Talk It Up!

Looking forward to Social Media Breakfast Seattle

It's almost here! After months of planning with a crack team of Seattle's social media glitterati, I'm really looking forward to tomorrow morning's inaugural Social Media Breakfast Seattle! Eric Weaver and Rod Brooks will be speaking on “Going Social is More Than Just Talking: Effective Ways to Build Social Media Strategy for your Business.”

Didn't get tickets to the sold out event? Listen to Eric and Rod on the Social Media Breakfast Seattle podcast, follow SMBSeattle on Twitter, fan us on Facebook and watch the live UStream here.

A few reasons why I'm looking forward to this event:

• Curious to find out how the breakfast social media crowd differs from the evening one
• Meeting Eric and Rod in person
• Hearing about social media strategy, not techniques
• Meeting non-social media business people with an interest in social media

Home :: Online Media Legal Network

The Online Media Legal Network (OMLN) is a network of law firms, law school clinics, in-house counsel, and individual lawyers throughout the United States willing to provide pro bono legal assistance to qualifying online journalism ventures and other digital media creators.«« about us »»

via www.omln.org

Is this moving forward toward's Jeff Jarvis' vision of the future described in What Would Google Do?... communal access to legal advice, car buying, real estate.

Democratization of Information

Video of the Democratization of Information panel from #140conf in LA, answering questions such as:

• What is the value of community in news and information?
• How does real-time information contribute to democracy?

Panelists included Arianna Huffington, Jon Klein of CNN, Peter Hirshberg, and Caprice Young.

TypePad Micro: short attention span theater

[Edit 11-18-09: My new TypePad Micro blog, Media Munchies, is here. Using it as a place to share tidbits I hope to blog about later]

Microblogging sites like Twitter were once described as "what happens in between blog posts." Today, TypePad rolled out a new microblog-friendly service called TypePad Micro, which is focused on sharing short bursts of content and maintaining connections.

You know, so now you can BLOG between blog posts.

OK, kidding aside, it's a super-easy way to begin posting content online without the discipline and editing of longer-form blogging. 

The idea behind TypePad Micro is to make it easy for people to curate content from the web--be it text, photos, or videos--and share it in real-time with people on their blog, with easy cross-posting abilities for  Facebook and Twitter. TypePad states:

We very much see this form of blogging as a complement to, not a competitor of, these services. Many bloggers have friends and followers on these great networks but often want to post more than 140 characters, or share photos and videos, with their own narrative and their own design.

True that. The TypePad Micro theme, called Chroma, is streamlined, soothing and a bit reminiscent of Posterous. Here's an example, the site DollarShort.org:

If you already have TypePad Pro, TypePad Micro is now included. It's an interesting idea--set up a Micro account just for quick sharing and easy cross posting to Twitter and Facebook. I don't know if this will kill my Twitter addiction, but the "easy cross posting" is definitely a beneficial feature for a busy social media person like myself who lives her life in the Short Attention Span Theater.

So here's an idea. If you have a "serious" blog and don't want to interrupt its flow with quick photos and updates, see what Stephanie Quilao of Noshtopia has done with her new Chroma blog. Or maybe you are a marketing visionary (dare I say "guru"?) and want to quickly curate great posts, charts, and graphs from other professionals on your site and for your followers on Twitter and Facebook, but keep your main blog with your original content separate.

I can see see TypePad Micro as another way to engage your readers (and their readers). For example, if you add reblog links to your post footers, readers can quickly share your posts on their own TypePad blog, driving new readership and visitors to your blog.

I'm setting up my Micro now... what would you use it for?

Social applications boost productivity

Palo Alto Networks recently released a report with the rather dull title The Application Usage and Risk Report - Fall 2009 Edition.

Not the most riveting of names, but full of findings that serve as ammunition for the employee or social media consultant making the case for using social media tools in the workplace. In fact, consider the report a couple of clips of ammo, with backup weapons.

This report shows how employees in businesses actually use social media on an everyday basis, in real life. No speculation about what they might be doing--bandwidth (literal, not the figurative, mental kind) statistics are included for every social media tool measured.

Social media tools boost productivity

I'll give you the spoiler right up front:

Research from McKinsey & Company and the Association for Information and Image Management (AIIM) shows that companies are seeing measurable benefits from the use of Enterprise 2.0 applications and technologies. Specific benefits include an increased ability to share ideas, more rapid access to knowledge experts, and a reduction in travel, operations, and communications costs. 

So there. Can we put to bed the idea that engaging in social media at work is a waste of time and get on with the business of collaborating now?

