Posts Tagged ‘social media’
StrAIT Blogging on Blogging
Well I’m back on a social media post. I know, I know, I promised the last post on social media was my last post on social media. So shoot me (just kidding). I just attended a webinar put on by HubSpot and the American Marketing Association. It reminded me of one of my blogging hot buttons. One of the recommended best practices in blogging is to specify keywords in the metadata, i.e., data describing the post but not visible in the post that you can see. Then the author uses them as much as possible in the body of the post. This is supposedly a good thing for search engines to see in the post. I suppose that it tells them that the author is talking about what he claims he’s going to talk about. When I do that, my wording sounds forced and artificial. Some people can write that way and it sounds natural. I suppose that when I’m writing that way I feel artificial, so that’s the way it comes out. Excessive wordsmithing can be a bad thing.
Raisin Bran
The presentation also included some interesting ways to categorize blog posts. I have included some of the slides from the presentation. The first category is Rasin Bran. This metaphor speaks to the most basic form of blog post. The presenter told us that they are typically small but useful posts, typically providing “how to” type information. While I don’t write as many of these as the presenter recommends, I do try to make mine useful. The slide tells us to be able to “whip these out”. To be honest, it’s unlikely that I pop out posts as quickly as this slide would imply. I have to catagorize my posts as more of a cup of rasin bran than a bowl.
Spinach
This category of posts are intended to be more thoughtful and be intended to establish a reputation as a thought leader for the author. I confess that is one of my goals. My goal is not so much to be an academic wizard on the technology but to be a practical voice for the use of technology to derive real business benefits. I do spend quite a bit of time thinking about a subject, mapping the major points back to my own experience and applying some common sense in my recommendations. The slide tells me to not do too many of them. Well, this category has been my bread and butter (no pun intended) since I started my blog. I guess that gives me a dinner plate full of spinach or a smaller plate if it’s steamed.
Roasts
This category implies a post that is more like a whitepaper or some other more serious academic work. While I don’t think this is my style, some of my posts have drifted in this direction. Typically, if I feel strongly about a topic and feel that my experience is particularly valuable, I may generate more words than normal. This is fairly rare but they are definitely here. It is impractical to make this the norm because they are more work, especially if I have to create diagrams or illustrations. These topics tend to focus on managing people, organizational communications and aligning technology to the needs of its customers. These are core issues in the successful alignment of technology to business process and aligning those business processes to a clients business goals (“alignment” is one of my keywords but maybe I’ll get credit for “aligning” as well).
Tobasco and Chocolate Cake
I’ve grouped these las
t two together since I don’t intentionally do many of either of these. The Tobasco category implies making inflamitory statements that promote a lot of comments. I suppose I should do more of these type of posts but I’ve never been one to say inflamitory things just to get a rise out of people. That’s never seemed like a useful thing to do. I seem to be able to be mildly inflamitory without even trying and the purpose of this blog is to be a useful reference for my viewers.
I think that this post is probably as close to Chocolate Cake as any post I’ve written. It has nothing to do with any type of alignment (there’s that keyword again) and probably isn’t that useful in running an organization. The Chocolate Cake slide recommends using video and images. Well these slides are images and videos of raw food doesn’t sound like the thing to do. However, I must admit that I am having fun writing this and I’m not being all that serious. I guess that means this post is mostly Chocolate Cake with a side of Spinach. If you like thise slides here is a link to more HubSpot presentations.
The presentation also said that a good post should be between 500 and 800 words. This one is slightly over 800 words, so it’s tim
e to shut it down before the blog police come for me. I hope this post was a good mix of Chocolate Cake and Spinach for you. See you next time…
Using of Social Networking for BPM Project Communications
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Update: 9/15/09
Just in: Hard data on the use of social media by executives. Get the study here. You can also download the document on our Files page.
My thanks to Suzanne Adnams. Her profile is here. See her blog here. She has been the most helpful contributor to my research.
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I recently posted the same question to a number of LinkedIn Groups as I have already posted here in my own blog. See “Using Social Media to Communicate with Executives“. There have been few responses to my question. However, I have received a few responses. I also received feedback during networking events that I found useful. I just responded to a recent reply and wanted to share it here. It has helped me to clarify my strategy and may be useful for you as well.
Recently, I was at an American Marketing Association luncheon were I talked with a young lady with firsthand experience. Her firm studies and advises clients on the topic. Based on what she and others have told me I now have a working model to use in my business. I segment my marketplace into two distinct groups. The first group is manufacturing and manufacturing related service companies (my primary market). The other group is composed of service companies not directly connected to manufacturing, like marketing, sales, technology services, etc (my secondary market). For the primary group LinkedIn is the most used tool, Facebook is occasionally used and Twitter isn’t a player. Even LinkedIn is used only in a fairly passive way. My secondary market is somewhat more active in social networking because there is a higher percentage of younger leadership.
