Social Media for Working & Learning

Intranets = Collaborative Working & Learning Systems

Nielsen Norman Group's Intranet Design Annual 2010 reviews the year's ten best intranets.  Although the price of the report is quite hefty, the summary identifies some of the key areas for which best intranet practices are presented in the report.  These include things like

• Company and industry news
• Employee and department weblogs
• Onboarding of new employees
• Collaboration tools and discussion boards
• Internal wikis
• Employee self service
• Change management
• Staff directory and employee profile pages
• Corporate calendars

What is significant about these features is that they are the same as those that I identified (in my recent State of Social Learning article) as significant aspects of social learning within an organisation.

At the recent LT Conference, a number of organisations (notably BT) were using intranet software to power their social learning approaches; some were discarding (or thinking about discarding) their LMS altogether, as they aren't provide the full functionality to support the full range of "learning" within an organisation today. 

I see this as the beginning of a significant trend in corporate learning and one that L&D departments needs to ensure they are part of.  If they don't, they are likely to see their function partly or completely taken over by Bus Ops or IT - the departments that by implementing social intranets within an organisation, become the "enablers" of organisational learning.

Google Reader - now follow changes to ANY website

A posting on the Google Reader blog has just announced a very useful change:

"Today we're rolling out a change in Google Reader that lets you create a custom feed to track changes on pages that don't have their own feed," 

and explains further

"These custom feeds are most useful if you want to be alerted whenever a specific page has been updated. For example, if you wanted to follow Google.org's latest products, just type "http://www.google.org/products.html" into Reader's "Add a subscription" field. Click "create a feed", and Reader will periodically visit the page and publish any significant changes it finds as items in a custom feed created just for that page.

Social Technographics: another rung on the ladder

2 1/2 years ago Charlene Liu and Josh Bernoff introduced Social Technographics.  At the time they wrote:

"At the heart of Social Technographics is consumer data that looks at how consumers approach social technologies – not just the adoption of individual technologies. We group consumers into six different categories of participation – and participation at one level may or may not overlap with participation at other levels. We use the metaphor of a ladder to show this, with the rungs at the higher end of the ladder indicating a higher level of participation."

They have just released a new graphi,  detailed in a recent Groundswell blog posting  stating

"As you can see from the graphic, we added a new rung, "Conversationalists". Conversationalists reflects two changes. First, it includes not just Twitter members, but also people who update social network status to converse (since this activity in Facebook is actually more prevalent than tweeting). And second, we include only people who update at least weekly, since anything less than this isn't much of a conversation."

Google Docs adds storage

A posting on the Google Docs blog announces that they are rolling out the ability to upload, store and organize any type of file in Google Docs.

"There will be 1 GB of free storage for files you don't convert into one of the Google Docs formats (i.e. Google documents, spreadsheets, and presentations), and if you need more space, you can buy additional storage for $0.25 per GB per year."

With this added functinality Google Docs is evolving into a very useful group collaboration site - ie more than just an online office suite.

Google Docs

The Backchannel

I was reading an article in Business Week - Use Twitter in your next presentation - which referred to Cliff Atkinson's new book, The Backchannel.

The BW article highlights 5 suggestions Cliff made in his book for speakers dealing with the fact that audiences are likely having conversations about them and what they are saying:

1. Accept it
2. Show you understand how Twitter works
3. Create Twitter-friendly messages
4. Take breaks
5. Extend the conversation

I've been incorporating Twitter into my presentations recently - you can see an example of a presentation I gave at Online Educa - Tools of the Trade - where I encouraged participation from the audience and the more global audience.  It makes for a very dynamic, interactive and inclusive session.  Do you have any examples to share of presentations where you have made a point of including Twitter in it - and/or any advice for those who are about to do so for the first time?