Is This Future Shock? » Twitter

Twitter Chats for Knowledge Management

SteveEllwood — Tue, 24 Nov 2009 21:01:38 +0000

How did a Twitter chat work?

I had a brief meeting today, about Knowledge Management.

I didn’t know where the meeting started; I didn’t know everyone who was there. I didn’t know when the meeting started – and I wasn’t invited.

How did that work then? Basically, I spotted a tweet from someone I follow that was hashtagged with #KMers. Following the link got me to the live search for the hashtag, and I was able to take part in the lively discussion – the bit that particularly interested me was the creative tension between folksonomy and taxonomy.

What’s it all about?

Chasing it up after the event, I found the excellent KMers.org site, where a group of Knowledge Management professionals

aim to use a Social Media tool (Twitter Chat) and a CMS tool (Drupal) to run a site that helps KMers share information about the practice of Knowledge Management

I just lucked into it. I enjoyed the section I was involved in, and I’d recommend future events.

You can see the transcript of the [Pilot Chat] Best Ideas from KM World.

If you are interested in Knowledge Management you should take a look. Maybe I’ll see you there?

On Tweckling during conferences (socialfish.org)

Bookmark It

Hide Sites

Sometimes, what you don’t know is surprising

SteveEllwood — Mon, 10 Aug 2009 14:12:27 +0000

: Image via Wikipedia

I’m still trying to find my way through what social media/”Web2.0” actually means to me.

I have accounts on lots of services, and use:
Twitter – a lot
Facebook – a bit
LinkedIn – a bit
I blog – a little

I glance at other services, share some photos on Flickr and follow a few folk on friendfeed. Prolific posters on any of the services, I tend to consume via RSS.

One of these is Robert Scoble, who is hugely well known – in certain circles – and has made a recent career about knowing things in this space.

I was staggered to see in his recent post Twitter’s platform shortcoming

… last week I learned that there are tons of followers who just follow you to get you to follow back

I thought everyone knew that. But then, there’s loads of stuff I don’t even know that I don’t know.

Why do *I* follow people?
I know you, you’re geographically close to me, I liked your blog post, someone I follow has @ replied with something of interest.

If you follow me, and you’re not immediately interesting, or your tweets are pushing links all the time… sorry, I won’t follow you.

I can’t remember ever knowing something before @scobleizer. I did this time.

Bookmark It

Hide Sites

BT Twitter accounts

SteveEllwood — Tue, 16 Jun 2009 09:28:41 +0000

Following a tweet from @andypiper about a list of IBM Tweeters, I wondered if it would be a good idea to have a list of BT Twitter accounts.

As @andypiper said

although the list of “IBM*” Twitter IDs is useful, it is far from complete – there are many IBMers active here

So, I don’t feel so bad in pointing to:

@BizExperience – Twitter account for BT Business Experience 2009 29 June – 3 July
@BTCare – BT’s face for residential customers
@BTBusiness – BT’s face for business customers
@BTCloudApps – integrating connectivity, bus apps, devices and service for the total cloud computing solution
@BTFresca – behind many of the world’s fastest growing and most successful ecommerce websites
@BTInsight – BT’s web site for small business
@BTOpenZone – news and help for BTOZ customers
@BTServiceUpdate – Service status update for BT Business Broadband or phone line (see http://ow.ly/ukd3)
@BT Tradespace – online community for SMEs, individual sellers and customers
@btviewpoint -
BT Viewpoint – Latest developments and trends in business communications and cloud computing
@insightsideas – Business insights and Ideas from BT Global Services
@ribbit – open platform for voice/2.0 integration
@9600- Andrew Back, Open Source Strategist at BT Osmosoft
@busyhobs- Alan Hobson, BT Global Services
@gadgetmanmike – Mike Hinton, Head of Service Management EMEA, BT Conferencing
@gkc – Gary Casey
@iain_mac – GM for BT Business Service
@Jermolene – Jeremy Ruston, BT’s Open Source head lad
@jpdenison – GM for BT Systems and Innovation
@labete – James Marwood, Change consultant, self protection instructor, productivity geek
@markmorrell – BT’s Intranet manager
@martinfaux – working on BTB’s Proactive Digital Care initiative
@mccartc3 – Clyne McCarthy
@mcreedy – Michael Creedy – BT Wholesale Customer Services Network & Planning
@osmosoft – Open source application developers
@psd – Paul Downey, Internet Kitteh and author of The Web is Agreement and The URI Is The Thing
@raymond_merrill – Raymond Merrill, HR Solutions specialist
@sgt101 – Simon Thompson, chief research scientist for intelligent interactive systems
@srowney – Simon Rowney, Head of Technology Improvement
@stan1ey – Steve Stanley, BI Specialist within Retail Service Design
@Stewniblock – Stew Niblock, works for BT Business, specializes in setting up lines, broadband and mobiles for business

