August 21, 2009
Just another thought about micro blogging in relation to personal branding
In regards to micro blogging I think some people should think more about how other people might understand them by reading their status updates. One of my ‘friends’ on Facebook (actually I dont know her that well, we just met each other via a friend at a party once) is almost only writing negative status opdates on her profile. She only writes about stuff that irritate her and she really has a bad attitude. Maybe thats just her way to blow off steam, but I have really gotten a bad impression of her. If I was to hire her in my organisation I think I might think twice about that beause of her bad attitude.
Assessment criteria and personal branding
First of all, sorry for this being such a long blog post. I believe this is not preferable in a blog post, so hope you will bear with me and I will try to avoid this in future posts.
I have been asked to write a reflective post on my blogging experience so far. Additionally I am to reflect on my practical ability to leverage off web 2.0 to enhance personal branding because one of most important outcomes of this course (Enterprise 2.0 at QUT) is to build a web presence that enhance our personal branding.
I have given a lot of thoughts to how web 2.0 technologies can enhance my personal branding. I guess personal branding is more important than ever because of the globalization. Nowadays it is much easier for companies to find new talented employees online because of all the networks and people are more willing to relocate to other countries for a great job than they were 50 years ago. This has really increased the competition for the good jobs and I have tried to ask myself: How can I get noticed in a crowd of talented people.
In the following I will try to explain what I have done or intend to do to improve my personal branding. I have also found a very helpful blog on www.web2journal.com written by Jesse R. Wardenwho is a member of the Editorial Board of Web Developer’s & Designer’s Journal. He presents a checklist of items you need for an all-encompassing personal branding strategy. The whole checklist can be found here .
First of all it is important to figure out what you want and start walking towards that. It is of course a bit difficult in case you (like me) are not totally sure specifically what kind of career you want. But it is often possible to narrow it down to a specific field of study and then take it from there.
Someone once told me (Jesse also highlights this in his blog) that it is a good idea to prepare a short speech of what you do, so you can explain it somebody in a short concise manner without boring the other person. You have probably heard it before, but it is a good idea to imagine yourself taking an elevator ride where you have to explain to someone onboard what it is you before the ride is come to an end. Almost every time I mention (outside Uni.) that I study a course named Enterprise 2.0 or that I study a Master in E-business people tend to get a vacant expression on their face and I have to explain. That is why I find a small prepared speech very useful. It should be positive, confident and concise, because as we all know that First impression last. There is always a chance that a possible future employer could be present.
As learned in this course it is important to have a web presence. I am represented on Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn and myspace. Other than that I have posted a very detailed resume online on a personal website so I can always refer to that when applying for a job etc. It is currently not available because unfortunately I have not managed to keep it up to date and the webpage needs a new design in order to be more presentable. There exist a lot of good software tools for writing a good resume. A top ten review can be found here. Additional to these there exist a lot that are free to download.
Being present so many places online also put one under the obligation to keep it up to date, so I better do that soon before I am going job hunting again. Additionally to these web 2.0 services I have recently started blogging and I think it can be advantageous in relation to a job because there is a good chance that you are being perceived as knowledgeable. Depending on the outcome of this blog I think I will add it to my resume in the same place where I have listed a link to my LinkedIn profile etc.
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What is mentioned above correlate with the assessment criterion: The ability to engage successfully with the wider community using Web 2.0 tools and techniques. I spend a lot of time on Facebook each day and I have participated in some discussion for a (only Danish so far) where I was seeking advice or making a comment on other peoples contribution. An example is the Danish site www.Trendsales.dk where it is possible to buy stuff consumer-to-consumer (C2C) and discuss all kinds of products. LinkedIn has helped me find contact persons in many companies that were needed for interviews etc. for assignments and projects.
Another assessment criterion of the unit is Manner and consistency of participation in weekly workshops activities and your contribution. I believe I have taken these weekly workshops very seriously and worked very hard to contribute and make my blog posts interesting and valuable for others. Fortunately I have received some comments already that proves this (e.g. the post Four ways in which enterprises are using Twitter according to Gartner and Businesses on Twitter). If people have left any comments I have responded and sometimes this has lead to a great dialogue.
