporate social networking. Goodness, like I said, where there’s smoke … Otherwise why would you feel threatened for that change in the first place and feel you need to defend the indefensible? Plenty of food for thought right there, don’t you think?

To The Crazy Ones, The Misfits, The Rebels, The Trouble-Makers … The Brave Ones

Yet we all know that “Email is where knowledge goes to die“. By the way, that quote I have borrowed for over the course of the last couple of years is not mine, contrary to a few people’s tweets I have bumped into over the course of time, but from Bill French himself, who coined it a whopping 13 years ago, back in 1999, and still is as relevant as ever. So during the course of 2011 we have seen how I am no longer alone on this crazy endeavour of wanting to ditch corporate email for good, at least, for the vast majority of internal, behind the firewall, interactions and instead make a progression, or a transition rather, towards embracing and making the most out of Enterprise Social Software tools. No, once again, I am not saying that we should be kissing good-bye to work email altogether, since I still see a couple of good use cases for it, but I am really glad that a good amount of folks are starting to see the light acknowledging that, certainly, there are better tools out there that help knowledge workers become more effective and efficient at what they already do with regards to being in the know, collaborating, sharing their knowledge across and helping their organisations understand new key concepts like openness, publicy or transparency, amongst several others like being more networked, interconnected, nimble, trustworthy, committed or even more motivated towards wanting to participate further out in the open in (knowledge) communities to keep up with the learning curve(s) and what’s happening around them. Regardless of whatever those may well be eventually.

So this section is dedicated to what I would call from now onwards, The Brave Ones. Those folks who, over the course of 2011, have been capable of challenging the status-quo of corporate email to the point where they have been rather successful in their efforts of starting to move away, rather progressively, from email itself and, instead, move to more powerful collaborative and knowledge sharing tools. This section is dedicated to those Brave Ones who make me feel right back at home, because I no longer feel like a weirdo within the corporate world trying to abandon what I feel is no longer a productive tool. They are the ones who keep inspiring me to push the limits on to the next level, even after 4 years of living “A World Without Email”. They are the ones who are, rather strongly, showing the way of how it is possible to live a work life, after all, without email as the main ruling tool available to them.

But who are those Brave Ones, you may be wondering, right? Well, here are a few of them and some of their rather interesting, thought-provoking and inspiring writings they have put together over the course of the last few months and still going strong!

Starting with “We Quit Email“; a rather fascinating initiative launched by Kim Spinder in The Netherlands and which is getting some lovely traction with plenty of advocates who have started their journey to move away from work email and who are making some really good progress altogether. Check out their Facebook Page for more details on how they are getting along and how you, too, could join them! We have also seen how some large cloud email providers like Cisco are moving away from providing that online service any longer and I would venture to state that we all probably know why that is happening…

Then we have got my good friend Prof. Paul Jones, at UNC-Chapel Hill; one of the smartest people I know in the Academia world, and in general, for sure, and whom I continue to have the great pleasure of interacting extensively over the course of months during 2011 through various social networking sites sharing plenty of really good insights about his bold move of giving up on work email and instead making use of social tools. Now, one of the reasons why I have enjoyed the vast majority of those interactions is because Paul has taken the opportunity to blog extensively about what’s meant for him to ditch work email and, instead, rely more on social networking tools to connect, reach out and collaborate with his peers and students. And he has been getting lots of great press altogether over the course of time, too! Amazingly inspiring stories that you folks can follow up on, and I strongly suggest you do!, throughout the various links I have been putting together over here, just to give you a glimpse of how he has been doing and how he, too!, has proved, and rather extensively, how you can live “A World Without Email” even in the Academia world, perhaps one of the most traditional environments where you could say email rules just as much as in the corporate world. Time and time again he has proved that it is possible to make it happen and perhaps a good introduction to find out more about how he does it is this wonderful Prezi presentation that he put together not long ago where he talks extensively about it, and, most importantly, what it’s meant for him and for those around him. Strongly recommended read, for sure!

Of course, we have got a few more examples of those “Brave Ones“; Geoff Kim would be another one of them. Check out this blog post where he announced a while ago that he, too, would be moving off away from work email and still going strong at it, judging from his Twitter bio. MG Siegler (@parislemon) has been sharing plenty of interesting thoughts about his recent move of giving up on work email as well, and has been getting some rather interesting follow-up conversations as a result of it. We have also seen how incredibly talented and smart folks like Chris Anderson are finding it rather cumbersome and challenging to deal with email altogether, so he, too, decided to challenge its status-quo introducing the Email Charter, a rather interesting initiative, for those folks still relying quite heavily on email, as their preferred method of communication and collaboration, to save their own inboxes, and which over the course of time got a whole bunch of relevant press and follow-up and which perhaps I will discuss some more about it on a separate blog post in its due time. But surely worth while checking out, no doubt! Specially, if you are still planning to continue making use of email …

And we have got more “Brave Ones” out there, folks! You see? This is exactly what I meant when I stated above that it’s a really really nice feeling when you are no longer alone doing something and people start joining you on their efforts on an initiative that they, too, feel is worth while pursuing further along, just because they would want to improve things on how we connect, communicate and collaborate onwards. And if there is someone out there who has made quite a difference as well with regards to this whole initiative of abandoning email that would be my good friend Paul Lancaster, over in the UK, who, back then, had the absolutely brilliant and unique idea of have a “No Email Day” on a date rather difficult to forget: 11th of November 2011 (In short, 11/11/11).

The initiative was rather simple and easy to follow: not to send a single email for an entire day on 11/11/11 and see whether folks would succeed, or not, and then share further insights about it on what the experience was like. He put together a rather fascinating “No Email Day” Manifesto over at Slideshare that you folks can still go out there and read further on. It’s a highly recommended read that surely captures the spirit of this No Email Day initiative with lots of really interesting and relevant points as to why email is no longer the kind of communication and collaboration, amongst several other types of interactions. He also published a Twitter report with the outcomes of the initiative that’s worth while skimming through to find plenty of really worth while digesting reads on how other folks across the globe joined the movement and enjoyed a email-less day at work. Fascinating to say the least!

The whole idea got plenty of attention and traction on both the social networking world, as well as traditional news mainstream resources. And Paul is already buzzing around on to the next thing! As he recently announced over on Twitter:

Ok, here we go. We’re officially declaring 12/12/12 as #noemailday No.2. Just under 12 months to take (back) control of your Inbox!

— NO EMAIL DAY (@NoEmailDayHQ) December 30, 2011

Yes, indeed! Mark your calendars, folks, for December 12th 2012 (12/12/12, for short), because we will be having the second “No Email Day” in a row and that, basically, means that we have got less than 12 months to take back control of our inboxes and start thinking outside the inbox a bit more! Oh, boy, I just can’t wait for that date to come along! Ohhh, and I am sure you may be wondering what my 11/11/11 was like, right, as an experiment. Well, of course, I didn’t send a single email; in fact, I haven’t sent emails in a long while! But it looks like folks around me were not very successful about it because I got one of the highest incoming numbers of email for the entire month!! Ironic, to be honest! But plenty of work ahead still if I would want to revert that trend for 12/12/12… And I am ready for the challenge! Will you be joining us as well?!?! We surely hope so!

So far this section has been about “The Brave Ones”, as people, as knowledge workers out there who have successfully challenged that status-quo that email has been providing for most of us within the corporate world for a good number of decades, but the really exciting thing from 2011 and with which I would want to close off this section is the fact that not only knowledge workers, but also different businesses and organisations are starting to consider, slowly, but rather steadily and progressively, and to a certain degree perhaps a bit too aggressive as well, transitioning away from corporate email into social networking tools, specially, for internal, behind the firewall conversations happening amongst employees.