Consequently, my strategy is simple. For me social networking tools can be somewhat useful as marketing tools but not as communication tools during engagements. In an era where senior executives have email enabled phones, plain old email is still the best choice for project related communications. Social media will be reserved for marketing related activities. I am already using collaborative technologies for engagements so there is nothing to change in that area.
Actually, this strategy is a confirmation of what I already believed. I just wanted to gather enough information to be more objective than just my “gut”. However, if I get a landslide of responses tomorrow to the contrary I do reserve the right to rethink my strategy. Given the level of responses so far I don’t anticipate any landslides.
For context the forum response is shown below:
“Mike – you raise a very interesting question, and I suspect from the lack of responses to date that there aren’t any clear answers to your dilemma, and that others may be posing the same question for the same reasons. I don’t have a clear answer to your question, but I do have some observations.
Fundamentally, there may be a disconnect between the role and function or ‘social’ technologies versus the type of service that it enables. To me, the disconnect is aptly illustrated by the confusing use of the terms ‘social media’ and ‘social networking’ – which I believe to be two different, but related concepts.
We can see the challenge through attempts that many companies have had to introduce collaboration software (eg. Sharepoint) into their environments – even though everyone thinks its a good idea, getting everyone to use it is another matter! If organizations have this level of difficulty getting participation within a relatively controlled workgroup (ie. employees), I don’t think there’s much chance of achieving compliance with a group of independent, external clients.
If you want to use this type of communication within your business, you may want to pursue ‘social media’, which in my definition is focused on promoting, marketing and branding your business/services to constituents. As these technologies mature, and become more pervasive in their use within business, then gradually there will be more uptake at a senior level. For now, though, the ‘closed’ two-way communication that would be appropriate for executive clients relating to specific work does not fit into the ‘open’, one-way communications that is typical of social networking and social media interactions.”
Your question would fall into what I would define as the ‘social networking’ category. If I may paraphrase: How can you use new forms of communications provided by social networking services such as Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn etc. as part of your communications strategy and plan with executive sponsors? The answer, as simplistic as it sounds, is that these channels are simply extensions of any normal communications plan, and need to be considered in the same light. If the constituency with whom you are dealing uses these services, then there may be an opportunity to integrate those into your communications, but that’s a big IF. For the most part, most business-focused activity will take place via professional-level services such as LinkedIn, with Twitter or Facebook perceived as primarily personal/recreational services. None of these, however, are designed for the type of business communications that you are considering. Although it would be possible to create a FB page or a LinkedIn group specific to a given project, and limit access to that information to only approved members, it is much more challenging to get executives to change their habits to use it.
Using Social Media to Communicate with Executives
I am trying to identify ways of communicating with executives using social networking tools. As a member of the same age group and general demographic, I have a feel for the answer, but I need to keep an open mind. My basic question is “Can we use social media as a viable way to communicate with executive sponsors of our projects?” I have attended a number of webinars on the topic and have been reading what I can find but nothing addresses this question specifically. I have put forth the effort to become more familiar with these technologies. I view myself as informed and motivated in their use but not an expert. I suspect that most C-level executives and their staffs have neither the time nor inclination to do the same. I suspect that it will vary by industry but have no data to support a conclusion. All of the data I have is not specific to executives. As I think out the details of this issue I can take multiple positions but don’t feel confident in deciding which one is right.
As you can tell, I suspect much but actually know little. Thus, I am asking for any data or opinions on the subject anyone can provide. Please post any comment you think could be useful to this post. Thanks for any help you can provide.
Using the Internet for Sensitive Collaboration during Projects
Revised 8-4-09
I want to post some comments on how I see the use of the Internet to collaborate on and with sensitive information. First, I am sensitive to the “cloud”, i.e., the use of web-based applications and data storage. I use it to provide our website hosting, SharePoint portal and our WordPress blog, including reference files. I have accounts on LinkedIn, Facebook and Twitter. I have tried an assortment of tools for blogging (and I need to delete most of those sites) before settling on WordPress. I am looked into Ning and others. I have accounts with Google Docs and Office Live Workspace. And while some of these spaces could be useful I decided to do something different for StrAIT Advisor collaboration needs.
Let’s review StrAIT Advisor’s needs. Our engagements will be fast and when completed, there can be no lasting footprint in the client’s infrastructure. Our engagements typically consist of one of us working with a small team of the client’s people. We will discuss and collaborate on the client’s business processes and value stream (for more information about value streams click here). In both of those scenarios, we will be exchanging messages, documents and drawings that may clearly identify the client’s competitive strengths and weaknesses. The client will assume that none of that information could be accessed inappropriately. Given that I have run IT organizations and been accountable for a company’s cyber security in the past, I am extremely focused on security and best practices. To minimize our client’s risk, we will primarily use the web as the infrastructure for pipes. That means we use appropriate security tools to enable sensitive information to be transported over the web in peer to peer connections but not be stored there unless in an archive located in very secure storage where we know that we can “hug the data”. That is an old IT expression indicating that the user knows positively where their data is located physically and is comfortable with its security.