I have blogged approximately 4-6 times a week (writing and editing existing blogposts) which I believe to be appropriate in reference to the assessment criteria. I spend many hours on research every week but I think it is very difficult to answer precisely how many hours a week I spent on this unit because the lines for what is work and what is of private interest is very blurry. But there is no doubt that I spend less than 12 hours in total per week. I think it is very interesting to follow other people’s blogs and give comments (e.g. see Donald’s blog Reflections on Blogging), even when it is just a comment saying I found a link, article, point of view or the like useful.
Jumping back to the subject of personal branding I also believe it is important to have a serious e-mail address. At my old job I read some of the CV’s that my boss received because he wanted my opinion and I was horrified to see that people had emails like Beerlover@xxxx.com etc. I think people should make the effort to create an email address that leaves a better impression than that.
Another thing that Jesse R. Warden mentions in his blog is that is it a very good idea to have a business card, so you are ready if you meet someone (could be in work related environments or at a private party etc.), maybe it even could be accompanied by a logo that positively identifies your brand. I have made my own business card but maybe it would be a good idea to consider some kind of logo?
Jesse R. Warden suggests on his blog that you should have a mantra, saying or quote, because they are good to associate yourself with. I think this is something I want to try,- explore if I can find a great author or poet where I can garner a good line from that represent my attitude toward life, or just situations in general.
The last assessment criteria in the checkpoint post is: Leadership via the ability to contribute to the structure and format of the workshop activities, and the smooth running of the online community. One of my suggestions for this unit (since its Enterprise 2.0) was to invite a guest speaker from an organisation that have experimented with 2.0 technologies. I think it could be interesting to hear examples from ‘ the real world’ and be presented with the success and most important the failures when implementing enterprise 2.0 services. Of course we all can read cases and articles, but I think companies are much more willing to talk about there success stories than highlight the failures, which is why some research online can be mispresenting and make the use of 2.0 technologies too rosy. I think we are a lot of students in this unit with interesting networks that we can benefit from.
To help the smooth running of the online community I will always make sure to give my opinion or give input and share ideas where possible. In regards to the different logos, my opinion is that the logo should visually relate to this specific unit which I made comments about in the thread concerning the logo.
I have discussed this leadership criterion with some fellow students. I think it is great that some have taken the initiative to establish accounts/groups e.g. on Facebook and LinkedIn. This is easy and takes about 10 minutes or so, but I think the real question is how do we actually plan to utilize these? I think LinkedIn is a good place to etablish a group because we can benefit from this in our personal branding and in job situations e.g. showing an employer that you are active in a community or utilise this network when job hunting. But I do not understand why we are to be represented multiple places (Facebook, workspace, cocomment, Twitter etc.) in addition to LinkedIn. If the point is to make a discussion forum and share ideas I believe it would be much more beneficial for all just I we agree (maybe vote for it) on one site/service and make this one really good and valuable for us and others outside this community.
I have given assessment 2 a lot of thought and found a company ( the band Passtime Poets is also established as a company) I want to work with. I have taken the initiative and introduced this idea for others and given them the opportunity to join me on the project. As can be seen in the wiki post, three people have already decided to join me. I have written a post describing my thoughts on fulfilling assessment item 2, which can be found here
August 20, 2009
Assessment item 2 in INN, Enterprise 2.0
I am suppose to write a post describing my thoughts on fulfilling assessment item 2 in the INN unit – Enterprise 2.0 at QUT. The aim of the assessment item 2 is to create a web 2.0 Business Improvement Proposal.
I have given this a lot of thought and I think I will try to prepare a Business Improvement Proposal for my brothers company/ band Passtime Poets.