Thus over the course of last year we have seen how companies like Intel, Deloitte, Lanvin, Klick, Notebooks & Gottabemobile, Nozbe or even Volkswagen (with a rather good press coverage as well altogether, by the way) have already started to make their move into a corporate environment where email is no longer as relevant as it used to be, or come to the point where it is no longer in use for internal interactions like for Klick, Notebooks & Gottabemobile, as well as Nozbe. Whoaaahhh! Who would have thought about that, right? They are surely leading the way, but if there is one other company out there that has been both the traditional media and social media darling with regards to their quest of ditching corporate email for its entirety over the course of three years that would be the French IT firm Atos Origin who earlier on this year made a very clear statement, a new mission, a new goal altogether: stop using email for internal interactions in three years.

At the beginning of the year, around February 2011, we saw the first announcement from Atos’ CEO Thierry Breton, explaining and sharing further details, about what their company will be doing in the next 3 years to ditch corporate email. Slowly, but steadily, move away from it, specially, for internal collaboration amongst employees and, instead, rely on both social networking and real-time collaborative tools, like blogs, wikis, microblogs, instant messaging, emeetings, etc. etc. in order to slow down, quite drastically, their reliance on email as a productivity tool to get the job done, because it was no longer happening and people were spending far too much time just processing those emails. It was no longer effective enough.

Needless to say that such a bold move provoked an unprecedented amount of very vibrant reactions of all sorts (Positive and negative), across multiple publications, newspapers, radio shows and caused quite a stir within the social networking realm, specially, since it was coming from such a large IT firm, with a top down corporate mandate inspired by Thierry himself, and which a good number of folks had plenty of concerns that it would eventually work out as announced. But they kept going and a few months later they came back for more! And if initially the whole announcement caused quite a commotion all over the place, their follow-up even more! Why? Well, because they were starting to prove they were walking the talk and got embarked on gradually moving away from corporate email and successfully continue to make use of social tools. Of course, there were a whole bunch of rather interesting follow-up conversations, blog posts, articles and whatever else with people starting to take sides. Those who feel they won’t make it, because email will always be there, and those of us who feel they would eventually be making it across because it’s all not just about abandoning email but inspiring an entirely new corporate culture where openness, trust, publicy, transparency and connectedness will rule instead.

Yes, indeed, I believe they won’t be capable of ditching corporate email on its entirety for 100% of the internal interactions, but if they succeed with going all the way up to 99%, or 95%, or even 98%, which is what I am currently living myself, it should still be considered a huge success and another leading model to follow. You may be wondering why I am changing my perception and opinion from a recent article I published on the NYTimes where I stated how even then I would still envision a couple of use cases for email, as mentioned above on this article, but then while reflecting further along on it, if we take corporate mandates as what they are, game changers, and if we give them enough time to make it happen (3 years) and help knowledge workers to adjust properly to new ways of thinking and working, there is no reason why it wouldn’t be taking place altogether! And that’s why I am very excited to keep learning more about the progress they are making, because 18 months down the line, the news we are getting as a result of that blunt move, are very very encouraging altogether. Can you imagine if they eventually manage to pull it off?!?! What will be our excuse not to follow suit? … Plenty of food for thought in that regard, I would think … Specially, as bold moves like that one help redefine the corporate world of the 21st century. Something that you would agree with me is rather needed at the moment …

Musings About (Our Use And Abuse Of) Email

We are now approaching the end of this rather long blog entry. I do appreciate the continued patience and interest in reading this far, and I thought I would start working my way to the conclusion by sharing with you folks a good bunch of rather amusing, and equally inspiring, funny at times, too!, links to blog posts, tweets, Web sites that have been musing extensively about the whole topic of email and how it’s been dominating the way we collaborate, communicate and share knowledge across the corporate world. So we have seen Dilbert at its best, or xkcd (Twice!) bringing up a touch of hilariousness to the whole mess email has provoked over the course of time. The Oatmeal has done a pretty good job at it, too!, with some funnies that I am sure we could all relate to. We have been exposed to some brilliant email closing lines, rather clever Out Of Office messages, comics, other interesting initiatives and lots and lots of witty remarks of the pros and cons of work email. And I am sure you would all have plenty more favourites out there… Care to share them along as comments to this blog entry? Would love to read them as a lovely trip down the memory lane for what we experienced during the course of 2011 and perhaps still into 2012! Don’t be shy… Share away!!

Perhaps my old time favourite musing about this whole thing about email though is the absolutely hilarious blog post that my good friend, Dan Pontefract, put together earlier on in the year under the suggestive title “Email, A Love Story“. I would strongly encourage you all to go and read it if you would want to laugh really hard and fall off your chair! But please try to avoid having a drink while in front of the computer, because otherwise it will get messy and we certainly wouldn’t want that! But I can tell you, it won’t leave you indifferent! Thanks much, Dan, for the link love, too! (Pun intended!)

Towards A Social Messaging and Notification System

Almost there, folks! Almost done with perhaps the longest blog post I have ever written in my entire 9 years of blogging. Goodness! Who would have thought about that as I was getting started with the few paragraphs a while ago? Phew! Hang in there for a little longer! So, after having put together that particular yearly progress report on living “A World Without Email“, you may be wondering whether do I see email myself in the next few years, right? Well, back in February 2008 I would have probably told you that email would no longer exist within the following 5 to 7 years. But then again, like I have mentioned above already, first hand experience and lots and lots of conversations with hundreds, if no thousands of people sharing and exchanging insights on this subject, have taught that perhaps we are not going to see email go away in its entirety any time soon! We are certainly going to have it, but perhaps in a different shape and form. It’s not going to be like regular post, or telegrams, or even faxes, where we hardly use them anymore. All of those “systems” failed to reinvent themselves successfully and accommodate into a new space where they would fit in with a large complex environment of communication systems. That’s probably why we hardly use them anymore. Yet, they are still very much there!

However, email is not going to suffer from that same fate. For the first time in decades, email is starting to feel threaten by that complex collaborative, knowledge sharing and social networking environment and, as such, it’s starting to help re-define itself into the next wave of email. Funny enough, Google Wave was a pretty good representation from that re-encarnation, but it’s probably too bad that it never delivered, for whatever the reason. Perhaps one day I will share my ¢2 on why I feel it failed eventually, when I thought it was the closest we have probably ever had to move away effectively from email altogether!

Anyway, what I am trying to say over here is that I feel that email will successfully reinvent itself before we ditch it completely within the corporate world. It’s morphing already. If you look into what a good number of email system vendors are doing at the moment, they are not sitting back waiting for it to die. They, too, see the need to reinvent what they have been providing for a good number of years. It’s a big, fat cash cow that no-one wants to see going away far too soon. And that’s probably why we are seeing lots of interesting articles and publications that are covering its evolution into what may become over the course of time, making that massive transition from what I call a pure content repository tool, to a social messaging and notification system of content that’s stored elsewhere, which is just too funny, and perhaps ironic, too!, because that was exactly the main purpose behind email when it was first invented over 40 years ago! What comes around, goes around, I guess …

Living A World Without Email – The Documentary

Well, I suppose we would have to wait and watch attentively to see what happens eventually and see whether email will finally reinvent itself, or not, into accommodating a new set of needs where it would need to find its sweet spot and consider itself part of a bundle, a set of options, in a new, much more complex collaborative environment, where social collaboration consoles will rule; where it’s just one more of the mix, one more of the potential solutions for very specific use cases and from there onwards we would have to watch and see how it will decide to blend in. Because whether it would like it or not, if it doesn’t, I can surely guarantee you it would have its days numbered within the next year or two! Yes, that soon! Remember, the social transformation is already happening and email has got two choices at the moment: 1) Join the party and jump into the bandwagon and continue to live on merging into the new space filling in the gaps of what social tools don’t provide just yet (Standards, universal access, as good starting points!) & 2) Move on to die a rather slow, but painful death where hardly anyone will use it any more, like we are doing with faxes, telegrams, or postal letters nowadays (How many Christmas Cards did you send again this year, by the way? To me, the star, by far, of these Festive Holidays was something I was totally not expecting at all: WhatsApp. See what I mean?).

