Here’s an excerpt from Aaron Kim’s blog post about meritocracy and social media:

Furthermore, Web 2.0 and Social Media are leveling the professional playing field. Two quotes by Pauline Ores (who is the IBM personification of Social Media Marketing) during the O&M event caught my attention:

1. In the Social Media world, the most powerful person is the one who shares the most.
2. Control in Social Media is like grabbing water: the stronger you grab, the less you hold. There’s a right way to retain water, but not by being forceful.

Meritocracy, Pauline Ores and the multi-dimensional IT Professional « The bamboo raft

It reminded me of something that I learned while putting together a presentation on Generation Y and how work is changing.

Knowledge is still power. The old way was to keep knowledge secret, thus ensuring your power. The new way is to share it, and thus to make it grow.

Together with lots of other people in IBM and elsewhere, Aaron Kim helps me realize that I’m on to something good.

Gary Brown e-mailed me this insightful manifesto from Michael Lee Stallard, an expert on client and employee engagement. In it, Michael describes the key ingredients of a connection culture: vision, value, and voice. More and more companies are focusing on developing deep, rich connections between their employees and their customers, and this document has a number of good examples of the benefits of this approach. Check it out at ChangeThis :: The Connection Culture: A New Source of Competitive Advantage.

Okay, I did find another social network I wanted to join online.  Geni is a family-oriented application, and you can use it to collaboratively build your family tree. I don’t know if it can handle the complexities of the Chua clan (my grandmother led a complicated life! ;) ), 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.

Check it out!

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!

All that’s needed to turn me from an introvert to a people person is the ability to skip small talk, at least in the beginning. Thank you, Internet!

Take today, for example. I was working on a wiki guide to social media on a client site when I heard a cheery voice introduce himself and say that he found me on a social network. A few minutes later, I was deep in conversation with someone I’d never met or even talked to before. He had noticed that my client contact had added me on LinkedIn, and that I was from IBM. Intrigued, he checked out my profile and read my blog. He was baffled by the Emacs posts, but he noticed my passion for social computing, and that was something that he was very interested in. We talked about knowledge management, technology adoption, influencing behavior, the different initiatives going on at the company. I recommended two books:

Influencer: The Power to Change Anything by Kerry Patterson, Joseph Grenny, David Maxfield, Ron McMillan, Al SwitzlerRead more about this book…

The Leader’s Guide to Storytelling: Mastering the Art and Discipline of Business Narrative by Stephen DenningRead more about this book…

… and I’m definitely looking forward to more conversations.

Wouldn’t it be amazing if people in his company—and in other companies—could meet and talk to other people as easily as he found and talked to me? Wouldn’t it be great if people could skip past all the small talk and build rapport by talking about the things people are passionate about?

Okay, you definitely have to get this book. =) Read the chapter on
“Opportunity is Everywhere”, too. And “Repeat, repeat, repeat.” Great
role models, great stories, great tips.

Actually, just go and read the whole thing.

Darcy Rezac's “Work The Pond: Use the Power of Positive Networking to
Leap Forward in Work and Life”. ISBN 0-7352-0402-0.

(Someday I'm going to have Amazon links…)

My social calendar tends to stay relatively full. I have to
consciously schedule breaks into it because otherwise I just pack it
with stuff. Google Calendar's monthly view is great for keeping things
sorta organized. I'm really, really tempted to write a social app that
makes it easier to manage these get-togethers – what Filipinos call
“gimmicks”.

Such an app would have a floating list of non-time-specific
activities, with people indicating interest or even availability.
People should be able to take events from that list and schedule it
onto a group calendar.

There should be *some* way I can easily manage having multiple
overlapping circles of friends. See, there's a reason why I'd rather
blend groups!

And all of this, of course, should be available from a mobile
interface so that I can go from one event to another.

But that's too much interface complexity, so it has to stay inside my
head. ARGH!