Call me, email me, text me, ping me, follow me, SMS me, BBM me...too many options?

867-5309 - great song and a sign of the times in the early 80’s, one number, one way to reach someone. What would the song be like today? PIN5309, @8675309, 867@309.com, the list goes on.

When I heard this song, I began to think back to when I first started in my role as an inside sales rep in the late 90’s. My three choices of communication in the office were, in person, on the phone and email. Email was still new at the time and I can remember debating whether or not I wanted to have my email on my business card. It seems so strange now. Back then, I was not convinced that anyone would actually try to reach me this way. Little did I know that 10 years later I would be battling with it every day in a game of catch-up.

When I take inventory of how many tools and methods I have at my disposal today (thanks to the Internet and social media) to communicate with my peers and friends, I start to see the evolution of communication and the speed in which things are changing. Today when I need to reach out to a co-worker I can do the following; Walk over to their cube, but that doesn’t happen very often as most of my colleagues are in other countries. I can send an email, but that tends to get lost in a black hole. I can pick up the phone, but many of my co-workers have gotten rid of their desk phones. I can call their mobile device and that is usually a good bet as most people are always on these days. Or, if I know they are in a meeting then I will IM them on my corporate IM tool, Real Time. If that does not work maybe I will try their BBM, if that does not work maybe I can...and it goes on and on.

You would think that by having all of these different forms of communication my productivity rate would be off the charts, but that doesn’t seem to be the case. Both the glut of email and the disruptions in IM, that take me away from my tasks, start to detract from my ability to get my day to day work done. What I need is a communication tool that can provide me with more focus. It is not by coincidence that we are now seeing a trend in the Enterprise that has more users making use of tools such as Yammer. Gartner recently predicted that by 2012, activity streams (microblogging) will be used by over 50 percent of Enterprises.

I have found that making use of a microblogging tool such as Yammer and my Enterprise tool, Open Text Pulse (yes that’s a shameless plug); in conjunction with tools such as email and IM is a leap forward over just email on its own. These tools allow me to broadcast a message or a question to many, share my status and location as well as see status updates of new content being created in my Enterprise by co-workers that I follow. That is not to say that I think the victory of one is not a peril to the other. I think email will always have its place but in my experience, microblogging does a better job at delivering a comprehensive view into my knowledge base. Microblogging can augment the Enterprise by allowing employees to update each other on projects they’re working on and provide shared support and guidance.

Would love to hear your thoughts and or experience on the subject?

Open Text is Everywhere, even at the CTIA 2010 Wireless Conference

In keeping with the theme of mobility, I had the opportunity to attend the CTIA 2010 Wireless conference last week in Las Vegas with my employer Open Text. We were there to talk about our latest offering, Open Text Everywhere. We were showcasing our offering in RIM's Blackberry booth as a RIM partner. It was a great conference and I was able to see a lot of exciting new things in this space. While the conference was very consumer focused ,there was definitely a lot of talk in the keynotes and sessions about how mobility in the Enterprise space will help revolutionize the way we work.

I took some time out from the expo floor to interview our Mobility Product Manager, Rohit Gupta, to obtain some more details around our new offering and our mobile strategy.

The Reflex: Mobile and Me

Now I lay me down to sleep, I pr.....oblably should check my mobile once more before I go to bed. I just need to be sure that nothing is outstanding in my inbox and to see what time that meeting starts tomorrow. Sound familiar anyone?

I am beginning to notice that the way I use my mobile has become somewhat of a reflex. Checking my mobile is the first thing I do when I wake up and the last thing I do before I go to bed.

My mobile has become a part of daily routine. I am not sure at what point this happened and I am not sure what effect it has but I do know that I can't leave the house without it and I am sure that I am not the only one. We have nearly reached a world population of 6.8 billion people and of those ,5 billion are mobile phone owners.

I have been spending the last few months researching the mobile proliferation in both the enterprise and consumer space and the stats are amazing. For example, Forrester predicts that 73% of the enterprise workforce will be mobile users by 2012. " As the mobile platform evolves, it's going to become a more important terminal to the corporate network than the traditional laptop, said Kumu Puri, senior executive at Accenture's consumer technology practice. Full post can be found here http://pcworld.about.com/od/officehardware/Tech-Generation-Gap-Laptop-or.htm.

