An interesting article I came across on consumer perception about twitter.

Though Twitter is currently in the spotlight as a media darling, only 8% of advertisers and consumers think it’s a very effective promotion tool, according to (pdf)  results from a LinkedIn Research Network/Harris Poll.

The study also found that advertisers are more likely than consumers to know about Twitter and are more likely to believe in the microblogging tool’s future power to help promote products and services.

Twitter Awareness and Sentiment

The research, which included surveys of both advertisers and the US public at large, revealed that just less than half of advertisers (45%) think Twitter is in its infancy and its use will grow significantly over the next few years. In contrast, 21% believe Twitter will not move into the mainstream and it will remain something mostly young people and the media will use.

At the same time, just under one in five advertisers (17%) believe Twitter’s five minutes of fame are already over and it’s time to find the next big thing, while 17% of advertisers say they don’t know enough about Twitter to have an opinion on it.

Among consumers, the study found a different picture, especially in terms of awareness. A large majority (69%) say they do not know enough about Twitter to have an opinion about it, 12% think it’s in its infancy, 12% say it is just something that young people and the media use and 8% say it is already over.

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The big question. Why use Social Media?

If your companies answer is “because everyone else does it”, chances are they haven’t really thought this through. So what’s the first step? Go back to the drawing board and get an understanding of what it has to offer, its pro’s and cons.

There are a number of reasons why you want to embark on this journey and listed below are just a few of them.

1. Reach out to existing customers
2. Tap into new customers
3. Promote your brand
4. Recruit new talent
5. Be “Cool”

While I’m sure there are a number of other reasons you can add l’d like to focus on just these for a now.  Building brand loyalty and awareness can be done rather well using a well thought out social media strategy.

Reaching out to existing customers : The voice of your customer is probably the most important thing you have and creating a solution that allows them to constantly give you feedback is probably a smart thing to invest in.

Tap into new customers: A social platform loaded with content and interactivity is a great way to attract new customers to your product and services as well as give them an idea of what other customers think about it.

Promote your brand : Social Media gives you a long lasting and interesting channel to promote your brand.

Recruit new Talent : Social media platforms are a great way to attract talent to your organization as it allows them to get a better understanding of your company and the way you do business .

Be “Cool” : Let’s face it, with social media being leveraged successfully by a number of organizations there is pressure to adopt it and not be left  behind.

Choose your medium : This would probably be one of the most important decisions you’ll make. The fact that you have an endless list of tools at your disposal really doesn’t help. ( This is where putting together a strategy helps )

The most popular of these are of course:

1. Blogs
2. Micro blogging tools ( twitter )
3. Collaboration tools  (wiki’s )
4. Multimedia ( You tube, Flickr )
5. Podcasts

What makes this work investing in?

1. Reach : The volumes of people you can reach if you use this medium are mind boggling, you even pull in people that might not be part of your key demographic.
2. Usability : Using social media tools has become second nature to most of your customers out there ( if they’ve been on the web for a while ).
3. Cost effective : As mentioned before the return on something like this far exceeds that of traditional media channels.
4. Permanence : Traditional media cannot be altered, a social media platform is a living, constantly evolving platform that allows you to connect with customers constantly.
5. Recency :  One of the biggest advantages is of course sending messages and information almost instantly to user already tapped into the system.
6. Analytics : Modern Social Media Platforms allow you to generate the kind of analytics you can only dream of in traditional media.

Advantages

The biggest advantage over standard mediums of communication is the ability to connect with your consumers and users and get feedback. Its a bidirectional flow of information that will get scary at times if you don’t understand it or be proactive in dealing with issues that will most certainly crop up.

It’s cheap!! ( well cheaper, than alternative means of communication )

There is a sense of transparency with social media, essentially because people are free to say what they want without the fear of being  gagged. Your consumers will open up to you more and you’ll get a whole lot more honest feedback. Just be very careful you do not violate this trust by being too controlling, this goes against the very nature or social media tools.

Tackling issues before they snowball, Catching something when its still a minor irritant for one consumer is worth its weight in gold before it spiral out of control on the world wide web.