Thus where does that leave me then? That optimist, outrageous, heretic, free radical, potential trouble-maker, a true rebel at work, basically, who back in February 2008 decided to challenge the status-quo of the corporate world and undermine it big time by Living “A World Without Email” ever since. And not looking back! What happened to me during 2011 then? How did things go eventually for yours truly as I keep reflecting on everything I have been involved, or exposed to or immersed in? There are probably lots of different things that I could say to describe it, but I guess the one that would come the closest to accurate state what it was like was probably using the analogy of riding a roller-coaster non-stop! What an exhilarating, exciting, mind-blowing, rather hectic journey altogether! Being featured on a German IT Magazine as Menschen 2.0 is not such a bad thing to finish off the year, don’t you think? Well, there is more!

A whole bunch of good and very dear friends have helped me, over the course of months, spread the message about Thinking Outside the Inbox and start working your own magic to detox yourself from your email diet once and for all. They have also been rather instrumental in helping understand the new kind of leadership that’s emerging with social networking, the Future of Collaborative Enterprise and its rather complex environment and how we all start to fit in together in such ever changing landscape of Social Business. And for all of that, and so much more!!, I will always be ever so thankful! Without their unconditional support, their insights and extended views they have always been very willing to exchange with yours truly to keep learning more about this subject and all things social in general, without their true admiration which has always been mutual, helping out and rather often going the extra mile, #lawwe would have never happened.

So to all of you, you know who you are!, who have been sticking around through thick and thin over the course of the year(s) and, specially, in helping get the word out on “A World Without Email”, I would like to take this opportunity to thank you all for quite an amazing experience and a large token of gratitude for walking along with me on this rather exciting journey. It surely has been a blast and I am so looking forward to plenty more in 2012!

But before I would let you all go away and take a good rest from having read through this blog post on its entirety, which I do really appreciate, I would love to conclude this article, this yearly progress report, with what perhaps has been the most amazing experience for yours truly throughout 2011 and in this whole space of “A World Without Email”. No, it wasn’t just the couple of times I have participated in podcasting episodes from The Taking Notes Podcast, or This Week in Lotus podcast or from the delightful CBC Podcasting series (Or being featured on another BBC podcast or The Sunday Times as well, thanks to Paul Lancaster). It wasn’t just being a speaker at various different conference events where I talked about this very same subject, amongst several others related to all things Social, including The Social Enterprise theme, with perhaps #JamCamp being one of the most inspiring altogether!, or being featured in a recent NYTimes article over at Room For Debate with a bunch of really smart folks, under the title “Should Workplaces Curtail E-Mail?” and which Prof. Paul Jones captured its true essence beautifully on this blog post.

No, it wasn’t all of that, which I know would be more than enough on its own! (Phew!), and something that I would always be rather grateful for to even not forget about it. It was actually having that unique and once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to shoot a short documentary that my fellow colleagues from IBM Benelux decided to offer me, along with the fine folks from Ogilvy, as part of a Social Business campaign (#outsidetheinbox) that launched towards the end of last year and which, over the course of 4 minutes, describes pretty much who I am, what I do for a living, where I live, and, most importantly, how I continue to live day in day out a true life on “A World Without Email”. I am not sure whether you may have seen the video documentary already, or not, but, just in case, here is the embedded code of the clip (There are other versions of the documentary with subtitles in English, French) that has been making the rounds quite a bit over the course of the last few weeks and still going … so that you can watch it through…

Yes, that pretty much describes who I am, who @elsua is, what he does, what he believes in truly, and what he has been trying to do over the course of the last few years and which right now seeing how 2012 is presenting itself would, finally, become a global trend to follow. And, of course, I will be more than happy to keep up with these posts of progress reports, so that folks out there would be able to find out some more on how things are going. But for now, for me, that concludes this massive yearly progress report “A World Without Email“. I would want to take this opportunity to thank everyone who has managed to read it through in one single go. Hope it’s proved useful to you, just as much as it has for me as a remembering exercise of what’s happened in the last twelve months in this space… Stay tuned for more! And keep living those worlds without email!!

PS. Ohhh, before I let you all go now, for real, I promise, let me finish off this rather long and extensive entry with one of the experiences I’m the most excited about for 2012 and beyond (Probably for the next 100 years!). An experience that has totally made my 10 years of working as a social computing evangelist at IBM very much worth it all along! Earlier on this week, I got a bit too emotional and a bit too over-excited, when, while I am still on holidays, one of my colleagues, and good friends at IBM, sent me a quick message through Words With Friends sharing along how our new CEO, Ginni Rometty, put together the first blog post ever (In a community space above all that everyone is welcome to join!!) from any IBM CEO in our internal IBM Connections deployment with a short 3.30 minutes long video clip, with full text transcript and English subtitles as well, to greet all IBMers in the new year in her new role. And the most amazing thing is that, as Bob McMillan reported earlier on over at Wired, she did that without broadcasting it out there sending a single email altogether! Just put it out there and wait … Within a matter of hours it went viral throughout our Social Intranet to the point where it’s now the single blog post with the highest number of page views, comments and ratings altogether! Some whopping statistics for those folks who may be interested: 127k page views, over 560 comments and 108 ratings in just 3 days and counting! Bob is also commenting how she is not out there just yet on the Social Web, and he brings up a very good point, but, to be honest, she is already microblogging internally with a superb outreach and noticing how she has also got a Twitter ID I wouldn’t be surprise she will jump outside, too, soon enough! I guess my job is now done and complete. Probably a good time to start thinking about moving on to other things … If she has managed to make the time to write that blog post, put together the video clip and share it along, as our new CEO in a rather exciting and challenging new year, what’s our excuse? Or, even better, what’s your excuse? Live Social. Do Business.

Happy Epiphany everyone!

Continuing further along with another blog post from the series of articles on “Reflections from 2011“, I thought I would go ahead and spend a few minutes today musing about what I still think was one of the main key terms, within the Social Enterprise space, that most of us got exposed to, and talked extensively through a good number of rather interesting and enlightening articles and publications throughout last year and that I feel would continue to come along rather strongly during the course of 2012 as well. Probably, because we are not done with it yet, but, most possibly, because we need to shift gears with it. Why? Well, so far, we haven’t done good enough with it, despite the various claims we may have been exposed to over the course of time, and we are running out of time and pretty quick! Of course, I’m talking about Employee Engagement or, in other words, how do you keep your employees motivated to excel at what they already do, driven by their distinctive passions, purpose and meaning?

You may be wondering why I mentioned above that we are running out of time on this critical concept of Employee Engagement, right? Well, let’s see it with a couple of good examples. How about this recent, rather worrying, study on how “A Third Of Employees Are Ready To Quit” or how a good percentage of today’s workforce continues to feel more disengaged with what they do than ever before, as they no longer feel the passion for their work nor their job(s)? Or how another study finds out how “One Third of Employers Have Disciplined Employees Using Social Media“? Or take this other, even more interesting and intriguing, study, where it’s demonstrated how more and more employers are no longer trusting their employees to do their work. Or, another one where work inequalities are reaching alarming levels close to disengage them for good and with no point of return. Yes, the examples keep piling on and on and on and I am sure you folks have got your favourites out there as well.

The reality is that Employee Engagement still remains a critical success factor for most employers and large corporations, and small businesses, too!, and we are running out of time because we are not doing a very good job at it at all. Quite the opposite. Yes, I know, we have seen, or been exposed, to a good number of really good articles that talk extensively about how to keep your employees, i.e. your knowledge workers, motivated to do their best and keep growing further in their career aspirations, contributions, purpose, meaning, etc. etc. without losing track of the business revenues, which is what most corporations care about nowadays anyway (Always have, I am afraid!). Yet, we keep failing drastically, and rather miserably, in achieving that long term goal of keeping employees motivated and all of that due to a very simple reason that most organisations seem to keep ignoring or neglecting big time: we consistently don’t ask them what they really want!

