Tag Archives: social networking
I’m a skeptic. I’m old school. Work has typically been the place during the day to put the nose to the grindstone and, well, work. It isn’t for playing, chatting, messaging, updating facebook, booking flights via TripIT or anything like that. Work has been about making deliverables, staying on budget and making money, not socializing.
But the world changes. Existing in the digital realm, we must not only adapt to new scenarios but correctly anticipate changes to deliver timely solutions in this ever-changing landscape. This is the conundrum for all IT members: how to gaze into the crystal ball and forecast proper solutions in a world where nobody knows what’s coming up even 6 months from now.
Social Business Software is one of these rapidly evolving solutions that didn’t exist 2 years ago but may be one of the greatest pivotal tool impacts in recent years. Where does it sit in the corporate culture and how does it accelerate growth or value for the organization? What’s the value in employees being social with one another? Being responsible for implementing our SBS system I’ve come to appreciate SBS and can shed some light on social. The water-cooler for the 21st century.
By Jeana Anderson | Critical Mass Chicago
Illustration by EffingBoring
I recently started following the White House on Twitter, @WhiteHouse for those of you who want to check it out. A closer look at the content in the twitter stream sped me on a path towards applying some of Critical Mass’s Community Management best practices to the White House’s social media presence.
Best practice one: Research and understand the community before engaging. Moderating a community of President Obama’s supporters alone, the over 13 million citizens who opted into the campaign’s e-mail list, presents itself as a gut wrenching challenge for a single moderator. Thinking big picture: moderating President Obama’s social media community would never just be those 13 million opt-ins. The community would potentially consist of every U.S. internet user, 163.3 million people according to comScore.
Video by @matto
This is my first attempt at writing anything since attending the SXSW conference for the first time—it was quite an experience, from the panels to the parties to the conversations in the hallways, cafes and sidewalks. I spoke on a couple of panels but there was something really special about the “Friendship is Dead” salon that friend Russ Unger and myself “moderated”. I use the term loosely because it felt like a casual conversation more than anything else. Some even joked around about it feeling like “therapy”.
We started off the panel with the premise of friendship in the basic sense and quickly moved into social media territory. It became clear that few people in the room felt that there is a need for social applications to offer better controls around how we can classify “friends”—from those who we may have met online, to the ones we work with to the ones we’ve known from childhood that may ore may not be close with anymore. The conversation quickly moved into a very organic space where many of us felt the need to express opinions on the subject, and were clearly wrestling with the notion of managing our relationships as they soar into higher and higher numbers. If you reference “Dunbar’s Number” (below), there is an assertion that once we exceed the number of relationships past “150″, that our relationships become less meaningful and more difficult to manage.
