The last example talked about how Zappos, the online retalier, uses twitter to reach out to its customers. So the questions is would it make sense for your company?

What is twitter  ? ( for those of you who haven’t been caught up in this craze ).

Twitter is a free social networking and micro-blogging service that enables its users to send and read messages known as tweets. Tweets are text-based posts of up to 140 characters displayed on the author’s profile page and delivered to the author’s subscribers who are known as followers. Senders can restrict delivery to those in their circle of friends or, by default, allow open access. Users can send and receive tweets via the Twitter website, Short Message Service (SMS) or external applications. While the service cost nothing to use, accessing it through SMS may incur phone service provider fees.

Since its creation in 2006 by Jack Dorsey, Twitter has gained notability and popularity worldwide. It is sometimes described as the “SMS of the Internet”^[3] since the use of Twitter’s application programming interface for sending and receiving short text messages by other applications often eclipses the direct use of Twitter. - Wikipedia

Tweeting is a rather new concept for a lot of people most of whom can’t wrap their head around the concept of sending “thoughts” out on a random basis. It’s facing the very same barriers that blogs faced when corporates first started evaluating them, primarily the question of “how on earth do we use this effectively”?

So why tweet?

Well,  its a great way of connecting with people. However you need to understand the traditional “targetting” methods do not apply as the way you “get” followers is very arbitrary.

It’s probably the wrong medium to use if you want to share large volumes of information but great if you want to send a constant stream of “thoughts” out and get feedback from those following you.

So, before you go anywhere you need to first identify what business problem you’d like it to address. If the medium doesn’t make sense there is no point in wasting time pursuing this direction of thought.Establishing a presence via social medium takes a lot of effort and if you intend to use it as a platform to drive future initiatives a lot of thought has to go into the final solution.

This is meant to engage individuals not large organizations and while some companies do have twitter accounts setup the focus again is to connect with individual users across the web.

Create an account at twitter and play around with it for a while, it is a little confusing initially ( the benefit ) but you’ll eventually get the hang of it.

You can follow me on twitter as well..

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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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Web 2.0 adoption in the corporate sector has been slow, of that there is no doubt. The reliance on traditional information management systems that are heavily process oriented is tremendous. There is very little incentive ( or so a lot of people think ) towards investing in “newer” applications and services.

However there is a slow shift in that line of thought, i read a rather interesting survey conducted by the Mckinsey group on how Web 2.0 is being adopted in large corporates. The indication being that recently there has been a noticeable increase in corporates willing to invest in these new technologies and more importantly the rewards attained as a result of this leap of faith.

On the whole i think it’s a wait and watch game, the one thing you need to understand is that implementing a Web 2.0 application is considered something of a risk as most “corporates” as most do not have the exposure or understanding to realize the benefit it could garner for them.

I’m currently involved in a large project within the company i work for to rollout a large application that encompasses most Web 2.0 features like Wikis, Blogs, Social networking and such. Something that i personally feel has become long overdue and i can already forsee the huge benefit to the employee within the organization.

A decade or so ago the office was a treasure trove of new technologies, today the world wide web gives you a better variety of tools. What organizations need to realize is that most of their employees depend on these tools and services on a daily basis and the flexibility it provides them only strengthens the argument that there are serious drawbacks to the services they have to use back at the office.

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Wiki’s in SharePoint 2007 - Part 2

“My last post introduced you to Wiki’s in Sharepoint 2007 ( MOSS 2007 ). I have since had the time to explore this feature in greater detail, and to be honest was very impressed by what i discovered. I was a little apprehensive about the wiki feature for the simple reason that being part of the Sharepoint platform might have encouraged over-engineering. However aside for the rich text editor ( which makes the process of adding content that much easier ) the basic layout and functionality of the wiki hasn’t changed. So if you are a contributor on Wikipedia you needn’t worry.”

