Nov 2, 2012 | Change, Collaboration, Social Media
I have a new email address, one that allows me access to an enterprise social network, run off the “Yammer” platform that has been deployed by an occasional client.
This is an innovation that will turn the time people spend on their social networks into hugely productive time for employers.
The client concerned has a far flung empire, not big, but very spread, delivering a specialised service. Last week they urgently needed someone with an unusual skill to address a crisis in a client factory, a skill that up to now may have taken weeks to identify, if it was around. Instead, the engineering manager stuck the request on their yammer network, and it took minutes for a young engineer in Perth to respond, he had skill required, developed with a previous employer.
The opportunity to use internal social media, Yammer, Chatter, the Salesforce.com equivalent, and others, is opening a door to collaborative work such that we have brely dreamed about before. Forget the complicated, time consuming, and mostly wasted project update meetings every second day, replace it with a daily SM update, create forums to address problems and spread news and ideas.
This is not just socialising business, this is a revolution in cross functional/geographic collaborative management.
That’ll scare some folks!
Oct 31, 2012 | Social Media
Mike Stelzner’s “Social Media Examiner” on line magazine, rather than blog, is about the best of a good bunch of sites that offer insight to the blogging process.
These 21 tips, assembled from a group of pretty smart operators are gold.
Thanks Mike!
Oct 30, 2012 | Change, Innovation, Operations
Remember when there was a market for only 5 computers in the world, then a few thousand appeared in governments, huge corporations, and a few big R&D labs, then suddenly along came the PC, and there were millions of them in our homes, then hundreds of millions of “devices” in our pockets, seemingly almost overnight?
It is happening again.
Coming to a desk near you is the personal machinist, the 3-D printer that will do for small scale manufacturing what the PC did for personal information management and communication.
This post from Mitch Joel has a link to a video interview of Chris Anderson on his new book “Makers – The new industrial revolution” which should blow away a few intellectual cobwebs.
Theo Jansen whose Kinetic models have been a youtube hit has had miniatures produced, working models of astonishing intricacy produced by Shapeways technology, one of the revolutionaries.
This stuff is coming to a desk near you, soon, and the only limitation is your imagination.
Oct 29, 2012 | Change, Management, Marketing, Social Media
One of the many paradoxes of our on-line social life is that to engage, we give up a part of our personal life, we become available to anyone else who cares to look for us, within the boundaries of increasingly better privacy hurdles in social media tools.
In the past, our personal lives were almost all we had, simply because of the inconvenience, inefficiency, indeed, impossibility, of telling everybody, anything much about ourselves.
The earlier incarnations of social media removed those barriers, and suddenly we realised that we had created a monster, a perfect environment for stalkers. All sorts of unsavory and undesirable people, and those we had no desire to know suddenly had access to our details, and so we started designing out the access, but it is a binary process, a filter is “on”, or it is “off”, no “maybe”.
So, how do we design it out? We design back in some of the elements of the inefficiency we had until a decade ago, put in hurdles that need to be crossed before you get to the personal stuff. Clay Shirky, one of the great minds thinking about this stuff does it again in this Zeitgeist presentation from 2008. I only just found it, but the message is as relevant now as 4 years ago, perhaps more so.
Oct 26, 2012 | Communication, Marketing, Personal Rant, Social Media
Millions of “writers” are now publishing blogs, and as a result there are many sources of “how to” write a better blog, and get it seen.
However, it seems to me that most of the advice is rehashing pretty basic stuff, and focusses way too much attention on the medium of publishing, the web, rather than offering advice on the writing. If there is any merit in the idea that a well written blog will outperform a poorly written one, perhaps we should ignore most of the new-age advice, and go to the experts on writing.
Having an ability to write, to express an idea memorably, with clarity, and in a manner that creates understanding and an action from the reader is not a result of the net, it is just as hard as it always was, it is just that now the good stuff has far more visible competition for attention from the crap.
David Ogilvy is an acknowledged expert, the original Mad-man, who wrote some of the best advertising of all time, also wrote this internal memo advising his employees how to write.
The advice holds for those trying to write blogs, tweets, and advertising copy today, as much as it did of O&M employees in 1982.