The report goes on to point out what most of us have been saying for months: that "the same applications used for social interaction are being used for work-related purposes." The lines between what is considered "professional work" and what is considered "personal interaction" are blurring. After all, most professional connections are personal. And client and customer relationships are based on engagement, both personal and professional. Wise enterprises will recognize the growing trend of work-life integration as well as the value of personal engagement and connections in the workplace and facilitate use of social media tools.

Lest you fear this entry will be a total social media love-fest, there was a word of caution in the report's findings. Many users of Enterprise 2.0 and collaborative tools aren't aware of the risks incurred in using them:

70% can transfer files, 28% are known to propagate malware, and 64% have known vulnerabilities

What are "enterprise 2.0" tools?

And if you're wondering, "Enterprise 2.0" in this case was encompassed a variety of applications and technologies, including everything from messaging to social networking to cloud-based productivity, collaboration, and conferencing. Here's a quick peek:

 
Did you notice that the most heavily-weighted applications weren't just social networking; they were collaborative. Of course IM, webmail and Twitter can be used to chat with your mom, but they are also valuable tools for collaborating with colleagues, consultants, specialists, experts and telecommuting coworkers with H1N1.

Most popular collaborative tools

What are the winning collaborative tools? Check out these stats on Sharepoint, Google Docs and Twitter:

• 91% of enterprise users reported using Sharepoint, up from 37% this spring
• 82% of enterprise users reported using Google Docs, up from 33% this spring
• 89% of enterprise users reported using Twitter as an IM application, up from 35% this spring

Bandwith for these apps grew 17-fold, 290% and 775%, respectively.

Additionally, engagement in all social networking sites shot up, with Facebook (not suprisingly) showing the most spectacular growth:

What does all this data mean?

Employees are shifting from being consumers of data to active contributors. Instead of waiting for management to adopt new tools and tell them which word processing software is the official tool for the company, employees are being proactive. They are adapting tools they use to get things done in their personal lives to work, from checking Wikipedia instead of going to a dictionary to Twittering a specialist instead of asking the boss.

The report points out that almost all of these applications that have become such valuable tools for Enterprise 2.0 began as tools for personal use. The message here is that enterprise needs to rid itself of the bias for tools not specifically created for enterprise. Google Docs can be a powerful collaboration tool if organizations can shed the preconceived idea that free apps used to share grocery lists can also be beneficial in the workplace and boost productivity.

This is what I took away from the plethora of statistics in this report:

• Personal and professional are one and the same. Get over it.
• Consider personal use of new tools a beta-test of professional application. 

What do you think?

Don't follow your passion

Image by andrewhyde.net via CrunchBase

Last night, I had the pleasure of finally meeting Andrew Hyde, founder of Startup Weekend, currently working at TechStars, the premier venue for starting a startup. He was also a judge and reviewer for last year's Knight News Challenge, helping the Knight Foundation to choose the best innovators to receive $5 million in grants.

And he told me something interesting last night. He asked if I'd seen Mike Rowe's TED talk (I hadn't). Mike Rowe, host of the TV show Dirty Jobs, makes it his living to apprentice to those men and women with the filthiest, smelliest, hardest hands-on jobs out there--the ones that "make civilized life possible for the rest of us," as the show's intro proclaims.

In his TED talk, Mike Rowe gives advice that is counter-intuitive to most of us, in particular the Gen X'ers:

'Follow your passion' is the worst advice I ever got.

I blinked. What? Aren't we supposed to love what we do and never work a day again in our lives? Aren't we supposed to rise ourselves out of the sleepwalking daze of working stiffs to live every day to its fullest? And isn't the only way to do that to follow our passions?

Not so, says Rowe:

The ones who really get things done in this world, Rowe insists, are the ones who don't put their passion (or their safety) first. They put the job first. They see a need, and they get things done. They don't worry about the money (although oddly enough, it tends to follow them). They focus on the business of work.

And Rowe brings up another point: as a society, we've declared war on work. We've placed a value on doing less work, and we portray hard workers as heroes or punchlines but nothing in between.

Personally, I'm not likely to be castrating any sheep with my teeth any time soon. But as someone who grew up with the follow-your-passion mantra, Rowe's talk gave me pause. We can't all be idea people. We shouldn't all be creative people. And working hard doesn't mean you're a sucker. Or any less creative, for that matter. It's not about finding your dream job; job satisfaction comes from seeing an opportunity and working your butt off to make it happen.

That doesn't necessarily have to happen on a pig farm. But we'd all do well to remember that it can.