We humans are social animals, and naturally come together to share information.  Workplaces are full of these type of groups, from informal groups meeting at the water cooler, to more formal meetings with regular speakers.  And while there is value in these interactions, the efforts can suffer from their informal nature.  In Cultivating Communities of Practice the authors lay out a series of methods to foster intentional knowledge strategies through formal management and creation of these groups.  With the goal of fostering and environment that is rewarding for employees while also generating value for the company.

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Ruben Puentedura ponders the use of a smartphone to not just consume content, but also to create it.  And that got me thinking how I could adapt that idea to my own BlackBerry Storm in some type of platform independent way.  There used to be a handy service through FeedDemon that made it easy to read RSS feeds from both my mobile phone and multiple computers and bookmark them for later use.  It was a really handy way to collect ideas and then reference or blog post on them later.  But one of the hazzards with any such service is it may disappear, as the FeedDemon service did (the desktop software still exists but with a Google Reader backend.)  Delicious is another way to collect websites, but I can’t find an easy way to use it via mobile, and it is still too limited.  I want to collect everything — tweets, images, websites and random thoughts all in one place — and in a place under my complete control.

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I am not out to start any we-love-apple flame wars.  But I was struck today by the number of negative Apple mentions in the daily newsfeeds.  A partial list of quotes are below.  Is this the start of some gradual popular uprising fueled by the closed, protectionist, controlling, secretive Apple policies?  Or just people picking on the popular guy?

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If you’re a frequent participant in online professional networking communities these points should hopefully be obvious.  But online communities start to become more widely used in workplace settings, and more newbies come into the mix, reminders to play nice are never out of place.

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I have been watching Bates’ web redesign as led by Jay Collier over the last year with great interest.   Jay’s blog gives a great overview of their process.  The result is testament to the care they took in delivering on the vision.  And WordPress served as an enabler for their work, running both the planning blog as well as the CMS for the live web site.  And at last week’s WordPress University workshop (part of the NERCOMP SIG program) Jay started off the day discussing how to break through communication barriers with WordPress as the enabling technology. Read the rest of this entry »

Is social media worth the time for a busy technology executive? Yes:

1. Transparency and Communication:  Probably the most obvious reason, provides a regular, less-formal way to introduce ideas and receive feedback from the community.  A blog format is  particularly good at forcing some type of regular schedule — i.e.  new post every Monday — although a smaller, less formal tool like Twitter — i.e.  at least two tweets a day — might be useful too.
2. Lead by example:  Employees already use social media, both to discuss work and while at work.  Model the behavior you expect.
3. Experience the good and bad of the technology:  How can you really judge new technology without direct experience?

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