A short version of Passtime Poets biography:
Years of rocking stages have finally paid off for this four-piece, originally from Denmark, and the audience is growing bigger by the minute. Mid-November 2008 the band released their debut EP “MT.EVERLAST” on iTunes. To kick off the act, Record of the Day featured their first single “Hollywood” in the spring of 2008 and the next single “Venice is Dead” was a hit in the North Atlantic shortly after. Fashion designers and tour managers are helping prepare the show ahead of UK tour plans. Their latest single “VALENTINE” will be released the day before Valentine’s Day and the debut album VERSATILITY will be released later this year. (From bandbase.com)
The music industry is really a though business and it is very difficult for bands to be recognised in a crowd of very talented bands. Furthermore there has been a major change in the record industry the last 20 years and bricks and mortar music stores and major labels are struggeling to survive.
So in order to get noticed unconventional methods can be beneficial in order to stand out from the crowd. A good example of a very untraditional method is Radiohead who released the album In Rainbows as a digital download in October 2007 after two years of hard work. What was unconventional was that fans could download it and they decided themselves how much they wanted to pay for the album.
A year after the release, the album had sold more than three million copies worldwide in both digital and physical formats. The album earned widespread critical acclaim, and was ranked as one of the best albums of 2007 by several publications.
Even though many might agree that this was a very bold move it turned out to be a success for Radiohead. I beleive you need to think a bit out f the box and experiment with these unconventional ways of doing business.
Passtime Poets is represented on Facebook,Myspace, and bandbase.com but they are not utilising the web 2.0 technologies to its full potential, because they lack knowledge to do so, which is why I think this will be an interesting case with a hopefully useful outcome. Additionally I have a passion for music which furthermore makes this an interesting subject.
How will web 2.0 technologies transform our educational system?
Recently I read a blog from Donald where he mention how the future might be for universities adopting integrated Web 2.0 technologies to conduct classes. I have actually thought about this a lot of times.
I consider it very old fashioned that we are a lot of students that need to commute everyday to Uni. where we have to sit in a class room listening to a teacher. There really must be a better way for doing this,- at least a more cost efficient one which is just as effective (providing the same value) as today. I have given this a lot of thought but cant really figure out a what combination of services/ tools that will provide all the benefits there is today. Listening to a lecture online whenever you like is great but I think some of the benefits of the interaction we have today would be lost. I have tried the distance learning, but its just not quite the same.
But it will be interesting to see what kind of Web 2.0 technologies universities will utilize in the future. Maybe the kind of lecturing we have today only will be available on display in museums some day, who knows.
As there is happening an increase in the number of teachers using blogs and wikis, and students networking and utilizing online tools, the demand for easier and more efficient ways of learning is on the rise. Even though many universities have adopted some technologies I beleive that many universities have yet to realise potential of technological innovations
In regard to this subject I have found an interesting list of tools and applications on Solution Watch under the heading “Back to School with the Class of Web 2.0” that presents valuable resources for students, teachers, and school administrators. Maybe some of these could be very valuable to use. Still I believe that the most successful solutions will be those which offer a combinations of multiple functionalities, e.g. like the blacboard used at QUT which contains wiki, blog and so on.
Maybe some of you know or have used some of these applications ?
August 16, 2009
A success story from Texas Instruments
Texas Instruments (TI) has a success story,- they have sucessfully implemented Enterprise 2.0 apps in order to provide a better customer cumminity where customers help each other solve problems faster.
In 2004 TI noticed a problem in its customer service department. TI needed a better way to quickly provide answers to customer questions, without the customer sitting on hold with the call center, waiting for a representative who might not even have the technical expertise to answer the inquiry. In response to this problem TI decided to build a enterprise 2.0 community-based application called E2E, which stands for engineers to engineers and was launched in late 2008. E2E is an externally-facing community where TI’s staff interacts with engineering customers and where the engineers can interact with each other. This way TI makes peer-to-peer collaboration possible and the customer shifts from being passive to proactive. In relation to the Tapscott and Williams seven models of peer-production, TI can really benefit from this wisdom of crowds in terms of creating new and better products and solutions, by knocking down the boundaries that isolates the company.