Accommodating team members with busy travel schedules is another need. Those people need to work in airports even if there is no wireless connection and work at 30,000 feet in the air and traveling at several hundred miles per hour. It will be years before the global transportation industry provides connectivity everywhere. Until then, a peer to peer approach solves this problem. Since most laptops have hard drives that vastly exceed the business needs of most people, the extra storage requirements needed typically don’t represent a major issue.
I have included a simple diagram from our overview presentation to emphasize my point. In that diagram the black arrows indicate the peer to peer connections using the “cloud” and the red arrows and database symbol indicate the archive storage. For the peer to peer collaboration we prefer to use Microsoft Groove. Groove can trace it family tree back to Lotus Notes which came out in the late 1980’s. 
We are satisfied that the security built in to Groove is sufficient to meet the security needs of our engagements. The archived storage can be supplied by the client’s own infrastructure or our SharePoint server. We will try to accommodate our client’s wishes if there are different architectural preferences as long as the same security needs are met and we can reuse our components and don’t have to build a customized solution. Every engagement is different.
I hope this post clarifies why we made the decisions we made. Please let us know what you think. Thanks for your time. We will talk again soon…
Adventures in Social Networking
Originally posted on 7/2/09
I want to admit up front that I am no expert on social media. My goals are simple. First, I want to leverage social media in a way that helps my business. Second, I don’t want to lose touch with friends and colleagues made over the years. I am indifferent about notifying people of my current location, random thoughts or irrelevant personal information.
Given those simple goals, I began doing research on what parts of the vast social media landscape make sense for me to pursue. After some investigation my list has narrowed down to four entities, excluding this blog (we’ll discuss that later).
First, and my primary social site, is LinkedIn. My page there is http://www.linkedin.com/in/michaelnpattison. It contains the most useful personal information. It seems to be the social network of choice for professional people of my age group (50+++) and younger. LinkedIn is best suited to both my primary goals. If your goals are similar to mine you should check it out.
Next is Facebook. For me, it is a distant second to LinkedIn. My page there is http://www.facebook.com/profile.php?id=1388328440&hiq=michael%2Cpattison. Certainly professionals use this one as well but business connections are not its primary focus. I see it as a more general purpose social media experience to stay in touch with personal friends outside the context of a career.
Next is Ning. It is fairly new for me but is interesting in that it offers a tool to create a fairly exhaustive, branded personal social networking experience. My page at Ning is: http://www.ning.com/michaelpattison. For me, the jury is still out on Ning. I am involved with the CIO Innovations Institute at http://www.cioinnovations.com/ . It’s fairly new and needs time to mature. We’ll see how it goes.
Last, and least, for me, is Twitter. I keep hearing about how valuable Twitter is for business use. My page there is http://twitter.com/mnpattison. I’m sure that it works well in some cases where companies benefit from viral networking and good buzz. That certainly wouldn’t hurt my business either. It’s just that I struggle with the notion of being associated with what I see as the more adolescent nature of what goes on there. I know people who would strongly disagree with that statement. They are spending a lot of time and effort on Twitter. With the other social media sites I’m interested in, I can’t justify this one being ranked any higher than fourth on my list. The amount of time I spend on Twitter is proportional to its ranking. Maybe that will change some day but it’s not today.
Speaking of this blog, I am currently using the simple blog plug-in supplied with my web site development software, WebPlus X2 by Serif (http://www.serif.com/webplus/ ). For those of us who don’t want to get our hands dirty with HTML programming or tools designed for web developers, it’s a pretty good tool; not perfect, but competent and simple to use.
Clearly there is more widely used blog/content management software out there and I should at least know if that would be a better choice than the one I’m using. First is WordPress. It is probably the most used, open source tool available. It is competent and free. I have installed it and have a test blog that I’m playing with. Since it’s a separate product, the search engines have already found it as the blog for StrAIT Advisors, test page and all. It may become my blogging tool someday but I’m going with simple and easy for now.
The other tool I’m looking at is Joomla! (I love that name). It is a CMS (content management system) from the ground up and can do many other things including complete web sites as well. I have installed it next to WordPress and will be evaluating it as I get time for its blogging capabilities. Stay tuned for progress reports…
So that’s a wrap for this installment of my adventures in social media. Please feel free to comment with advice or opinions.
Thanks for stopping by.