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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At the recent Nercomp annual conference I was part of a group to attendees tweeting the conference.  It was an interesting experience and a good experiment.  I picked up a couple of good points in following the stream of tweets.  And it was a handy way to get references to websites and other references mentioned in the sessions.  I saw a couple of comments from non-attendees who were following too.  And as a ‘tweeter’ it didn’t interfere too much with my attention to the sessions I was attending.  But it was a bit of a hassle getting it all set up.  Following the hashtag itself can be a bit of a trick, and not always accurate.  In our case the first hashtag we chose was also being used by a group in North Carolina. So we changed it to #nc-2010 which worked, but the hyphen ended up making some of the twitter clients a little cranky.   I thought following the other official conference tweeters would be helpful, but then I got all their non-conference tweets too. The worst part is my normal Twitter followers were bombarded with a much higher tweet volume than normal, and a lot of it of little interest to them.

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I have been using a basic Twitter plug-in to auto-tweet new blog posts to my twitter account.  It was always a little fussy, and recently it seemed to stop working — maybe something related to the recent WordPress update?  No matter, it seemed a good time to go looking to see what else was available.  And so far Twitter Tools is looking very promising.  It can be set to pull in Tweets that contain a specific hashtag — allowing selective tweet-posting of new entries.  And, assuming this message makes it over to Twitter, you can set your posts to go go to Twitter as well.  The big question is how it will work with posts originating from other external tools, like ScribeFire, or scheduled posts — both of which I do a lot.  We’ll see…

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I get a fair amount of useful information off of my twitter feed — in fact it is often more informative than the RSS newsfeeds I follow.  But Twitter, Facebook, Yammer and the rest of the live streaming applications share a common problem.  If you want to refer back to something that floated by several days, weeks or months ago you are pretty much out of luck.   The noise factor is not an issue when monitoring the stream live.  I mean sure, there is plenty of noise, but it is easy enough to filter it out as the garbage floats by.  But try to dig through items from the past and the noise quickly overwhelms.  Anyone got an answer?  Or is do we just need to accept that we must leave the past behind — even if it is digital?

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Gobal Ignite Week is coming March 1 – 5 — and it looks like there may be events here in New Haven.  Could be fun — I’m following the twitter feed.  Could be fun.

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Just yesterday I had a request to create a tool to collect some follow-up responses from our staff regarding a recent university-wide workplace survey.   So we need something simple, easy to maintain, quick to launch AND that collects the responses in a format that permits easy and flexible reporting.  As I recently demonstrated our WordPress MU installation makes it easy to launch a project-specific site which includes user-login tied to the school’s central user authentication system.  So simple-easy-quick — doing this through WordPress gets me at least half-way there.  And I remembered a recent suggestion in my Twitter feed to look at the WordPress Surveys plugin.

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