In my previous post, I outlined collaboration uses of social media on online broadcasting. In this post I will provide concrete examples on how we plan to use social media as part of GLOBE fm, productions.

Facebook Fan Page:

This will be the main medium of communication for our hosts and their fans. It will be used to post additional media, links, updates, and blog posts. In addition, the Facebook messenger feature will be used for real time communication, during the show. Also, the wall area will serve as an asynchronous communication channel.

Profile page at GLOBE fm´s website:

This channel will be used as the archive and main output for the podcasted versions of the shows. In addition it will be the official page for each show, featuring the links for facebook, twitter, IM, Skype, etc.

Instant Messenger and Skype:

Given the high cost of international telephone calls, we decided to use these two voice-ip technologies to connect with fans in other locations. Among the benefits of using this technology is the zero connection cost, the ability to conference more than two people and the clear audio output.

Twitter:

Unlike the above mentioned, GLOBE fm will have one twitter account for all shows. The purpose of having only one account GLOBE fm is to attract fans of one show to follow another show. In order to entice their curiosity, our posts will announce a new episode being uploaded to the website, the episode topic, any other relevant information and the link.

Stumble upon, dig it:

We will use these tagging services in order to attract audiences who fall above or below our targeted audience, whilst they are our prospective audience. In addition by using these services we placed among peers in categories relevant to each episode.

ITunes University:

This will be our primary output for academic related information, especially lectures, classes and teacher´s podcasts. It is imperative for us to have a presence on  ITunes University since we are a college radio station, and our mission is to be Westminster´s global output.

Nowadays many radio stations are using the internet as a secondary channel of distribution for their content, but several are neglecting to use the available tools to the fullest potential.  The ones who have understood this potential are making social media not only a distribution channel but an integral part of their programming.

An example of a big corporation using social media techniques is the Chris Moyles show on BBC’s radio 1. During the program the host makes reference to YouTube videos, pictures, and posts that can be found on his blog ( http://www.bbc.co.uk/radio1/chrismoyles/). With this technique they manage to make the content posted online an extension of his show, allowing the producers to make radio visual and more interactive.

This is a very practical and interesting technique which can be used by small broadcasters. GLOBE fm´s plan is to create a blog and Facebook fan page for each show, in which our Hosts can have a conversation with their fans. In order to nurture this close relationship with the fans, we encourage our hosts to post additional information about their show on these spaces, in a similar manner to that of Chris Moyles. We believe that by developing these relationships, we will make the shows more interactive and appealing to the target audience. Furthermore, our goal is to make the fans contributing producers for each show just by letting us know about their interests, facts that they find interesting or contribute the show itself. Being an internet station and targeting to a geographically scattered audience we will also enable our system to take Skype and MSN messenger calls.

I will update you on our progress on this after February 11 when we start broadcasting.

Chatting about the evolution of social media, a friend in the industry ask a poignant question: “Are people taking responsibility for the messages they are putting out and passing on?”

The conversation brought me back to the idea of Citizen Journalism that was coined six years ago (what seems like a century given the quick pace of technological change).

Our participation in the social media space, regardless of how frequent or sparse, makes us one of the many new Journalists of our time – we fulfill the role of producing and disseminating ideas about people, places, events, and ideas.

With mass adoption of tools such as Twitter, Facebook and YouTube we all seem to readily accept the power of distribution and influence that Journalism holds – but how many accept the accountability that comes with it?

Traditionally, journalists are said to follow a code of ethics which asks them to be objective, to find truth, to be transparent with their biases, and to bring relevant and useful information to their audiences.

Do you fact check what you Retweet? Do you blog objectively and/or disclose any biases you have? Do you write about what will be valuable to your audience, or is it simply propaganda for your own interests?  

As social media and consumer generated content have grown, there has been a flurry of blogs and articles about defaming and liability in the social media space. While being named in a lawsuit is an extreme, posting an unsubstantiated comment could equally do a lot of damage to your reputation or that of your business.

If you don’t already, take a few seconds before you hit submit and ask yourself: What if this was on the front page news? Would I want anyone in the world to read this comment? What are the ramifications if they did? If I was a publisher would I get sued or celebrated for this comment?

As Editor-and-chief of our own media channels we select which ideas to further and which to kill (effectively by not sharing them with others). Ideally we forge relationships with our community of writers/co-creators to produce something that informs and adds value to our audience.

So what kind of editor are you? Which section would your publication be placed in: tabloid or news? What affect will the message you are empowering have on those who view it?

Some things should never be changed. Kraft Foods has made some changes to the Australian icon, Vegemite. Sacrilegious! Besides an attempt to try to modernize something that I recognize to be as Aussie as kangaroos and boomerangs, Kraft opened up the naming of the new Vegemite to consumers via social media.

Social Media has pounced on the world with gusto and fervor, creating successful collective brainstorming products. But not all exercises in Social Media are successes. This is one of those instances. With more than 48,000 entries, you would think that SOMEBODY could create a name better than iSnack 2.0.

Apparently not. What does it mean? Keep in mind that this is a Kraft product. Not the latest product in the Apple i-product line. Nor is it some sort of software upgrade. And if you are creating a new name for a product, wouldn’t that not make it version 1.0? Vegemite 2.0 makes more sense.

There is something to be said to having a professional brand-builder create your product (like us.) Social collaboration is a great thing, but you have to be able to say thanks for the help, but there is nothing we like here, and call the pros.

The full article can be found here at AdAge.

Luckily there has been a Hitler rant video created for this. Check it out too.