This is a link to a great video created by the CBC as part of a documentary they did on the mobile revolution in 2009.

http://www.cbc.ca/doczone/cellphones/video.html

I plan to stick to the theme of mobility over the next few posts to share some of the trends I am hearing about and I hope to include a few guest bloggers as well, so stay tuned and I look forward to the conversations.

My Social Media "ah-ha" Moments for 2009

As the year quickly comes to a close I start to think about all of the big moments that I will remember from this year. There were so many, and this video using Google Wave does a great job of taking us through those moments. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XyoGbd1iJIw

In my mind, social media played a big role in many of these big moments. Even in my own view of the world of social media I saw a lot of change and shifts of how I used this medium throughout the year. For example, I began to see the true value that came from connecting a voice to a brand through the use of social media. I began to see the power of co-creation and innovation by reaching out and connecting with like minded people and talking with subject matter experts through social media channels.

I had two "ah-ha" moments this year (a phrase I borrow from a former co-worker and friend). One happened during a dining experience where I tasted an amazing wine that I wanted to purchase, but was unable to locate in the retail market. I reached out through my social media channels and within two minutes I had an email from the wine producer and a phone call from the local distributor and was making arrangements for a delivery of the wine to my door before the meal was complete. My second moment happened after I posted a complaint about a certain brand of photo development services and within 4 minutes I had an email from the brand manager to help resolve my issue.

What these "ah-ha" moments made me realize is that there is great power in not only connecting and conversing with others through social media, but there is an even greater power to discover in the exercise of listening through social media.

Are you listening?

Happy Holidays and a Safe and Healthy New Year!

OT Content World 2009 and Social Media!

I spent the last week in Florida at our user conference (Open Text Content World) where the common thread of many conversations and presentations revolved around Social Media in the Enterprise.

I had the pleasure of presenting two sessions; one about Collaboration and Community Management in the Enterprise and the other on making use of real time collaboration tools in the Enterprise. A key take away from both of my sessions was that technology is meant to be the enabler and not the solution. My goal was to help demonstrate that making use of social media tools such as blogs, wikis, ratings, etc..can help foster a more collaborative and open environment in the workplace and can in turn help accelerate employee engagement and productivity. Social Media introduces new ways to engage customers, employees and partners that requires transparency & authenticity.

There was a general consensus with the attendees in my sessions that it was not a question of whether or not they saw the need to introduce more “social” tools to their users to allow them to contribute and build out conversations around content and business processes - the struggle existed in the ability to shift the mindset of users. Many people in the room were more concerned about how they were going to be able to adapt to the use of social media. They understood that this was more than just introducing new tool sets; it represented a culture shift - a shift that needs to happen to make the use of these social tools take on meaning and relevancy in their organizations.


Just for fun: In case you are wondering to what extent social media tools are being used in the world today I invite you to spend some time watching the below graphic of Gary Hayes' Social Media Counts. http://www.personalizemedia.com/garys-social-media-count/

I found it quite fascinating to watch these numbers grow. Enjoy!

Pssst..pass the tweet!

Last week I was in Boston attending the Enterprise 2.0 conference. I felt that the conference was well attended (all things considered) and very well put together. My hat's off to the organizers. It was fun to see both customers and my co-workers, both whom I typically only see in a virtual sense through email, blog and wiki posts and chat sessions.


While the bulk of my time was spent on the vendor expo floor talking to people about our latest product offering, Open Text Social Media, I did have a chance to sit in on one session. The session's theme was Social Media in the Enterprise. The session's flow was crowd sourced, with the audience members choosing the content to be discussed from a top 10 list. The topic that was of most interest to me was how to measure the ROI of Social Media. In my opinion, it is only a matter of time before we recognize that the value of Social Media is really served up in the way that we can connect people to people to content and that the need for measuring the ROI will eventually fade away into the fabric of collaboration. Is there a ROI for bookkeeping? No. Is there a ROI for facilities management? No. Is there a ROI on producing business cards? No. All of these things are accounted for as a cost of doing business. We may start asking instead, what is the return on ignore? What will happen if I don't embrace social media? That may become the easier thing to measure.