These are just some of the thoughts I had around this topic, feel free to add you own or disagree.

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Now that you’ve understood how you can use blogs as part of your knowledge management strategy there is a need to educate your project team on how best they can develop a good blog. Though from experience i can say that there is a good chance a number of them already do blog outside of the office.

For those of them who haven’t been blogging or don’t know the benefits of it you might get the following questions.

Why Blog?

Blogging has become the cornerstone of information distribution for most people around the world. It allows you to get your ideas and views out to the entire world, and in some cases lay the seed for very interesting debates.

How do i Build a successful Blog?

Well, the fundamentals are simple Content, Content, Content. Unless you have decent content on your Blog you can be sure you’ll fail even before you get started.

Visibility for the Blog

As I mentioned earlier one of the biggest drivers of getting your employees to start blogging is the idea that there exists a platform from which they can promote themselves. Which means for them to be recognized their blog needs to.  The steps mentioned below hold good for any blog and can be replicated within the context of an organization as well.

Leave Comments :

Leaving comments is part of the foundation for starting a blog community. Most bloggers would be happy to respond to your questions, only if you are sincere. Do not use comments as a way of increasing the traffic on your site, that will happen gradually. Meaningful discourse is the target here.

Trackbacks :

A trackback is a mechanism that allows bloggers to keep track of which blogs have commented on their articles and if those articles have influenced other blogs. It’s a great way to start a community and get bloggers to read each others blogs. The plus point about this is that it helps in increasing the traffic flowing to your blog, which lets face it isnt altogether a bad thing.

Tags :

Tags make it easy to navigate a blog and find what you’re looking for. Tags are category names and people can select keywords for their posts. Usually you will see keyword names on the side navigation of a blog. It is also helps the you, the blogger as it helps to organize your blog and eventually your thoughts. Creating a structured layout is very useful to your visitors as it gives them a lot more information to go through, information they might have missed if not for the tags.

The single biggest blunder bloggers can make?? Not updating your content regularly enough. This is a sure way to lose readers on your site as most users ( if they’ve decided your blog is interesting ) expect new content on a “reasonably” regular basis. So keep this in mind, losing readers are a lot easier than gaining new ones.

Now what?

Once you’ve put together your blogging strategy and educated your employees / project team on how best to develop their blog you need to start figuring out how you can start extracting content that is relevant to your business.  I have some thoughts around this and will put them down in another posts soon.

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A blog (a contraction of the term “Web log”) is a Web site, usually maintained by an individual with regular entries of commentary, descriptions of events, or other material such as graphics or video. Entries are commonly displayed in reverse-chronological order. “Blog” can also be used as a verb, meaning to maintain or add content to a blog. - Wikipedia

Estimates have blogs growing at the rate of 20,000 every day. Now that’s quite a figure. Just imagine if you were able to tap into that vast array of blogs and extract something useful. Then imagine you could do this whenever you needed the information, would make your life a lot easier wouldn’t it?

So what makes them such marvelous information houses? well for one, it can be run by pretty much anyone, a single individual, a group or an organization. A simple layout allows people to collaborate , share presentations and other documents. It’s very well structured, allowing articles to be grouped by specific categories and to top it all of its search able. Now put a couple of hundred of these together and you get the picture.

The Blog is a platform that’s relatively easy to manage and can easily be scaled up to meet requirements of any size and the best part, most blogging software is available free of cost and even the ones that aren’t are reasonably inexpensive. Always a good angle to push when you have a tight budget.

Using these Blogs within your organization or project team is a great way to promote sharing of thoughts and ideas.

There are generally three types of Corporate Blogs:

• The CEO Blog
• The External Blog
• The Internal Blog

CEO Blogs

CEO Blogs have been gaining popularity for a while now as it becomes a medium for employees and people outside the company to connect with the leadership.

External Blogs

External blogs allow corporates to communicate with their employees, clients and vendors. Putting a human face to the company unlike the memo’s that every corporate employee receives when something of any significance ( well, most of the time ) occurs.