Today TI has successfully transformed much of its customer service into a portal where customers and TI employees can share best practices that help solve common technical challenges. If TI’s customer service receives phone calls, it’s for a more specific question that is not as broadly question applicable to the whole community.
TI’s E2E is build on a platform with technology from Telligent, a company that makes Web 2.0 technologies for enterprises. According to Associate Professor at Harvard Business School, Andrew McAfee Enterprise 2.0. is characterized as follows:
Enterprise 2.0 is the use of emergent social software platforms within companies, or between companies and their partners or customers.
McAfee has coined a mnemonic to make it easy for everyone to remember what appears to be the key aspects of these social platforms, called SLATES (Search, Links, Authoring, Tags, Extensions & Signals). SLATES is an easy checklist to ensure that a tool consist of the right essential ingredients to be characterized as a Enterprise 2.0 tool. Most companies intranets and portals still cannot live up to the qualities that are believed to be important for better business outcomes.
Telligent is a Enterprise 2.0 tool because it provide an external-facing community application that enables organizations to listen to, learn from, and improve conversations with customers. Customers can quickly Search and navigate in the blogs, forums and wikis for answers. Blogs, forums, groups, ratings, and more work together to create a connection point geared towards ongoing customer engagement. Everybody is Authors and can contribute to the wiki etc. and it is possible to add hyperlLinks to external documents or to anchor within pages or posts, as well as remove hyperlinks and anchors. The categorization system that is build from Tagging is called folksonomy. Because the platform will be developed over time by TI’s customers a folksonomy is build instead of a taxonomy which is build by experts. Extensions are possible. In this way users can recommend stuff to each other. The RSS feeds make it possible for bloggers to generate Signals, i.e. small notices each time they add some content.
Many companies perceive Enterprise 2.0 technologies as being disruptive technologies, but according to McAfee Enterprise 2.0 technologies are not necessarily incompatible with older ones. Instead of being disruptive existing channels and platforms can be enhanced by adding some SLATES components. According to Dion Hinchcliffe Enterprise 2.0 seems to work better when it lives in close contact with existing IT systems than in isolation.
Hichcliffe has introduced an extension to the SLATES mnemonic: FLATNESSES, where social, emergent, network-oriented and freeform aspects are added, because they are so essential.
For companies such as Texas Instruments, the Enterprise 2.0 tool Telligent also provides a social environment that enables people to share knowledge, generate quality content, and inspire conversations through the use of software and technology. As Hinchcliffe points out Enterprise 2.0 initiatives is often used in entirely unexpected ways. This is because these tools are generally so freeform, that they will regularly be used in ways they were never originally intended. Many companies even realize that their platforms also are great branding and PR tools because it brings the company and customers closer together. Blogs and wikis can be put to just about any use in terms of accumulating knowledge and collaborating over a network.
August 15, 2009
Four ways in which enterprises are using Twitter, according to Gartner
In regards to my previous study of how Twitter can be useful to companies I just stumbled over this article from Gartner that I would like to share with you.
It states that by year 2011, Enterprise microblogging will be a standard feature on 80 percent of social software platforms. In the article Gartner highlights four ways in which organizations are using Twitter. These are
- Direct : The company uses Twitter as a marketing or public relations channel
- Indirect : The company’s employees use Twitter to enhance and extend their personal reputations, thereby enhancing the company’s reputation
- Internal: Employees use the platform to communicate about what they are doing, projects they are working on and ideas that occur to them
- Inbound Signaling: Search tools like search.twitter.com provides a rich source of information about what customers, competitors and others are saying about a company.
The article can be found here
It’s more than just technology
Looking at examples from the international literature of organisations utilizing enterprise 2.0, there seems to be a tendency showing that the successful stories are those where the focus has been on people instead of technology. This is for example illustrated in the article Collaborating in the Cloud from Baseline. The best starting point is to find the collaboration champion, which is the person who is the mainstay of the project and should lead by example. This person should be nurtured and encouraged continuously. I believe that many CIOs spend a lot of time deciding on what enterprise 2.0 service to choose instead of spending more time and money on changing the culture in the company and teach employees what kind of benefits social services etc. can provide. In my opinion, that will be the most important issue for companies in order to use web 2.0 successfully.