Indeed, that simple! Employee Engagement has always been a concept driven top down by corporations and their executives, who keep wondering how do they keep their employees motivated to go the extra mile without asking for much in return. What can they do to entice their knowledge workers to keep thriving and shining at what they already do well, which eventually is going to provide more business revenue, better customer satisfaction by delighting their clients and, hopefully, happier employees, without having to spend perhaps too much cash on rewards, incentives or whatever else so that it doesn’t go out of proportion. See? That’s exactly the problem! That kind of mentality where we are inspiring our knowledge workforce to compete against each other for those rewards, for those incentives, as individuals, as treasure hunters, where you try to do your outmost just to stay on top, annihilating everyone else around you. It’s part of that legacy corporate culture we have inherited from the 20th century and which we don’t seem to be too keen on getting rid of it, probably because it perhaps keeps nurturing the main corporate system that feeds it rather nicely backwards as well: money, greed and power.

I mean, can you imagine an entire workforce earning just as much as the CEO and his / her corporate executives? Or having that same amount of power at the same time as a group, network, community, where traditional management is no longer the one ruling but instead a new kind of leadership would be required? Obviously, not! Which corporation could sustain that? The reality though is that mentality is what’s keeping us away from “Designing a beautiful business“, as my good friend, Esko Kilpi, put together on a superb blog post just recently that I strongly encourage you all to go ahead and read further on what it would entail to reach that mantra of a beautiful business that he envisions amazingly accurate, and very nicely done!, and not too far away from today’s corporate environment. At least, for some businesses out there.

Another interesting read to provoke that shift away from that industrial model of recognising your employees with that individual competitive environment of cash, and whatever other tangible incentives, and move into a much more accurate, relevant, pertinent, purposeful and perhaps very much needed networked, interconnected and community-driven approach would be the excellent article “The Philosophy of Motivation” put together by Greg Satell where you will be able to find precious little golden nuggets like this one very relevant to the whole conversation of how to approach it when wanting to keep your knowledge workers motivated:

“[...] treating people with dignity means treating them as ends in themselves, rather than as simply means. [...] motivation is much more about intrinsic rewards than extrinsic rewards. Motivated people join an organization in good faith and expect to find meaning in their work, instead they get an incentive program. No wonder they get discouraged“

Greg’s description of the shift from the industrial age to the passion economy is just brilliant, too!, with magical quotes like this one: “In the industrial age, value was created by harnessing energy. In the passion economy, value is created through superior design“. Like I said, a highly recommended read to help differentiate what’s at stake over here.

The challenge is out there for everyone though. As we move into another exciting and rather thrilling new year, it would be the perfect time to shift gears and start thinking about “Employee Engagement” not just from the top down in any and every organisation, but also from the bottom up! The good thing is that we are not alone! We don’t have to reinvent the wheel and wonder how we are going to get things started and make that shift happen. We are not starting from scratch and it would be silly to fool ourselves, if we believe it’s a whole lot harder than what it actually is. As a good starting point, we need to lower down the center of gravity and the decision power, starting by trusting more our very own employees, so that we get to find out what they really think; continuing further by discovering together different ways to keep rockstar employees happy, because whether we like it or not, they are the major driving force that gets everyone else excited wanting to jump into the bandwagon by following their true passion, which is the work they are already doing and excelling at!

I strongly believe that, at the end of the day, we would ALL be rather amazed and very pleasantly surprised to find out from those employees that, for them, it’s not all about the money, or the salary raises or whatever other cash, hard incentives. It’s a whole lot more than just that! We are talking about people in here, and as people do business with other people, there is a great chance that it will all be about fostering the right working environment where people are, AND feel, treated like people. Just what they are. An end in themselves, as Greg put it beautifully in an earlier article I mentioned above.

It’s all about finding ways to motivate your knowledge workforce to finally help you understand fully that this is all way beyond just thinking that money will do. Don’t take me wrong, money is good! It pays your bills and gives you an opportunity to enjoy a fulfilling life, but there is more to it. In fact, a whole lot more to it. And, like I said, we won’t need to start from scratch. In fact, there has been plenty of rather fascinating and thought-provoking research in this area, like Jack Wiley, executive director of the Kenexa High Performance Institute, recently wrote over at “Give employees what they really want” and where he talks about R.E.S.P.E.C.T., i.e. the main topics to cover, as an organisation, to keep your employees motivated and bring in Employee Engagement into the 21st century modus operandi of the new workplace, away from the industrial era:

• Recognition
• Exciting work
• Security of employment
• Pay
• Education and career growth
• Conditions
• Truth

Please do go ahead and read further on Jack’s insights for each and everyone of those items to see what lies ahead. Certainly, a good challenge for all of us, as I have mentioned above. It’s not going to be easy either, for sure. But no-one said it would be. It’s actually what’s at stake for all of us who would want to design those beautiful businesses that Esko mentioned over in his blog post. That’s what makes it the most exciting of challenges. It’s one we can all contribute and make it happen eventually. It’s our way out to define the workplace of the future and there is probably not a better way of doing it than reverting Employee Engagement into what really matters, as Esko concludes beautifully with this gem:

“The years with the Internet have proven that we are capable of working together competitively/cooperatively, building social communities that many would some time ago have dismissed as impossible dreams. Thus we don’t yet have a good idea of what cannot be done by connected people working together in new ways. Changes in existing organizations and the evolution of new ones will have characteristics in common. Just as natural systems like the human body are not vertical hierarchies with each part superior to another in ascending linear order, organizations of the future will not be structured that way. This is not to say that all present industrial organizations are doomed but our models to describe the world around us are. We need a new vocabulary beyond the models of industrial production and separatist, mechanistic concepts of a corporation“

Yes, indeed, we probably need a new vocabulary, but I suspect that along with that new vocabulary we would also need a new way of thinking, a new way of working where employees, through their trusted networks and social communities own the corporation, just as much as the latter owns them. That’s when engagement will take a new meaning. The one we have all been waiting and anticipating for all along. For all of us, not just for the few we already know who they are…

Are you ready to own your beautiful business? If the answer is “Yes!”, you better start working your magic to help make employee engagement no longer a myth, but today’s corporate reality. We very much need it. And fast!

After having put together last couple of blog posts about some of my reflections from the year we are about to end around The Social Web and Technology in general, I guess it’s now a good time to share with the world the third one from the series. The one I have been telling people about over the course of the last couple of months as the one that is going to mark a before and an after with regards to my own involvement with The Social Web. You could probably think of it as a redefining moment of my own Social strategy, pretty much like I did in February 2008, when I redefined my own use of email by living “A World Without Email” ever since. I do realise that some folks may not like it, and some other people may relate to it quite a bit. But, in principle, I am going to keep that spirit of living life in a perpetual beta, going through, yet again, another experiment and see how it would move along, except that, this time around, it’s my own virtual life. Welcome to the new elsua!

How can I summarise this new strategy towards social networking in a short sentence, so that you would be able to have a glimpse of what I am about to get started with? Hummm, that’s quite a nice challenge, indeed, but if you have read the last couple blog entries you may have sensed already what it would be like. In case you haven’t though, here is a single one liner describing what I am about to get started with in 2012: Finally, after 10 years in the making, I’ll be freeing up myself from the yokes of both technology and the Social Web in order to get around, connect with my various social network(s), share my knowledge across and collaborate further along on my terms and not longer theirs.

