How was it for me?

I created this blog as part of an assignment for a Massey University paper, Social Media Networks for Business. It’s been a valuable experience. There’s nothing like applying knowledge to make it stick.

Image via Flickr by Gmacqueron

It’s easy to read something and think I understand it but the real test is whether I can write about it. Reviewing readings and researching until I can blog about a topic has ensured a better understanding of course content and writing in my own voice, rather than worrying about my academic writing skills, has enabled me to put my full focus into understanding the content.

The other thing I’ve found really valuable is actually blogging, not theorising about blogging, or writing an assignment as if I was writing a blog.

The experience of creating the blog, settling on a name and a corresponding url, thinking about and organising tags and categories and even using the draft and publish tools has been a little bit trial and error, even with an intuitive tool like WordPress. Far better for that learning curve to take place on my own blog rather than a work blog.

Can I use that image?

Another good lesson for me has been sourcing images to use on my blog. I haven’t done this before. I use my own photos for my other work, and in the workplace, my organisation uses images they own or have purchased a licence for.

Image via Flickr by Chinmay

Because I hadn’t needed to, I hadn’t spent any time on Flickr before starting this blog. Now I’m hooked. This doesn’t seem uncommon; the Flickr Addicts group has over 60,000 members.

Checking out my earlier and later blog posts will show how much images add to visual interest and readability. I could go back and add images to my earlier posts, but I haven’t – they illustrate part of my learning journey.

Image sharing is great. Imagine, if you’ve created an image professionally, sharing it can enhance your online reputation by showcasing your skills further than your own networks – everyone wins. Someone gets to use an image they want for free, and the image creator extends their online reach. Now that’s pretty cool, and definitely in line with the principles of Web 2.0.

Licensing such as Creative Commons makes this possible. Creative Commons came about because traditional copyright licensing just didn’t cover all the ways people want to share their creative efforts in the digital space.

It can be confusing figuring out if you can use an image but a quick Google search will throw up a lot of information on the topic. Techsoup has an informative article, Finding and using images from the web, that also gives a list of sites to search for images.

Basically, if you want to use someone else’s image, check they allow it to be shared in the way you want to use it, then acknowledge where you sourced the image. The acknowledgement and a corresponding link back to the original image is what makes the whole sharing thing work by giving the image creator recognition from a wider network. Besides, it’s polite to say ‘thanks’.

If you’ve used the image in a really cool way, why not let the image creator know? Again, there’s win-win potential – if they choose to promote that image use within their networks, your site gains visitors from beyond your digital reach.

Getting social at work

If you’re tasked with implementing social media tools in your workplace, I’d definitely recommend trying out the platforms you’ll be using personally – gaining knowledge and experience in using the tools and on touchy topics like photo sharing will increase your confidence. This is likely to mean you’ll be more comfortable sharing that knowledge with colleagues and encouraging them to do their own research and to communicate it back to the team.

Image via Flickr by isbg6

Set up a wiki or a blog or some other tool where the team can add their experiences and findings and before you know it, you’re demonstrating the four Cs of social networking – you’re communicating the knowledge you gain, connecting to information from others, cooperating by all contributing on the same platform and collaborating by working on the same project. In this instance the project would have the dual purpose of gaining the knowledge and skills to enable your organisation to make successful and productive use of social media tools and creating a knowledge base for future reference.

Let’s Talk About the “C” Words

Communication. Cooperation. Collaboration. Connection.

Niall Cook describes the above as the 4Cs approach to social networking in his book, Enterprise 2.0 – How Social Software Will Change the Future of Work. He uses the 4Cs to categorise social software tools.

Communication

Image via Flickr by Tony Dowler

Cook says that many organisations use the intranet as a downward communication channel – a place for management and HR to provide useful and essential information to staff such as policies, procedures and company news, with perhaps a space for staff to post social event information.

That’s not to say informal communication doesn’t happen within an organisation – of course it does, via emails between colleagues or groups and via that good old-fashioned form of communication – talking, be it over the desk dividers, over coffee or over the phone.

The idea of moving towards a social intranet is that all staff can then benefit from the useful information that is often shared in those conversations, perhaps using tools such as discussion forums, or blogs with comments enabled.

Connection

Image via Flickr by Jlhopgood

In my last post, I discussed tagging and categorising – these are forms of connection. Connecting isn’t just about connecting people with people; it’s about connecting people with the information they need. An example of connection could be enabling tagging within a corporate intranet, then educating people as to how to tag pages.

Tagging, or social bookmarking, could be an easy way of starting a cultural shift towards social tools within an organisation – adding a tag is a low-risk way of sharing and if enough people collaborate by contributing, all staff will see some quick wins as search results become more targeted and relevant.