What struck me while I sat in the one session I made time for was how far we had come from last year's conference. Last year Twitter was fairly new to most of us, but this year Twitter seemed to be the stream of concise for the conference itself. Even though I was unable to leave the expo floor, I was able to catch all of the highlights simply by reading through the tweets specific to the sessions. Each session was given a unique hash tag that allowed me to search through tweets by that specific tag. This back channel form of communication really brought a lot of value to me this year. It was interesting to read the different highlights and perspectives on what was being communicated by the presenters as well as the audience themselves.


It's funny since last year it may have seemed rude to be typing away while listening to a presenter, but this year it appeared as though having a laptop with you and making notes was just a natural way to absorb and share the content we were receiving.

As Chris Stubbs wrote in a recent blog post entitled "Making a Game of the Back Channel";

"There was a time not too long ago when, as a presenter, looking out on an audience and seeing this would have lead to the emotional equivalent of being hit in the face of a rotten tomato...Thankfully (or perhaps not so thankfully, depending on your view of human social evolution) seeing a crowd full of faces illuminated by the radioactive glow of their laptops or smart phones is no longer the symbol of disrespect that it once was. It can be, in many cases, the new look of engagement."

What amazed me was the ability of people to multi task in the sessions by both listening to the presenter, tweeting thoughts and perspectives, or simply re-stating a presenters point; as well as taking photos of the slides themselves. Myself, I think I need to practice my skills as I found it very difficult to do all these things at once. I guess I am just one of those people that can't chew gum and walk at the same time.

It made me question whether this behaviour will spill over to other areas such as the class room or the boardroom. It reminds me a little bit of passing notes back in grade school. I am interested to hear others thoughts on the value of back channel communication and your stories about using the back channel to stay informed.

Social Media Means What?

Social Media Means What?

There is a multitude of conversations taking place around how to define the term Social Media and as with most buzz words; different people will attach different meanings and value to social media. This is the “not so popular” definition in Wikipedia today, “Social media is information content created by people using highly accessible and scalable publishing technologies. At its most basic sense, social media is a shift in how people discover, read and share news, information and content. It's a fusion of sociology and technology, transforming monologue (one to many) into dialog (many to many) and is the democratization of information, transforming people from content readers into publishers. Social media has become extremely popular because it allows people to connect in the online world to form relationships for personal and business. Businesses also refer to social media as user-generated content (UGC) or consumer-generated media (CGM).”

In my opinion 'Media' is content. Content can be text, audio, visual, drawings etc; and these forms of content can come to us either through, TV, radio, newspapers or it can also come to us from tools like Facebook, Twitter, You-Tube, wikis and blogs. These may each equate to different forms of media, such as newspaper is print media, web content is digital media. But at the end of the day these all fall under the umbrella of “Media”. Media is the vehicle we use to send out information to interested users.

When we attach the term social to media it introduces the personal aspect of interaction to that content. In my mind, content is really just data. Until we apply rich context around that content, either via relationships with people or things, then can the content become more meaningful and equate to knowledge as opposed to just data.

When I speak with people about what it means to make use of social media, particularly in the enterprise space, I like to describe this as having the ability to “socialize” your content. To me that is the value of bringing social media to the work place. As a friend of mine Brian MacLeod says, “Social media has the ability to turn tacit knowledge into explicit knowledge.”
I think it makes sense to define social media as a tool set that provides individuals the ability to personalize content creation, the ability to “socialize” content.

Something that we need to keep in mind is that social media is more than just another form of media; it also speaks to something more fundamental in nature, having the ability to socialize our content demonstrates a culture shift in how we interact with other, particularly in the Enterprise. Social media and this organic growth of new media formats that are growing from the ground up also represents a shift in how we do business. It speaks to the “power of we”, and the “wisdom of the crowds”. It represents a change in how people are discovering, collaborating and sharing content.