I am not sure what you folks would think, but I’m ready, at long last, to free up myself from the yoke that both Technology and the Social Web have over-imposed on all of us and to no remedy. Or, better said, I am ready to free up myself from those people who control both of those environments to get the most out of us, but at our very own costs; in most cases, our very own energy, efforts, and truly hard work, while they just sit there and wait for it to happen, because they know it will happen eventually. Most of us, knowledge workers, have always had that very strong urge to connect with others, to share our affinities and true passions, to care for what one embarks on, and to help out where we possibly can. And plenty of times we keep going through the extra mile to try to achieve it. And most of the times, we don’t. Rather technology fails, or The Social Web user experience fails. Or both! And what do we do? We keep trying over and over again till we eventually make it through and make it happen. I am tired of having to put up with it all, of having to spend a humongous amount of time trying to customise my virtual social life to meet someone else’s needs (Those of both technology and the Social Web, as good examples to start with), while ignoring and neglecting my own.

Well, not anymore from yours truly. It’s, finally, a good time for me to depart from that incredibly frustrating experience of having to adjust, time and time again, both my working and life styles to the constant failures from both technology and the Social Web. It’s time for me to let real life kick-in, once again, and bring back that very important component all of us, human beings, seemed to have been neglecting for a long while: our very own personal, real life, (business) relationships. Yes, the physical social networking no-one seems to have realised we have been having out there for thousands, if not millions!, of years! I am no longer going to wait for either technology, or social networking tools, to fix their silliness and have me try multiple times to reproduce an experience that I feel should be rather straightforward: sharing!

I am no longer willing to go and pay through my nose for a service, i.e. the Internet, that telcos have ingrained in all of us as an essential must-have. Well, not really. They never had the control and they are not going to start now. At least, not with me. if the connection is there, if technology enables it painlessly, if the Social Web works the way it is supposed to, I’ll be fine. I will be there! Just like in the last 10 years and counting… However, if either of those three factors fail to deliver, I hereby declare I no longer care. Like a very good offline friend of mine would say: “Life is just way too short to have to worry about certain things taking place. You better make them happen yourself and move on, instead!“

And that’s why, from here onwards, I am no longer going to worry about technology itself (Whether it’s connectivity, tools, or social software), nor going to rely on it much to get stuff done. If it works, it works, if it doesn’t, I won’t be bothering. I will be moving on to the next thing, because, you know, there will always be a next thing. Even after the Social Web. And that, basically, means I am no longer going to be around, waiting for things to happen and ask me, again, to spend my energy, effort and whatever other trouble, including my own time, to see if things would work out once again. Like I said, life is just too short for me to worry about those silly things. We should move on to better things, I am afraid.

WOW!! Really? Are you saying what I think you are saying with those few paragraphs mentioned above, you may be wondering, right? I mean, how will I get my stuff done, both internally and externally, both at work, and outside work, if I am no longer going to rely, as religiously as I used to, in both technology and social networking tools. Well, that’s a pretty good question, indeed, for which, at this point in time, I don’t have an answer for. However, I can tell you something else. I’m an optimist, an outrageous, a heretic, a free radical, in short, a rebel at work by heart who knows that if we don’t push the limits on helping redefine and reshape our very own social technology experiences no-one else is going to do it for us. So I’m having enough with it all. I am having enough with having to put up with plenty of frustration, of additional stress I know I could do without, rather low energy levels that keep draining both my motivation and energy to want to do great things, and a huge amount of unnecessary and unneeded tension that I know I just don’t need any longer anymore! And probably you, too!

Indeed, I am not sure how this is going to end up eventually, and whether I will be making it at all, or suffer along the way quite a bit. However, I am very willing to give it a try and see how it goes. That’s what life is all about, I guess, right? Trying new things to see whether they would work out for you or not, learn a lot about them along the way, and try not to make the same mistakes again. In short, keep applying some of that critical thinking in everything we do, because, like I said above already, if we don’t do it for ourselves, no-one else would. And perhaps rightly so. It’s got to get started within ourselves, because, whether we like or not, we are the ones who know best where the issues lay and what we can do about them. And act upon them! Long gone is the time where we remain passive about most of the stuff we used to do. Long gone is the time where we just waited for things to happen. It’s time to move on to better things and keep excelling at what we are already doing.

I am sure at this point in time you may be wondering what it would look like, right? I mean, how will it work for yours truly in today’s technology driven world by no longer being dependent on it, by freeing yourself from its everlasting yoke? Well, like I said, I will be reshaping it over the course of time, but here are some initial thoughts of how I’m planning to tackle both Technology and the Social Web in 2012 and beyond:

• Connectivity: Starting with a biggie, why not, right? Yes, from now onwards, I will no longer care whether I’m finally connected to the Web or not. If within the first 15 minutes I can’t manage to stay connected on a rather decent Internet connection, I will give up on it and move on with the offline world. Perhaps a whole lot more productive than trying to figure out, or troubleshoot, why I can’t get connected in the first place. This would apply mostly to my business travelling, whether to customer events, workshops, meetings, or conferences, seminars, summits, hotel rooms, etc. etc. I’ll be more than happy to live blog / tweet / plus on things around me while I am travelling and certainly share as much as I possibly can, but if connectivity fails to deliver, you won’t see me much, perhaps the odd message to alert folks I’m giving up for the day and move on into real life, where I am sure conversations would be just as good and fruitful, but without the excruciating experience of, time and time again, having to struggle with technology. Not to worry, my dear telcos and various different Internet providers, the b*tching will be rather limited, since I know you can’t care less about trying to improve our user experiences. Your wallet will notice it though. From day one… At least, from me.
• The Social Web – Blogging: One of my favourite social software activities from over the last 9 years (It’s hard to believe that I got started with my first internal blog way back on December 2003!!) will always be blogging. Like I said, if there is anything the last three months have shown me with these rather extensive breaks is that I need to keep writing. It’s healthy for the mind, it’s healthy for the soul. I realise now, as I am putting this round of blog entries that I cannot longer live without it. So what am I am changing in this area?

  Well, as a starting point, I am going to diversify my own blogging style. It’s no longer going to be those rather lengthy, hopefully, helpful, blog posts that I keep sharing over here. I do know and realise that plenty of them are far too complex to digest on a single read. Yes, they are, just as much as they are for me to put them together, since I truly love the research that goes along with it. The amount of extra linking I put together into it, the recommendations I share across on people to follow, including their writings and everything else and so forth. It’s quite a lot of time consuming, but totally worth it. Once you have got the right connectivity though, but since I know next year will be another year where I won’t have it, I better diversify on it. So, as a starting point, my blogging will continue to have lengthy blog posts where appropriate, but when I can’t put them together I will be going for shorter entries, sharper, sharing an initial idea I want to jot down somewhere and rather raw with hardly any additional links or hyperlinks to people’s work. That will need to come along at a later time. 

  The idea would be to keep feeding the blog with, hopefully, interesting content we can all learn from, which is also one of the reasons why I’m planning to make much heavier use of my Google Plus profile to draft some of those ideas, get some conversations going and then perhaps move that dialogue into a blog post for everyone else to see and participate in. And whenever it happens that I’m offline I will move that writing exercise offline as well, which is where I am hoping to rely, quite a bit more, on Evernote on my iPad than what I have in the recent past. Somehow I would want my iPad to become my new moleskine that I can take with me and sync everywhere, whenever I regain back connectivity.

• The Social Web – Twitter and Google Plus: My use of both Twitter and Google Plus will continue to be pretty much the same from what I recently blogged about over at “Google Plus and Twitter – How They Work for Me Hand in Hand“. I will continue to work with both of them as part of “The Big Three“, but with the slight difference that, if good, decent connectivity is not there within the first 15 minutes of trying it out, I’m dropping both of them for what’s left of the day, till I regain that connection again. Like I said, if it works, it works, if it doesn’t, I am no longer going to wait. Instead, will focus on other offline activities, including real life conversations, specially, when I am on the road. 