I’ll add any other sites/folk who identify themselves as BT on request.

I work for BT and I’m @steveellwood, but highlight this blog post is not an official BT statement of policy, and was done to provide a quick link.

Bookmark It

Hide Sites

Thinking social media, ID and Facebook names

SteveEllwood — Mon, 15 Jun 2009 07:12:46 +0000

Two face

Having seen all the furore about Facebook names, I got mine.

Originally, it is http://facebook.com/steveellwood.

However, you can also find it – and me – at http://steveellwood.com/facebook.

Similarly, I’m http://twitter.com/steveellwood – but you can find me at http://steveellwood.com/twitter.

What’s interesting – to me in any case - is how I ended up with my “branded” pages.

I’d seen Paul Downey, @psd, make a comment about facebook names. I’d a while ago added Anil Dash, @anildash to my friendfeed list – to my shame, I’ll admit I’m still learning what I might do with Friendfeed, so I spotted the Facebook names post I blogged about the other day.

In the comments about that, I saw the approach Ross Rader (@rossrader) took, using the link to his domain.

I twittered about this, and a friend and colleague Rob Collingridge, @robcollingridge, took this up, and implemented it on his domain. I’m like “Wow, was that easy to do?”

Rob sticks up some instructions on his Facebook wall. Drat, my domain is hosted on wordpress.com. Maybe I need to selfhost. I’ll ask.

Another twitter friend, @akaSteve, encourages me, and kindly offers assistance. I already have hosting though, so a day later, my domain is moved, my blog is moved and upgraded – and I can point to Twitter and Facebook from my domain.

All because I saw something on Twitter.
Image Credit: larry&flo

Bookmark It

Hide Sites

What's my blog about?

SteveEllwood — Sun, 17 May 2009 10:12:30 +0000

Image Credit:wordle

Bookmark It

Hide Sites

The Foreign & Commonwealth Office – social media experts?

SteveEllwood — Thu, 05 Feb 2009 17:59:23 +0000

I’ve just remotely attended a really interesting presentation in London [OK, I attended remotely], by Media Snackers who talked about engaging with the young, through social media and so on.

Couple of things:

The world’s changed, and it’s not turning back

used to be their strapline – but they’re now emphasising

cheaper, quicker, sexier

as what the social media stuff can do. Look at their site to see what they are about.
A couple of the points they raised struck me – the takeup of social media amongst the young is astonishing; they highlighted a Forrester report which segment the social media area into

Creators
Critics
Collectors
Joiners
Spectators
Inactives

and this is segmented by age – with the creatives and critics highly represented in 16-24, with spectators and inactives being preponderantly 50+ (like me!)

perhaps nothing too new for some of us – although there are scary figures about the change in media consumption, but something he said struck a chord. More or less:

… a lot of people seem to be getting into the space; I mean, look at the Foreign & Commonwealth Office – they’re a lot of suits, but they’re on Flickr, on YouTube, on Twitter, they blog… where are you? I mean, c’mon guys…

I thought, that can’t be right, can it?
Hmm…
So, I had a brief look, and found a Flickr, YouTube, Twitter and blog platform presence for the Foreign & Commonwealth Office. It may not be exciting, but it looks like they do have a coherent social media strategy.

What are you doing?

If someone looks for you on Flickr, YouTube, Facebook, or Twitter – what will they find? If they search for a blog presence or social media involvement – what will they see?

If you’re not taking part in the conversation… it will go right on. Without you.

Bookmark It

Hide Sites

Social Media & Knowledge Management

SteveEllwood — Sun, 01 Feb 2009 12:20:24 +0000

Social Media in the Enterprise

I wondered about the impact social media tools were making in knowledge management for the enterprise. We have got some very rapid growth in the takeup of the tools in my company; we have loads of wikis, internal blogs – growing use of Twitter.