Cooperation and Collaboration

Image via Flickr by Nazarene Missions International

Is it cooperation or collaboration? I confess; I’m a word nerd, and I spent some time Googling this just for fun. The English Language and Usage section of Stack Exchange has perhaps an oversimplified explanation. Cooperation is described as working with someone to enable them, whereas cooperation is defined as working alongside someone towards something.

There’s also a really interesting discussion on Harold Jarche’s blog, Life in Perpetual Beta, triggered by his blog post, In networks, cooperation trumps collaboration.

In a nutshell, collaboration is about working together towards a shared goal. Resources, risks and rewards are shared. Cooperation is also about working together, but there is still a division of labour, tasks and responsibilities, with each piece separate, but part of the whole.

An example of cooperation in a social networking sense could be a project site on the intranet where each person involved in the project could add their information and contribute to discussions. The whole team then has all information at their fingertips, not just the minutes of a weekly progress meeting to refer to.

Jarche says “collaboration happens around some kind of plan or structure, while cooperation presumes the freedom of individuals to join and participate”.

This is an interesting point.

You can cooperate without collaborating, if collaboration is not the end goal, but can you have any form of collaboration without cooperation?

A wiki is an example of a collaborative tool – all approved users can add or update information and share the knowledge instead of keeping individual notes. An example could be a customer service team with a wiki knowledge base – instead of sharing topical information for customer enquiries via email or on a noticeboard, team members add information to a wiki. Information is searchable, easily accessible and up-to-date.

However, even a collaborative tool such as a wiki involves a degree of cooperation – the collaborative plan or structure could be said to be that everyone ensures content is up to date and relevant, but for this to work a certain degree of cooperation by individuals is assumed.

In closing, I wanted to share a collaborative discovery tool I found – Opinion Space, developed by  University of California Berkeley

One central question is posed, then users “rate” others’ responses, using a sliding scale. Users then create their own response to be rated by other users. The colour, size and location of each opinion on the “map” all mean something, for example the ideas rated as insightful feature prominently.

The Opinion Space website gives links to past and present opinion space projects by different users. One such organisation is the US Department of State – their current question is, appropriately, about using technology to enhance open public dialogue.

This is just one tool I found. What other cool collaborative tools have you discovered or used online?

Social Networking – There’s Nothing Like the Deep End

It was only a mouse click – why did I feel so much like I did that time I’d deliberately stepped off an 11-storey building attached to an abseiling rope?

The reason for the rapid heart rate and twitchy hands: while no heights were involved, I was about to step way out of my comfort zone and show a piece of my creative writing to others and invite them to comment on it. Not only that, I was doing it online and I’d never met any of the people I’d be interacting with!

That was several years ago. Years of travelling had left me a late digital immigrant; not only was that the first time I’d ever exposed my writing to the scrutiny of others, I’d only just got an email address and my trawling of the internet had been restricted to quick web searches for specific information in internet cafes; I’d never before even tiptoed through any kind of social network and here I was, expected to actively contribute as part of my first Massey paper – Creative Writing. Posting and critiquing online wasn’t optional; it was a course requirement.

The first time I posted work was terrifying – what if people didn’t like it? What if they were mean? Worse, what if no-one cared enough about it to comment?

Even more worrying was my first critique of another’s work – what if people thought I was mean? What if they didn’t like what I said or if they thought my comments were stupid?

Through communicating on the forums I became aware others felt the same. Together, we got over it and got on with it.

Our interaction began cooperatively – if you reviewed my writing I’d review yours, for example. Soon, critiques graduated from gently pointing out a typo to more comprehensive and useful analysis. We learned to accept and learn from constructive criticism; to understand it wasn’t a personal attack and paying attention to others’ suggestions really did improve our writing.

Before we knew it, we were collaborating. Each of us realised that while the initial piece of writing would always be the writer’s, the input of others didn’t dilute the work. Instead, it opened us up to new ways of presenting our stories, and allowed us to step back and see through another’s eyes which parts simply didn’t work. We responded to writing that spoke to us, or writing that was sitting alone without a review, moving beyond the quid pro quo of “you comment on mine and I’ll comment on yours”.

The honesty of those critiques was far more valuable than praise. The connections we developed were real; we had a sense of community. Many of us never met or spoke on the phone, but we developed trust and respect for one another’s work and opinions.

While the online space was moderated, we’d all invested in the community by sharing our writing and this seemed to keep our online community self-regulating – critiques were made with empathy, not brutality and participation levels were far beyond course requirements.

Could an online network in a workplace foster those same kinds of bonds? Would people be so willing to contribute if there were a risk that someone would criticise, rather than critique, their opinions and ideas? What could inspire individuals in a workplace to contribute willingly – how could they gain from their contribution?