  Mind you though perhaps on that same context of being a road warrior I will probably be focusing more on tweeting, than plussing, at least, till the overall user experience for Plus Mobile improves quite drastically, including the additional of a native iPad App. So if you don’t see me for a couple of days on Plus, it’s probably, because I am travelling and taking a short break; it doesn’t mean I have abandoned it. Not a chance. Remember, it’s still part of my “Big Three”, along with IBM Connections and Twitter. 

• The Social Web – The Rest: The rest of the various other social networking sites will probably remain the same for yours truly. I will continue to have a light presence in there, although I’m not going to invest much on it, at least, till they all dramatically improve the overall experiences, so that they don’t become more of a drain, like most of them are now at the moment, whether due to privacy issues, terms of service, awkward user interfaces, etc. etc. You name it. So if you would want to reach out to me, the best methods would still be through this blog, a Twitter mention to @elsua or My Google Plus Profile. If it doesn’t get eaten by the system you should be able to receive a response from me within a reasonable amount of time depending on the urgency of the request / query / matter. I will still be there, not to worry, it is just that my response would now probably take a bit longer … But it will get there eventually.
• The Social Web – Content Curation: And, finally, perhaps the biggest new move I will be making in 2012 and beyond. As good as knowledge sharing, collaborating with others, and generally connecting with other people are as activities on the Social Web, I’m going to start focusing plenty more on content curation. It’s the new black, it looks like, and I am hoping to bring it back into my social streams starting very very soon. Time and time again I keep getting healthily bombarded with terrific content I would want to share across, but usually I keep failing to share it along, because I just can’t keep up with it all while trying to add my ¢2, with the issues mentioned above already. So, instead of increasing my levels of frustration and irritation from not sharing those great links out there, I’m taking a different approach this time around and will start exploring the potential from one social software tool I have been following for a little while and enjoying from other folks: Scoop.it. 

  My profile in there is rather empty at the moment, but as we move along into the new year I surely plan to create a good number of different categories and start populating them a good bunch of interesting and relevant readings I have bumped into over the course of the last few months, and which, at some point or another, I would want to refer to once again on the odd blog posts, Plus conversations or tweets.

  I may be looking as well for an external social bookmarking service, to keep that curation going, but I am not too sure at this point in time just yet on what I will be doing. Still thinking about it, so if you folks out there have got any recommendations outside Delicious or Diigo, which have never convinced me much, I am afraid, I would love to learn about how you are managing your own social bookmarks. I have heard lots of great things about Pinboard, but not sure whether it would be worth the investment or not… What do you think? Is it worth while going for it? Would love to read your thoughts on it, if you are using it actively. 

And that’s it! Another rather lengthy blog post about to hit the Social Web out there. Another blog entry, that, like I said, will help shape up, once more, my overall Social Web Presence. Still in the making though and with plenty of room for improvements, I am sure, but I just love engaging on this kind of experiments to keep refining them over the course of time, just like I have been doing for almost 4 years now with living “A World Without Email“, more than anything else because of the unexpected situations and key learnings that will occur and that I am sure will be helping me put a stop with that excruciating and rather painful experience of having to adjust my social presence around certain social networking sites, when I feel it should be otherwise.

Did I complete lose it? Am I way off again? Did I jump the shark far too soon? I seriously don’t know. I guess time will tell, and this blog, too! Because I surely plan to share how the experience will be developing over the course of the next few months. Got any suggestions on what you feel could work, or not? Share them along, too, please! I would love to know whether I have gone completely crazy with all of this Social stuff or whether we are just witnessing the beginning of something bigger, much bigger: Redefining Our Own Social Web Presence with a Focus and a Purpose.

(Ohh, by the way, I haven’t revealed a couple of surprises here and there that will surely continue to shape up and change a few things on how I view self-publishing of new content and not necessarily on the blog alone; I will be sharing more details on each of them shortly as well, as I get ready to prepare last few things, before they go live … Stay tuned for more! It’s bound to provide lots of good fun, too!)

In a rather thought-provoking blog post shared a few days back, my good friend, the always insightful, Alan Lepofsky ventured to put together what could well be some very interesting predictions for 2012 with a slight twist that I am sure is going to provoke lots of healthy dialogue as we start moving into the new year. Of particular and relevant interest to this article I am putting together over here in this blog would be item #1 on “The Social Buzz Wears Off” where Alan comes to share this rather shocking, perhaps, too harsh statement: “2012 will be the year employees start hating social software“. Goodness! So soon?!?! I mean, we have only been having social software tools for merely 15 years and we are already starting to hate them, as end-users? Boy, look at email, it’s taken nearly 40 years to reach that kind of negative sentiment altogether and we are already claiming the Social Web will be reaching that same status that soon? Really? Well, I am afraid Alan is right, although I wouldn’t call it a prediction for 2012, but more a reality of today, 2011: the current state with all things social. Welcome to the Age of Effectiveness!

I am not sure what you folks would think about Alan’s thoughts in this area, but I think he pretty much nails it with a growing sentiment that plenty of us, knowledge Web workers, have been pondering about for a long while now and which another good friend of mine, Greg Lowe, put together beautifully in a rather inspiring tweet earlier on in the week:

Will 2012 be the year I settle for a single Social Network? I think so. FB, Twitter & G+. I’ll be scrutinizing for effecitveness.

— Greg Lowe (@Greg2dot0) December 27, 2011

Effectiveness, that’s all the rage coming along for 2012, and beyond, with regards to our overall user experience with social networking tools, whether inside, or outside of the firewall. Long gone are the days and the times when wasting time getting the Social Web to work for us was all what we were busy with during our working hours, as well as plenty of our private time. As we move into 2012 it looks like most of us are now ready to claim that we, knowledge workers, should no longer go around social software, but, instead, the latter should work around us, or, more specifically, what we would want to achieve, whether internally, or externally.

Why effectiveness? Well, for several reasons, but I would probably think that one of the strongest cases is to look for ways to fine tune our overall user experience with social at a time where we are now getting exposed to more data, information and knowledge than ever before, and we would want to get a grasp of what’s happening around us without having to focus much more on technology. We are already starting to see how technology is perceived as a means, as a tool, to achieve a goal, no longer an end on its own and we are probably owing that shift of focus of our attention to smartphones and tablets (Specially, Android, iPhone & iPad devices) where technology does no longer take as much preeminence, but instead, our overall user experience does. So, over time, we are becoming more and more demanding with our over social experiences and, as such, that’s where we are realising that we still have got a long long way ahead of us to make it work around & for us, instead of against us, which, funny enough, seems to have been my own experience in the last 12 months.

Greg mentions on that succinct tweet how he will be looking forward to potentially settle down on a single social networking site for 2012 and beyond to stay focused, which seems to be, and rightly so, the focus of attention nowadays for plenty of people, if I may add so myself. And that’s a good thing! Because right along with focus we have another concept I have grown rather fond of during the course of this year: purpose (Or purposeful). And whether most of those social networking sites and enterprise social software solutions would admit and acknowledge or realise about it or not, next year we, social software end-users, are going to become a whole lot more demanding with where our focus will be going (Or should be going), as well as for what purpose.

That shift has already started with yours truly, as I have come to ponder and muse about in this “Reflections from 2011” series of blog posts, where if I was previously blogging about how technology in general was one of my major disappointments from the year, the Social Web is not far behind. And that’s something that I find very worrying. Not because of what’s happened in this past year, but for what’s continuing to happen in the new year and that we seem to be doing very little about to avoid making the same mistakes. But perhaps we should see it with a couple of examples, so that you folks can see what I mean …

Earlier on this year, I put together a blog post where I talked about “The Big Three – How to Handle Your Fragmented Social Life“. In it, I mentioned how I may not be capable of settling down into a single social networking site to allow me get the most out of the Social Web, whether internal or external. So, instead, I decided to stick around with what I still call nowadays “The Big Three“: the three major social networking solutions I have learned to treasure and nurture over the course of time to reach the stage where I can no longer live without them, both on a personal and work levels. You know how it goes. Social software grows on you the more you use it, not because of the social technologies in place themselves, but more because of how they keep helping you manage to stay connected with those people who you care the most for and have learned to trust over the course of time a great deal thanks to that continuous social friction. Yes, the main purpose, if you want to call it that way, for social software, still today: connecting people to people and connecting people to content.