I wondered about the difference between *Information* Management & *Knowledge* management.

Thanks to a tweet from @elsua I found my way to an excellent presentation on Knowledge Management given by John Bordeaux (@JBordeaux, since you ask).

What I Did

View more presentations from John Bordeaux.

As with many of these things, what you can take away from it depends to some extent on your organisational culture. I found it very interesting, particularly the view on

Basic information sharing infrastucture – just do it!
…

Enterprise search

Democratic web publishing

Social media! Everything 2.0

Image Credit: I am K.E.B.

Bookmark It

Hide Sites

@SouthwestAir responds to questions to La Guardia

SteveEllwood — Thu, 29 Jan 2009 14:32:00 +0000

I’ve posted about corporate use of Twitter before. I like the way it can build a brand’s position and personality.

I really liked this use of a response to a question from Jaunted by the Twitter face of @SouthwestAir (Christi) – and of course, she tweeted about it. Now, that’s a great way to use your Twitter account. They get it.

Flock O' Tweets – sorts tweeters into flocks

SteveEllwood — Wed, 28 Jan 2009 23:13:37 +0000

Every now and then you find a little mashup that makes you go “Now that’s a good idea!”.

Flock O’Tweets is one.
Put a group of those you follow in, separated by commas: out pops a nice little RSS feed for you to consume at your leisure.

Give it a try.

Will your social media engagement scale?

SteveEllwood — Mon, 26 Jan 2009 16:00:21 +0000

Do you listen to your customer?

We do … that’s what we all say. It’s what we all want to do. Sometimes, particularly in a big corporate, it gets to be a bit difficult to hear what they’re all shouting to you.

Sometimes, it might be “Thanks”; sometimes, “Can you do it tomorrow?”; it might even be “I want to complain”. We want to hear all of those. We want our customers to know we’ve heard them.

How do they talk to you

Ideally, how they want to. They can ring you, email you – hey, even write to you.

What if they use Twitter?

@SouthwestAir and @ComcastCares are examples where corporates engage with an audience – they look for who’s tweeting at them, and talk back to them or help them.

@stephenfry is an extreme example of an individual – some 63k people follow him and he follows back about 32k. He can’t hope to see everything that comes through [replies virtually every 5-10 seconds], but he does engage with his audience. [You can find me at @steveellwood, but I only have 203 followers - but I follow 234 people!]

What if they use Facebook

What groups are being set up around or about your brand? Are they positive? Are they YourFirmSucks? How are you going to deal with it? If you don’t, what’s the message you’re giving? Not saying anything, is making a statement – whether you mean it or not.

Should you engage with your customers via social media

If you start to, and more customers pile in, will it scale?
Chris Brogan (surprisingly enough @chrisbrogan) says in Are you Important to me?

No. No, it will not scale. You cannot … maintain a 1:1 relationship with every single person who interacts … I think the same is true of using these tools within an organization. Only, the beauty is this: inside an organization, you can spread the connections out a bit. Not everyone has to talk with Tony Hsieh at Zappos. They might want to, but they will find that there are plenty of other great folks there.

Ditto Comcast. Ditto Dell. Ditto every brand that’s trying to figure out these tools and this space.

It will not scale, but if you want the bottom line return on investment value, you’d best remember to remind people that they’re important to you. And that’s what these tools do best.

What are you doing to engage with your customers in social media? I’d be interested to hear.

Image Credit:svenwerk

Bookmark It

Hide Sites

Is This Future Shock? » Twitter

Twitter Chats for Knowledge Management

How did a Twitter chat work?

What’s it all about?

Related articles by Zemanta

Sometimes, what you don’t know is surprising

BT Twitter accounts

Thinking social media, ID and Facebook names

What's my blog about?

The Foreign & Commonwealth Office – social media experts?

What are you doing?

Social Media & Knowledge Management

Social Media in the Enterprise

@SouthwestAir responds to questions to La Guardia

Flock O' Tweets – sorts tweeters into flocks

Will your social media engagement scale?

Do you listen to your customer?

How do they talk to you

What if they use Twitter?

What if they use Facebook

Should you engage with your customers via social media