While external blogs are great tools for communication their primary purpose is for PR.

Internal Blogs

Blogs at the team level allow much greater collaboration than was possible before, ideas, thoughts and musing can be captured. Information that is generally lost in a large forum of ideas or that is absent from “reviewed” documentation. Simply, they are perfect tools for capturing and harnessing tacit knowledge in the organization.

It becomes a medium to allows users from different sections of the organization to connect with each other. More importantly it becomes a conduit to allow people to talk about subjects that are not part of their regular job description.

Constraints

There are of course a number of constraints when blogging within a company. The most predominant is that employees are generally a lot more careful about what they say and how they say it. Unlike a personal blog there is always an apprehension about how what they say is going to be perceived. This could act as a hurdle to many of them blogging.

Selling the Idea

The leadership team would be very interested in promoting blogging as long as you have clearly defined goals of how you are going to harness the knowledge.

You might try talking to employees about the advantages of having a platform they can use to share their ideas and be recognized. A blog becomes a powerful tool to market themselves.

So, if you’re company hasnt started using blogs you might want to broach the topic to them. Start small, stay internal till you come up with a blogging strategy to maximize the effectiveness of the message and you might just surprise yourself.

If you’ve experimented with Blogging within your project or organization do leave a comment on what your experiences were.

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The Project Portal has become an integral part of the project team’s work model, and while some projects do rely on internal shared drives to host information ( essentially code and documentation ) there is a strong case to move content to a platform that promotes collaboration.

The need to make this transition is stronger when you have a large team that is distributed across the globe.  With the large volumes of documentation that a project generates over its life it’s imperative that data sanctity is kept.

Why do we need to do this?

Well, a portal that’s accessible to teams across the globe allows them to interact with one another and increase synergy levels.

1. Becomes a quick reference for important documents and reduces confusion when multiple versions of the same document exists in different places.
2. Promotes interaction between team members across geographies and acts as a content guide for future issues.
3. Reduces learning time by promoting sharing online and improving productivity by reducing time required to identify relevant content and experts.
4. Can be used as a platform to communicate with team members regarding issues related to the project / company and client.

What should a project portal have?

There are a number of features that could find it’s way to a project portal, including:

• Project Announcements
• Client Information / News from the Client / Client Appreciation
• Contact Information of the PM, Tech Leads, Key Resources
• Calendar
• Tracking of Tasks and Issues
• A Resource Management Section
• Document Libraries for project artifacts
• Best Practices / Lessons Learned
• Discussion Forums
• The Project Wiki

Project Office.net has a great tool that allows you to perform a number of activities that are required during the execution of a project. In future posts we will do a walk through of the product and understand how its various features can be put to good use.

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Just a quick update for the folks of you who are keeping a very keen eye on the new MOSS 2007 developments.

Atlassian can now be used inside of MOSS. Using a new connector, this has been made possible. This really gives MOSS users the option of working with a new wiki service.

Some of the features as described on their site :

Embed your wiki

Any Confluence wiki page or blog post can be embedded into SharePoint. This allows you to blend enterprise documents and lists with agile wiki content, all on a single SharePoint page.

Wikis aren’t wikis without the “Edit” button — so we made sure to put one in. You can edit embedded Confluence wiki pages directly from SharePoint with a single click.

Beyond wiki pages, you can embed dynamic Confluence page trees into SharePoint, for ease of navigating your wiki content.

Local lists

Any SharePoint list can be easily included in a Confluence wiki page. This enables you to combine contextual wiki content with more structured data such as document lists, calendars and other SharePoint collections.

Search once

With combined search, you’re guaranteed to find what you’re looking for — no matter whether it’s a wiki page, a Word document or a blog post. With the SharePoint Connector for Confluence you can now search enterprise wiki pages and SharePoint documents in one location.

There is no user retraining required! Use the same search box as you do today — in either SharePoint or Confluence — and you’ll find content from both platforms.

Login. Once.

With the SharePoint Connector for Confluence installed, users can seamlessly navigate between SharePoint and Confluence, with no interruptions. SharePoint and Confluence share the same set of users via Microsoft’s Active Directory and Atlassian’s Crowd.