Yet, that overall user experience for myself with those big three (IBM Connections, Twitter and Google Plus) has been less than ideal to the point where I have been struggling more than succeeding on adjusting their ways of working to my ways of working and getting things done. Whether it may be related to their native features, or, better said, the lack of them, or whether the deployment has been everything but smooth, one has come to realise that in order to care for those social tools you love and heart quite a bit, there are some growing pains to put up with along the way. However, that doesn’t mean that those growing pains should be there for good. Quite the opposite. As we are about to enter a new year, we are all probably going to become a lot more demanding, like I was mentioning before, not just to kill off and terminate those pain points, but participate actively in helping re-design that overall user experience to the point where I’m starting to believe that those social networking sites that listen to their end-users the most and learn from them would be the ones that will be succeeding eventually. And big time!

One thing that we should not forget, and this is something that I kept telling the customers I have visited during 2011, is that, as a vendor of both your products and services, the group of people who would always know your own products much much better than you will always ever do, or dream of, would be your customers. Not only because they are using your solutions out of the box with the intended purpose you decided upon from the beginning, but also because those very same customers are the ones who are taking to the extreme your products, hacking away new behaviours, new ways of doing things, pushing the limits of how far they can go with your solutions to help them achieve what they want and not what you want. So those vendors that get to understand that and fully embrace it are the ones that are going to win us back all the way and for a long long while!

Take, for instance, Twitter. If you have been following this blog for a long while now, you would acknowledge the kind of love / hate relationship I have been having with that social networking site for years. I have loved it quite a few times, but I have also loathed many many more. Over the course of time, the user experience has deteriorated so bad, including its third party, or even their own, Twitter Apps that I have been on the brink of giving up on it altogether and never walk back several times. Yet, I’m still there. Why? Because of the connections I have nurtured and cultivated over the course of time, of course, because of the continuous and rampant learning curve one gets exposed to, because of the wonderful and magical serendipity it provides, but, above all, because after a long wait, there is finally a Twitter App that has helped me recover back the user experience I once had with Nambu. And that is Janetter. Perhaps the best Twitter desktop client out there at the moment. At least, for me, the one that has helped me love Twitter again. Why? Because it provides me with a purpose to shape up my focus on where I want it to be. Not where Twitter wants it to be, regardless of what they say or do. Something that before wasn’t happening.

Take another example: Google Plus. The social networking site that plenty of people want to see dead, but that just recently reached the 62 million users mark, which I guess is not too shabby for a walking dead social networking platform, don’t you think? Anyway, like I was saying, to me Plus has become the favourite place to host lengthier conversations that perhaps have got a better place than in Twitter or your own blog. It’s become for me my favourite deep thinking learning place on the stuff I am really passionate about. The overall Web browser experience is amazing; the amount of features put together where Google is bringing Google to Plus at a rather rampant pace is unprecedented. The reach it’s starting to have is one to none (i.e. In the last several months I have been having plenty of customers finding my Plus Profile before anything else… including my own blog!!). Yet the mobile experience has got a lot to be desired for. Yes, I know, there are Android as well as iPhone Apps and they are pretty nifty, but still somehow I think we all know and realise we could do a whole lot more with them. Most of the times they feel like we are just scratching the surface of what we could do with them.

We need to have a better mobile user experience for Google Plus. We need to have better options and feature sets that allow us to bring back that focus and purpose with this social software tool. And to make things even better we finally need a good iPad App that provides that unique experience we all know we can have. And should have, if they would want us to keep using it in the next few months…

You see? This is what I mean with the state of the Social Web. I am sure plenty of you folks could share lots of similar experiences with other social networking tools, like Facebook, LinkedIn, Slideshare, and whatever other mobile social tools, etc. etc. Both focus and purpose are back in the game for the new year. They are the new black! To the point, where seeing how hectic and incredibly busy 2012 looks ahead of its starting time so far, I fear that I would be having very very little time to waste trying to adjust, for the zillionth time, to their needs and wants, versus them trying to adjust to my / our own. If The Big Three, at least, for me, don’t step up and move forward to improve my overall user experience the way I would want to, I guess it will be a good time for me to focus back on where the real social networking activities will be happening from here onwards; that special place we all know we can always shape up to meet our needs and wants and achieve most of what we want: real life.

While everyone else out there on the Internet Blogosphere gets busy blogging away their predictions for 2012 around the world of Social (And whatever other word you would want to insert right after!), Technology, the Internet and whatever else you can think of, like it seems to be happening in a rampant fashion year after year even to the point of getting people a bit tired of it all, I think I am going to spare you folks with this blog entry on my own predictions for next year and I am going to concentrate instead, perhaps, on putting together a blog post where I could reflect on what’s happened in 2011 and how that will shape up my overall personal experience for everything social.

Like I have mentioned in a previous blog post, the last 3 months have been perhaps a bit too hectic both at work and on a personal level, but that doesn’t mean that I haven’t had enough time to go and reflect on a few things and, most importantly, on how I feel about the overall Social Web and the Internet / Technology in general. Now, originally, I thought about putting together a massively long entry over here, but then I realise it may have well been a bit too tiring and exhausting going through it in a single go. So I have decided to split it up in a number of articles where I will also try to hint along how I will be re-shaping up my own Social Web strategy, specially, after the last few months where I have been more away from it than attached to it and somehow it’s helped me get a clearer vision of where I would want to go and where I feel things will go. Will there be convergent paths, you think? Hummm. Maybe. May be not. Let’s see.

During the course of 2011 I have embarked on a whole bunch of business travelling. A lot more than in 2010, for sure! And not just to present, attend or participate in various different conference events, but also, the vast majority to go and visit IBM customers to share the experiences of what a socially integrated enterprise is all about. You could say that my favourite topic du jour all along has been The Social Enterprise. And still going strong, if I look into what lies ahead for 2012 where that travelling agenda is going to be even more hectic! But more on that shortly…

A couple of folks though from my closer social networks keep wondering how I do it. Where do I get all of that energy and extra effort to never get tired of it and continue to move along. To be honest with you, I hate travelling. I have been travelling for most of my life, and, definitely, for most of my business life and biz travelling is no longer what it used to be. Quite the opposite! It’s no longer a pleasure, but a big drain on everyone. And perhaps on a separate blog post I will share how I really feel about business travelling altogether and what I would like to see change for upcoming years to bring back that pleasurable experience. I know a few of you would consider that impossible to achieve, but may be not. We shall see. I don’t think it’d be that difficult to just change a few things and make a big difference …

Anyway, the main reason why I never get tired of travelling is because it gives me an opportunity to do two things on a more or less regular basis; two things I was not aware of till I eventually fully experienced them this year plentiful. First, I love people! I have met so many wonderful folks this year, good old friends, and plenty new ones, who have surely make up for all of that hassle and burden of travelling, that it’s become an entire new experience where constant learning, collaboration and open knowledge sharing has happened at such deep levels that some of those conversations are still spinning in my head shaping up a lot of what I use to take the world for. Human beings were designed to be around other human beings, to socialise face to face, to learn by simply being around one another, to be challenged in healthy dialogue by those folks who always want to improve things, who want to make things better, who want to work smarter, who want to really create and leave behind an impact for which they would be remembered. It’s their legacy. Our legacy. They are the optimists, the outrageous, the heretics, the free radicals, the rebels at work who are constantly looking up for each other wanting to create and spark that energy, that brilliant idea, that can certainly change the world as we know it.

