Apr 19
Northern Voice Blogging Conference 2008
Moosecamp
The first day of the blogging conference is an “unconference”, affectionately called “moosecamp”. This is modeled on the popular “barcamp” which is usually a day comprised of computer geeks, who initiate informal conversations on topics of technical interests (and there is usually some of beer).
I was particularly interested in Sharepoint, and it was suggested that we also attend the session on Social Enterprise first as the topics are related. The majority of the conversations circled around company culture and how it related to collaborative culture when the software was introduced.
I’ll try to give a summary of some of the points:
Social Enterprise
Why use collaborative software? Some companies found that there were issues of permissiveness in emails. With problems opening email attachments, due to formats used and problems with viruses it was preferable not to send documents as attachments. One such solution was to use collaborative software to share documents. There were also the capabilities of using software systems such as Sharepoint as a closed system, in the case of certain documents not everyone is authorized to see all projects.
What challenges were involved in using software in a social enterprise system? In some cases some companies had difficulty in getting their employees to adopt the system as a tool for their work.This may have to do with some people’s distrust of technology and the fact that it wasn’t part of their office culture. How does it become part of the company’s culture? One participant questioned how much of the resistance to the technology had to do with language. Context and culture are interdependent concepts. In cases where it had become successful it was noted that in order for the collaborative software to be successful it had to mimic the cultural communication within the company and it had to serve the purposes of the group. It should come in from the grassroots. If it came down from management, there was lack of interest. It has to become the culture of the company and not just a project. It was also important to get the search algorithm working and needed to be professional about the search (it had to be meaningful); Google search, for example. Another participant noted that usage of the software went up when there was also some personal meaning in some of the activity that went on within the software structure. Organizing staff socials, for example, gave it personal meaning as well as fresh content which in turn kept people returning to the system.
Feb 08
It’s that time of year again….
Oct 02
PMI - Perry Martel International has some good articles on researching career paths and uncovering opportunities at their website: http://www.perrymartel.com/ . Of particular note is the article “Hunt Your Own Head” which discusses the more nontraditional approaches to finding career opportunities. It gives a good summary on using ’structured search engine queries’ as a means for doing a quick online scan in your career interest areas.
Oct 02
An article in the UBC E-strategy October newsletter mentions UBC Circle where I have been working with the communications group on this pilot project for the Institutional Repository:
(full article): Opening Minds by Opening the Circle at UBC
May 28
Courtesy of the folks down in Seattle at Common Craft a video explaining RSS
Mar 13
Last night I attended a meeting of the HTCE (High Tech Communicators Exchange) with a presentation by Tim Bramwell called “Changing the Mindset: What You Need to Know About Marketing Intelligence To Give You a Competitive Edge.” From the HTCE website:
“About the Speaker: Tim Bramwell is a professional business and market intelligence consultant with a significant record of achievement gained from a 20+ year successful sales, operations and senior management expertise gained over a career spanning Microsoft Corp., Ericsson Canada, AT&T Canada and building his own companies. Tim has been a member of, and has led, sales and marketing delivery teams promoting a variety of technology, consumer and business-to-business products and services.”
I’ve been asking myself the questions lately: how does an organization create innovation and maintain it? How does it lead the way? The key is to go beyond marketing research, which is at times too narrow in scope and is time sensitive to that of marketing intelligence which can predict the behavioural triggers in the marketplace.
Some of the “nuggets” I took away from the talk:
- 30-80% of the an organizations inner workings and communications exist in the heads of the employees.
- email was never intended to be used for complex communications - it was never structured that way and stays contained within the email account.
- Marketing research and focus groups are not broad enough, they are time sensitive and aren’t necessarily adequate predictors of behavioural triggers in the marketplace.
- Marketing Intelligence is a set of tools used to create actionable items.
- Good places to gather intel is at trade shows as well as with vendors and suppliers of your competitors.
- Your own company’s salespeople and customer support are a good source of marketing intelligence.
- There are technology platforms that can gather and scrape data from websites using filters for specific information. Some of the information can be gathered from websites, weblogs and podcasts.
- The big question is “what do you do with the data once you have gathered it?”
Feb 04
When I was 15 I took a drama class in which we would do a number of exercises to stretch our imagination and get our creative juices going for improv. One such exercise was to create a story whereby one student would start with one or two creative sentences and then pass it over to the next person to add to the story and on it would go from student to student creating a collaborative story. It was a lot of fun and it got a little crazy at times.
More than 20 years later enter the wiki novel. The well -known publisher Penguin Books has introduced the first ever wiki novel as a social experiment to see if collaborative creative writing can produce a novel worthy of the book loving masses. The novel is called “A Million Penguins” Read the rest of this entry »
Jan 23
Coming up soon at the Northern Voice 2007 conference Darren Barefoot will be leading a session on Why Do We Blog? In order to gather empirical evidence for his theories he has posted an online survey for his readers to contribute stats and personal commentaries as to why they have been bitten by the blog bug. The link for the survey is here.
A couple of years ago my classmate Terry showed me the blog he was working on. I had never heard of them before but I quickly picked up on the concept. Read the rest of this entry »
Jan 22
Recently I was perusing the discussion http://www.terminus1525.ca/node/40117 on the collaborative art network website terminus1525.ca which circled around mail art. This form of art collaboration has been going on since the 1950s whereby artists use the mail as a medium sending art pieces via the postal system and the recipient adding to the art and forwarding back and forth as a means to create a unique art piece. Read the rest of this entry »
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