I came across an internal blog post about making sense of the intranet social networking tools. Joseph, a communications assistant from the UK, asked us to help him make sense of the overwhelming choices we have in terms of Web 2.0 tools. When I checked out the wiki he created, I found out that Joseph was doing his Ph.D. dissertation on social computing in the enterprise. This just happened to be the area that I got my masters in, so I sent him an instant message and I shared a copy of my thesis with him, in the hope that my bibliography might save him some time. He had read some of my blog entries, but he hadn’t realized I had done my master’s research in the same area. I then proceeded to brain dump a whole bunch of tips, such as:
- Blog about your research. This is the single best thing you can do to get the word out and to find people who are interested in this kind of thing. I can’t begin to describe how helpful people were. And if you end up falling in with the way the company does social networking (like I did!), people will help you find a great job too!
- Build relationships. Again, the internal blog’s a terrific place to do that, particularly for this area of research. Invest time in scanning the blogs and commenting on things you find interesting.
- Don’t worry about disappearing off the dashboard. Plenty of people use feed readers and subscribe to specific people or tags, so once you get on their radars, you’ll stay there.
- Use a feed reader that lets you create keyword searches. That way, you never miss discussions that you are interested in. Feedreader, Omea, and FeedDemon all have this feature.
- Get to know people. I recommended a whole bunch of people who are interested in social computing. =)
- Read these books: Crossing the Chasm, The Diffusion of Innovations, The Tipping Point, and Influencer.
- Check the blogs for news about interesting tools. Our internal early adopter program is good, but the internal blogs catches the coolest hacks from all over.
- … and other tips! =)
I tried to squeeze as much as I could in half an hour, but I’m sure I’ll think of other tips! I loved just passing on everything I could think of. It was the best way to give back to all the people who helped me with my research, and I was happy to have stumbled across someone else who could learn from what I did. Besides, it was the Right Thing to Do.
Thank you, blogs, for this opportunity to help!
Tags: blogging, networking, social, story by Sacha Chua
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), but it isn’t a bad way to start. The good thing about it is that it doesn’t rely on everyone opting in, because you can fill in other people’s details. And once you’ve gotten your family tree in place, you can share photos, look up birthdays, send messages, announce events, that sort of thing.