And throughout 2011 I had the huge opportunity to meet, and learn!, from a whole bunch of them! And big time! So much so that plenty of those conversations have certainly changed the way I view things, both at work, and in my private life. The best part of it is that they have also helped me learn about something very important; the second thing I mentioned above earlier on. The Social Web. Yes, we all know it from before. We all realise how critical and paramount the world of the Social Web has become not just for businesses, but also for all of our societies. For ourselves. If anything, because of a single, and rather simple, reason: the amplifying effect of our physical relationships and mutual bonds.

The Social Web is a wonderful thing! It’s changed my life and probably the lives of millions of people out there as well, but the main reason why that’s happening is not because of the unprecedented penetration and broadband reach it’s been enjoying in our society, touching every single aspect of our lives, but more because it’s helped us become even more connected than ever before. It’s helped amplify our relationships, our friendships, our reach, our connectedness, our common conscious (and unconscious) knowledge to such deeper levels that there is no way back. And probably there shouldn’t be, because all of this interconnectedness is helping us out to become better humans to our own abilities and expertise.

Throughout 2011 I have had the great opportunity to experience that; to realise that while the Web is there, there are many many more important things, specially, when that Internet access is patchy and you have got that unique opportunity to meet up, face to face, that huge amount of talent, and smart people, who you could never get tired of learning from. In the past I used to neglect that to a certain level and in the last few months, definitely, the last three, that being disconnected from the online world on a rather regular basis has helped me scratch that urge of meeting up people face to face and start a conversation and converse no matter for how long. And, boy, has that made a difference?!?!  The amplifying effect from the Social Web kicks in fully after you have met those people and exchanged a few ideas, you come back home and you realise you want to keep the dialogue going. And with all of these social tools at our fingertips, it’s never been easier. Quite the opposite.

There used to be a time, in my last 10 years of having been exposed to and involved with social networking and social software, where every time I would go and meet new people, specially, at customer events, workshops, seminars and whatever else, to talk about The Social Enterprise, I used to resort to those lovely, rather informative, perhaps a bit overwhelming short video clips that tried to explain the impact of Social Media in our world. Pretty much like a la Did You Know? fashion. The latest one I have bumped into is this fantastic 2 minute and 45 seconds YouTube video clip under the suggestive heading of “The World of Social Media 2011“:

For those folks who are rather familiar with Social Media, they probably wouldn’t learn much about it from just watching it. However, it’s worth while. It will help provide you with an opportunity to discover how the Social Web has moved way and beyond the tech world and dived in, big time, in every person’s life, whether tech savvy or not. It’s become so pervasive throughout the world that in all of my biz travelling this year I didn’t have a need to use these sort of videos any longer. The conversation has stepped up. Everyone knows about the Social Web. Even folks who not so long ago were technophobes and who, right now, are in full discovery mode trying to figure out how to best make use of it for their work, as well as their personal lives.

What’s my conclusion from all of this? Well, as a starting point, one gets to realise that social networking has been there  way before the Internet came into existence a few decades back. That personal (business) relationships, when carried out, nurtured and cultivated face to face, are as good as it gets. That the Social Web is not a substitute for those physical relationships but an augmentation factor that no-one can, or should, ignore to make them even better and more trustworthy. That eventually, the Social Web is unstoppable at this point in time and that those businesses that are still blocking the access to social networking sites, or the whole conversation around Social, are just missing a huge and an unprecedented opportunity to shape-up and redefine themselves to become even profitable, sustainable, caring, nurturing, purposeful and meaningful businesses. The Workplace of the Future. Our future.

Now, who dares to ignore and neglect that in 2012? Any takers? I hope not, but if you are let me share a couple of final words with you: Good Luck! (You are going to need it … )

PS. I am sure you may have noticed how at the beginning of this blog post I have included a whole bunch of links to blog entries and articles about some of the most interesting readings I have bumped into around those 2012 predictions and for some of them I may be touching base on them and for some others I think they would be relevant to see how far they may have set the stage into what lies ahead … Hope you folks enjoy reading them just as much as I did while putting together this blog entry.

As a result of John Tropea’s wonderful blog post from yesterday, which I have blogged about over here, there has been also quite an interesting and rather refreshing conversation developing on the side over at Google Plus around the topics of business processes, BRP (Barely Repeatable Processes), the role of traditional hierarchies and structures in today’s work environment while mixing and mingling with a networked organisation and where learning fits in there altogether. Some fascinating stuff in there, for sure! And one of the various reasons why I keep digging quite a bit G+ over other social networking sites. The depth of the conversations has been like no other so far! And it’s thanks to those conversations themselves how one keeps bumping into golden nuggets like the one shared yesterday by Dennis Callahan on that very same thread around “The Future of Work“.

Yes, indeed, you may have noticed how the last few blog posts have continued to raise my interest around the topic of The Future of Work and how social networking and social computing tools are helping redefine how we view and interact at work within a corporate environment to make it much more open, transparent, trustworthy, networked, meaningful. Well, it looks like that interest keeps growing further, specially, after going through that fantastic article put together by Dennis where he has shared 19 different very enlightening and educational resources on The Future of Work, ranging from links to other insightful blog entries, to short video clips, presentations, etc. etc. Quite a goldmine on its own right there, for sure!

However, from all of those resources mentioned by him, and which I would strongly recommend you all go through them, since they will be worth while your time, specially, if you are interested in this topic as well, there is one in particular that I thought I would expand further on it for a bit. More than anything else, because of how much it resonated with how I view work myself, but, perhaps much more importantly, because of how well it describes the current work I have been doing myself, and a whole bunch of other people!, for the last few years. And still going strong…

Time and time again I keep getting asked what my work day as a KMer, Community Builder and Social Computing Evangelist looks like, specially, while working at a large IT corporation that has been there, alive and kicking, for the last 100 years and counting… At times, it presents a bit of a challenge in itself, since I guess it’s pretty tough to try to describe what you are passionate about in an eloquent manner; too many things to cover in such a short time!; basically, that stuff you know you could talk for ages and ages yourself and never get tired of it. Yes, I guess that passion for what you do will describe it quite nicely at this stage. Well, T.A. McCann, founder of Gist.com, just did that beautifully for me over a couple of minutes in a short interview under the suggestive title of “The Future of Work Is Now“, which he himself blogged about over here.

It’s a priceless gem, for certain! I can tell you that! If we have been talking for a little bit now about The Future of the Workplace, about what meaningful, networked, freelanced, intrapreneurial (corporate) work is all about, T.A. McCann pretty much nails it on that short interview. I just couldn’t put it in much better words than what he did. If not, judge for yourselves:

Mind-blowing, isn’t it? Who would have thought that in that future of work concepts like multiple jobs across a working lifetime, having fun @ work, work life balance no longer there, retirement would no longer exist, do your best effort at all times, connecting and reaching out to others who share a common passion on a particular topic / goal with you, learning as a key driver of working together effectively, etc. etc. would be helping redefine how we view AND live our workplace(s). And all of that thanks to the emergence of social networking tools within the enterprise and beyond! Not too bad, right?

I am not sure what you folks would think, probably  that I am a dreamer or someone trying to live to the fullest an unrealistic, utopian business world that will never see the light, specially in today’s working environment. Perhaps too optimistic, too outrageously excited and eager for what’s to come. Well, may be. May be not. Who knows. The reality is that’s the current work environment I have been living, experiencing AND enjoying for the last couple of years, and I know for certain I am not the only one going through this, so I doubt it would be a dream any longer. More of an ever-growing reality, rather. It’s probably just a matter for us, knowledge workers, to define how we would want to make it work for ourselves; basically, have knowledge workers create and define their ideal job role(s) and get down to business.

After all, remember, “Individuals will have more freedom and power than ever before.“