Each user has a single username and password for both applications. Thanks to the single sign-on (SSO) capabilities of Crowd, there’s no more repeatedly logging in. Sign in to one application and you’re signed into both.

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I just completed reading a rather interesting survey done by The McKinsey Quarterly. This was done to identify if and how businesses are using Web 2.0 within their organization. I was pleasantly surprised to note that a large percentage of companies have started taking a serious look at Web 2.0 technology implementations within their ranks.

This perhaps is driven by the fact that user-driven online services like MySpace, Wikipedia and YouTube are gaining popularity. The technologies that these applications use however are known to most corporates, social networks, blogs, p2p networking and web services.

However most of the companies that have invested in Web 2.0 technologies have stayed away from popular trends like blogs, instead they’ve placed greater emphasis on technologies that enable automation and networking.

Over 50% of the executives surveyed said they were pleased with the results of their investments, the early movers however were much more satisfied than those that started out later. The general feel was that a majority of the respondents wished they had started this a lot earlier. Of all the Web 2.0 technologies, Web services seemed to be the most popular with collective intelligence and peer-to-peer networking coming in a close second.

A survey by industry showed that Retail and Hi-tech leads the pack when it comes for future plan in Web 2.0 investments. In the Region category, India leads the pack with an 80% of respondents stating that they have plans to implement web 2.0 technologies over the next year.

How they use them : Another interesting observation was the end use for these technologies. 70% of the respondents said they use it for interfacing with customers, 51% use it to interface with suppliers and partners and 75% for managing collaboration internally.

Again, the most popular Web 2.0 technology being used by corporate today seems to be Web-services.

From a purely Knowledge Management perspective, the most popular Web 2.0 Technologies seem to be Collective intelligence ( 36%), Peer to peer networking ( 65%), Social networking (60%) and Mash-ups (70%).

The most successful of these implementations were performed at the grass roots level. The advantage of this approach was that most of these projects were taken up by their natural owners within the organization.

The value of these technologies are already having an impact on business, customers are now able to have dialogues with the companies.

Read the full survey here:

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In “Its all about the Blog” we discussed how the Blog has gone from being a simple medium of communication to a powerful media tool, and “Blogs and KM” addressed the issue of managing knowledge in an organization through Blogs. Since the last few posts have focused on certain aspects of the Sharepoint 2007 server ( MOSS 2007 ) i decided to do a small article on how Blogs were implemented in this environment.

Microsoft realized that in creating a content authoring platform they couldn’t afford to leave out the one aspect that has revolutionized the method by which content authoring is being tackled today, namely blogs. So in an effort to harness Blogs and promote their use in a corporate setting Microsoft introduced Blogs in their latest version of Sharepoint.

Being true to Blogs Microsoft hasnt tampered too much with the basic layout, which means there is a seamless transition to corporate blogging for people who are already familiar with the concept of personal blogs.

They’ve incorporated a complete gamut of features that we’ve come to expect from any Blog.

Some of these are :

• Comments
• Categories
• Blogroll
• Search
• Permalink
• RSS feeds
• Calendar

Using the Sharepoint platform allows for certain additional features to be incorporated into the Blog. You can now publish information on your blog via e-mail’s, this includes sending documents as attachments ( something most blogs dont support ). API support for word 2007 actually allows you to directly interface with your blog and submit content through a word document on your desktop. Advanced features like Sharepoint permissions can be inherited and used throughout the Blog.

Multiple Authors can contribute to the same blog, and since the Blog ( like most of the features on Sharepoint ) is built on Webparts it really allows an amazing level of customization. Mobile View allows users to access blogs on Sharepoint via their mobile phones, a very useful feature as the percentage of people living on their Blackberry’s and Treo’s seem to be growing at an alarming pace.

Perhaps the biggest advantage of using the Sharepoint Platform to host your Blog is the fact that you can get details like user contact info and such as the application interfaces directly with the organizations exchange server. A feature that most corporate would definitely find very useful.

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