Tuesday, February 24, 2009

Is social networking over exposing me?

Ok so I'm on facebook, twitter, friendfeed and a few other places I can quite remember right now. All my social networking sites are linked, so if I write a comment on facebook is comes up on my twitter home page for example. The thing is facebook is more for friends to read my comments and see goofy pictures and play mafia wars right. I want to be more conservative and professional on twitter (only get 140 characters so...). On my blog I want to sound like someone will converse with me from time to time and not a total loser. But i have my twitter feed coming up on my blog too so anything commented on facebook also shows.

Am I being rightly paranoid that my peers or worse potential future employers will see this rubbish and think "uh huh knew that phone interview was too good look at his blog and twitter comments!!" I know that I'm just getting all Web 2.0'ed sort to speak but how long will it take the more straight laced corporate cookie types to catch up ? will they one day think, yeah that guy was ahead of his time or will they think I'm a hopeless case of sad?

Anyone have any thoughts around this? have you thought about putting yourself about on social networks for work or fun and getting caught out?

Thursday, February 12, 2009

Web Meetings/Meeting Collaboration

I've been meaning to rant for some time about how web meetings or web conference calls aren't really very productive, if you have too many of them. Even if archived and played back its still audio with perhaps a mouse following a PPT around the screen, nothing you can read or view at leisure. I want to know what people think of conference calls where you're "multitasking" on other activities and really giving your full attention to the call, right?... You are sitting there 100% concentrated on listening and absorbing the content of the call aren't you? hmm.....

Would the following scenario be a better alternative? You receive your conference call invitation as usual you click to accept and the appointment gets added to your calendar. Then you receive another email with a link to a meeting space that was created when the conference call was scheduled, now you can view material, PPTs etc... before you get on the call. You can also see the other participants invited, perhaps interact with them through IM or create discussions within this meeting space. How much time would this already shave off a conference call?

Don't get me satrted on how long it actually takes entering a conf call and making sure your phone is synched up with the web urrghhh thats another topic.

Our lives will become so much easier adopting more social working habits, its so much easier when you give someone a heads up, informally even of a meetings agenda they might actually attend then :) It means a certain amount of vulnerability though in opening up to your meeting participants before the call starts, you might get shot down before you begin! But how else will we start to get more collaborative and open? Its like learning a new language you know you'll have to speak to a native speaker one day and they will laugh at you (In China they laugh at you anyway :( ) It's changing your fundamental working habits instead of hording, you will become a giver. Tacit knowledge is so valuable yet somewhat difficult to part with, not entirely impossible but difficult to learn how to spread around for sure. Do we need rewiring to learn new sharing skills?

Who in the entperise other than the obvious candidate HR should take on the evangalist mantle? Forget about the techies its enough that they can create the platform and give us the technology to able to work this way, surely it shoulnd't be IT driven. Internal Communications? do these departments still exist in numbers? Marketing? I don't see the clear choice personally should a new group be setup within the organization? Social Media Group, Enterprise 2.0 department, Social Networking and Portals....

What's your take on it all? are you going through any of the above mentioned stages right now?

Wednesday, February 11, 2009

Web 2.0 and trying to bring it inhouse

There are so many blogs and people twittering on about Web 2.0 and how social networking is going to transform businesses. Can anyone seriously admit to the fact that most companies are still way behind on transparency and keep their employees in the dark most of the time. Knowledge is power after all so hord it, don't let anyone else in on it. Thats the mindset in businesses today, how will social networking change that anytime soon? Who is going to mandate the organization to blog or wiki their minds so that others can gleam the previously unknown?


Who wants to stand out and advocate web 2.0 principles to the company? isn't that like saying "yes, I'm here, fire me..."


Web 2.0 is what facebook like concepts? can we really have an internal facebook and expect to get away with saying what we want? I doubt it. It is the young though who twitter and blog and facebook, the youngsters will determine how deep the transformation will go in an enterprise right? But the olds are the ones holding the purse strings, they surely don't want to invest in web 2.0 like technology, thats like writing yourself out of a job right?

So how will any sort of Enterprise 2.0 initiative move forward?