The article provides an example with Brian Volken, the global support director for dental solutions provider Nobel Biocare in Yorba Linda, California, who became the champion for using wiki software among the firm’s two dozen support staff in their American offices for the past 18 months. The staff provides information on implants and other dental products to dental labs and dentists. In the beginning the employees had the perception that knowledge equals power, i.e. that they are more valuable if they keep their knowledge to themselves. Volken tried to change this perception and taught employees to share knowledge and made them realize that the more they shared, the more valuable they are as employees because they’re helping others.
The example with Nobel Biocare shows that it is not the technology alone that provides value. The technology must be combined with teaching people how to use the technology and sometimes change their rigid behavior. Seminars and workshops might be helpful to explain employees why and how enterprise 2.0 services can be advantageous for everybody.
August 13, 2009
Coke on Twitter
I recently read a succesful story about Coca-Cola using Twitter, that I want to share with you.
According to the Wall Street Journal many large enterprises such as Ford, PepsiCo. Coca-Cola and Southwest Airlines has started developing software, allocate personnel and recruit new employees to follow blogs and twittering in order to nip possible negative PR in the bud.
Last fall, Coca-Cola’s software spotted a Twitter post from a frustrated consumer who couldn’t redeem a prize from the MyCoke rewards program. The consumer’s profile suddenly boasted more than 10,000 followers. Adam Brown, who was announced head of social media in March 2009 quickly posted an apology on the consumer’s Twitter profile and offered to help resolve the situation. The consumer later got his prize and then changed his Twitter avatar to a photo of himself holding a Coke bottle.
What Coke did here was very effective. They actually succeed in turning an issue into positive PR. Quite clever, I think. The example also shows that Twittering and other forms of social media play a very useful role in corporate communications. I believe it’s very important for companies, especially for large global enterprises, to really consider how they are going to react if suddenly thousands of people twitter or establish a Facebook group posting negative comments about the company. The balance of power between companies and consumers has shifted in favor of the consumers and therefore the two-way symmetrical model (James E. Grunig, 1992) is more important than ever.
About Yammer – an excellent micro blogging service
Those of you that do not know Yammer yet, here is a short introduction. Im telling you about Yammer because I think its an excellent corporate social network tool.
Yammer was launched in 2008 and is a micro blogging service that focus on businesses (techcrunch, 2008).
Like Facebook and Twitter Yammer is a simple way for employees to connect and share by posting messages. Each employee has their own profile and its possible to follow others like on Twitter. Because of the positive network externalities and wisdom of crowds Yammer can create valuable a knowledge base as employee participation grows. The interface is very simple and is therefore easy to use for all in the organisation. Yammer is only accessible by employees with a valid company email address which makes a closed company network.
Yammer can be characterised as a virtual water cooler. Through Yammers free desktop, BlacBerry, iPhone, email or SMS clients employees can stay connected and collaborate with other employees wherever their business takes them.
Compared to Facebook and Twitter I think this a good choice for companies, because its private and secure and therefore employees can express their opinions freely and not be concerned about what other stakeholders think of it. Also it protects vulnerable company information. Furthermore Yammer is more ‘clean’ and less distracting for employees to use because it does not envolve friends and family etc. but only people within the corporation.
If you are interested to know more there is a video tour available which gives a short demonstration of how to use Yammer.
August 11, 2009
Businesses on Twitter
I believe it can be really beneficial for businesses to be on Twitter , especially as a marketing tool or for investigating consumers likes/dislikes of your product. But at the same time I guess it can be extremely difficult for a business to be on Twitter because in most cases, ultimately it is not the company who is on Twitter but it is the individual employee. I think I have heard the phrases ‘corporate blogging’ and ‘employee blogging’. So this might be something for the companies to consider before they venture into using Twitter.
In order to help enterprises realising the advantages, Twitter has recently launched Twitter 101, a special guide – for business .This guide explains how companies can obtain value in 140 characters.