YouTube a KM Platform

“YouTube a KM Platform?? Are you out of your mind? thats probably the first reaction you had when you read the title of this post. Honestly? i don’t blame you , i was having the same thoughts a week ago , but then as you know when an idea takes hold it takes a while to shake off.

So I asked myself this very simple question, What makes a good KM platform? and then started listing the points down one by one. This is what i’ve come up with so far ( this is a very basic list, so bear with me)”

Why is Knowledge Sharing so different in the corporate world?

“Users spend over a hundred hours every month on collaborative sites like Wikipedia. While it seems cruel to call this Knowledge “Management”, it does describe the very foundation of KM. Get people to share their knowledge.

More importantly, this cultural phenomenon has shown long term sustainability of such initiatives without traditional drivers like Rewards and Recognition. ( Read Here ). Which addresses the basic question this post raises : Why is Knowledge Sharing so different in the corporate world? For a lot of you the answer might seem obvious, but with the trend of KM adoption in corporates rising there is a serious need to understand what can be done about this.”

MS Wiki Vs Wiki

“Right, i’ve already put up two prior posts on the wiki functionality thats available on MOSS 2007 ( Microsoft Office Sharepoint Server 2007 ) , You can read them here and here.

Now while it’s a great thing that Microsoft have finally awoken to the wonder that is the wiki, an in-depth look at the functionality would give an average wiki user the shudders.”

Knowledge Mapping in Organizations

“Why is establishing a knowledge map important for your organization? Well, lets look at it this way, unless you had a travel map you wouldn’t know what was out there and more importantly you wouldn’t know how to get there. A knowledge map for a company works in pretty much the same way. It tells the company where their knowledge resides and where the gaps are.

However the most important thing to keep in mind when creating a knowledge map in your organization is to map it in the context of the business processes that you are trying to improve. Otherwise you end up mapping knowledge you have no idea what to do with”

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Why is Knowledge sharing so different in the corporate world?

“Users spend over a hundred hours every month on collaborative sites like Wikipedia. While it seems cruel to call this Knowledge “Management”, it does describe the very foundation of KM. Get people to share their knowledge.

More importantly, this cultural phenomenon has shown long term sustainability of such initiatives without traditional drivers like Rewards and Recognition. ( Read Here ). Which addresses the basic question this post raises : Why is Knowledge Sharing so different in the corporate world? For a lot of you the answer might seem obvious, but with the trend of KM adoption in corporates rising there is a serious need to understand what can be done about this.”

Rewards OR Recognition?

“One of the biggest challenges in Knowledge Management these days is getting people involved in the process. Unlike other initiatives which use a mix of the carrot and stick approach, KM can only be promoted using the carrot.

Now the challenge is, what motivates the average users to contribute towards the system? Is it the rewards or the recognition? From what i’ve seen its a balance between both.

However, for the long term sustainability of any KM initiative there has to a be focused move from a rewards based system to one of recognition. For one, its cheaper , second and more importantly, studies done in corporates have shown that the single largest motivator amongst employees is recognition by their peers and superiors.”

Metrics and Knowledge Management

“For the longest time ( well, since a couple of weeks ago ) , i’ve been trying to come to grips with how Knowledge Management in theory differs so much from actual practice in corporates.

My previous posts on corporate KM and ROI on KM are an indication of my thoughts on this subject. As those of you who practice KM in the corporate world know, the success of any initiative is determined by its ROI.

The problem of addressing ROI is one which we face on a daily basis. The question they all ask “How do you determine , in numbers , the effect of a KM program?”.”

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BPO is one of the fastest growing markets in the industry right now, and with the increasing number of companies trying to capitalize on this area existing players are finding that they’re margins are being squeezed. Boosting margins and not loosing business as a result of high costs are right at the top of any corporates “To-do list “, one way of accomplishing this is to use low skilled individuals at a low cost to boost margins. The biggest disadvantage of this as every knows is the that the quality of the work suffers a great deal which could very easily lead to loosing clients.

So how do you increase your profit margins and still keep quality high? The most logical way would be to improve the efficiency and the effectiveness of your agents on the floor and Knowledge Management provides a method of doing just that.

The focus areas would be :

Efficiency

• Decreasing average handle time
• Minimizing talk time

Effectiveness

• Increasing first call resolution
• Decreasing call escalation percentages
• Reducing repeat calls
• Reducing agent training time
• Provide consistent, accurate answers

Innovation

• Creating oppurtunities to cross-sell
• Increasing customer satisfaction
• Decrease employee turnover

Knowing which areas to improve performance is the first step to establish a KM framework that could tackle these issues.

The biggest disadvantage BPO’s face is that a large number of them deal with highly confidential client information that is so safely guarded that most processes work as separate entities within the BPO. There isn’t any information sharing outside this area, however capturing ideas like best practices and replicating them across the organization and in every client process would display an immediate improvement, an approach most BPO’s do not follow in a structured manner.

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There has been a massive shift in thought over the last decade or so , from when corporations were valued on their physical holdings. However it has since become clear that a corporates worth has more to do with its people than its other physical entities.

Billions of dollars are lost every year over something as simple as communication, and when i speak of communication i’m talking about sharing of information , knowledge amongst co-workers. There have been instances where companies having factories right opposite each other haven’t been able to share knowledge due to culture constraints.

So, the need of the hour was to create a framework that allowed best practices to be shared by everyone in an organization. The biggest challenges with creating a system like this unfortunately is the fact that a large portion of the knowledge being dealt with is tacit in nature.

Some of the major roadblocks to sharing best practices are listed below:

Ever been in a situation where you don’t know who the person sitting across your cubicle is? Well, thats a classic case of an organization working in a silo’d environment. The larger it gets, the more complicated its hierarchy. In some cases it gets so bad that you barely know the rest of the people working in your team. Its a classic case of your left hand not knowing what you’re right hand is doing, and in some cases it gets so bad that your left hand doesnt even know it has a right one. This is the single largest problem of sharing knowledge in an organization.

Sharing of knowledge and information is still considered foolhardy as traditionally your value in the organization is determined by how unique you are, and the expertise you bring with you. Expecting you to suddenly start sharing the very knowledge that makes you a valuable commodity is a tall order. So a serious culture change is required before actually sharing of knowledge takes place.

There has always been a huge reliance on explicit information, “unless i have it documented there isnt anything i can do about it”. This massive reliance on explicit information means a large part , over 80% , of your employees knowledge isnt being tapped. Companies have slowly come to realize this and steps are being taken to ensure that tacit knowledge gets an equal, if not more important place in the information hierarchy.

For a learning and sharing culture to grow it needs to be rewarded from time to time. Only when this is done will the actually transfer of knowledge and best practices take place.

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It’s all about the Blog

“Blogs have caused quite a stir since their inception. Now the average Joe has the power to reach audiences across the globe, and the best part about it? it doesn’t cost a cent!! Even mainstream media is recognizing it’s unprecedented growth and the effect on society at large.

Corporates have slowly started waking up to the huge opportunities of this vast means of communication. The main attraction? well, for most companies interacting with their customers, building relationships and getting vital feedback. Not to mention growing their existing business.”

Communities of Practice

“We’ve all heard the term, but what exactly is it? and how does it benefit us more importantly. In simple terms a CoP is “A channel for knowledge to flow and a means to strengthen the social fabric in an organization.

A lot of people, corporates included, are under the illusion that creating a large repository of information would automatically result in people gravitating to this information base on a regular basis. Nothing could be further from the truth, and having received my dose of this let me tell you its a sure way to take the wind out of your sails.”

The Knowledge Management RoadMap

” Every journey has a start point and a destination, making sure you get to the right destination is the job of a road map. To ensure you get to the destination on time, within budget and without accidents you need to make sure you have a damn good roadmap and a plan.”

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