The year 2009 has not yet closed but there are certain interesting (IT) trends that can be worth watching. Though they are eventful individually, it is more interesting to watch when viewed in all the dimensions – Business, Infrastructure and Technology.

Business

After a lull in M&A activity in the first 2 quarters, we are suddenly seeing the start of a few acquisitions. This could be because of a few reasons -

Among the small and medium players, we have recently seen the Adobe acquiring Omniture, Mindtree acquiring Kyocera wireless, CA buying NetOS, etc.

Among the larger companies Dell is acquiring Perot systems with a view to expand the services market, but it will be worthwhile to keep a watch on this as to how the merger will help. Instead a smaller but niche player, who can bring in value to help in the infrastructure business in services under the cloud or such, would have been more interesting. Anyway, this is a bold attempt.

On most of the M&A as listed above, in the IT space, the hallmark is innovation. This goes to prove that many of these companies invest in innovation or grow inorganically. Either case, it is a signal for services based companies to come up with solutions to manage innovation. On the other hand, we are seeing R&D activity of most ERP products decline as ERP models have become mature and in a steady state. Due to this, AMS deals from small play service companies can be enough to sustain the ERP, to “keep the lights on”.

Infrastructure

On the environmental side, we are seeing increased awareness and activity on Green Computing. However, the levels of thinking are just basic in terms of instructing users to switch off their monitors when not in use, using less energy consuming devices, and the like. There has to be greater awareness and action around how to avoid rather than just decrease usage. For example, companies are still using or being recommended to use large or at best medium server farms to host their websites or intranets. Instead, they must think on how they can consolidate vendors or how they can consolidate their servers to a common platform to avoid allocation servers to 150% of their required capacity.

Technology

On the technology side, we are seeing increased thrust on Cloud computing and SaaS. SaaS is primarily on the business side, offering choice of platforms or services on rent. Cloud Computing is more on technology on how different atomic services can be exposed on the web thus opening a world of possibilities.

Conclusion

Overall, the trends point out areas where IT Service companies can leverage.

• Recommend AMS to replace ERP product support as opposed to having both of them together – this can be a value add for their clients
• Treat Infrastructure group as a horizontal competency that will cut across both Enterprise and non-Enterprise offerings. This will bring in enormous value-add to their clients in the form less server footprint and offering server/OS consolidation. Bringing them horizontal will encourage innovation collaborated across all technical competencies in the company.
• Innovate on not just technology but also on business models. For example, references and collaborative beta-implementations could result in win-win situations.

Synopsis

Customer acquisition in the ITES (Services) industry is a challenging task since it is highly competitive. Only the Agile and collaborative team wins more often than the others. Yet very little is done in terms of improving the process from these 2 angles. The reason could be 2 fold – one is that organizations are too busy to spend time in it, secondly there are not too many readily available solutions in the market that is attractively priced and featured. This initiative is an attempt to put across an approach to fill the gap.

Customer acquisition pre-sales process explained

The process starts from the time when an opportunity is being generated. It is an important part of the overall customer acquisition cycle.

In the ITES space, pre-sales forms part of the cycle. It starts with responding to a request or what is called an opportunity, in the ITES space. Whether it is responding to just an RFI or an RFP, it is an involved exercise, collaborating among different departments.

While looking at the process of responding, parallels can be drawn to the Quote to Order process involved with CTO/ETO (Configure-to-order or Engineer to order) model of the manufacturing industry. Q2O for CTO/ETO are cross functional with teams involved from among Sales, Engineering, Logistics, Delivery & Finance. In the ITES industry it is cross functional involving Sales, Technology, Delivery, QA and Finance departments. In both cases, the end products (or Solutions in case of ITES) are highly customized. Even if the solutions are to be designed from a base product, there will be a fair amount of customization. Wherever there is customization, there need to be inputs from Engineering (Technology in ITES). This has the tendency to make it complex, reduce agility to respond, and increasing risks (of losing out to competition due to higher estimates or decreased margins due to lower estimates). To add to the complexity, the process involves pricing and marketing information to supplement the proposal response.

In reality, it is observed that the Q2O process in the manufacturing sector for ETO is better organized in terms of better automated processes for configuration. Relatively, the ITES sector, ironically, is not advanced in terms of having a well defined automated set of processes. So far, this tendency did not affect the Service providers as severely as it is doing now. Rather the key differentiators now are agility to respond and at the least possible effort, squeezed by component reuse.

So, it is argued that the need for a well defined system for the process in ITES is not more relevant than it is today.

Taking a cue from manufacturing Q2O process, it makes sense for companies to adopt the following.

• Have focused areas of operations

• Provide solutions around focus areas to customize

• improve agility in responding to an opportunity

The drivers for this behavior are as given below.

• Current economy – The market will differentiate companies that can provide the value for less money. For the time being, Service providers are faced with a situation that is difficult to digest. On the one hand, clients are asking Service providers to reduce rates. Service companies, in the short term, have to live with the expensive resources that have been hired. To keep up the momentum, Service providers have to come up with innovation. Component reuse, Developer code reuse and the like are some of the near term strategies that need to be adopted. This will not only help Delivery but also help in responding faster to an opportunity for presales.

• Delayed sales cycles – The current situation is forcing clients to take a lot of time in due diligence and evaluating their choices with prospective vendors, therefore, Service providers are experiencing longer Sales cycles – the time it takes to close a deal. By focusing on select areas and responding to requests (Rfx) faster, this cycle time can be reduced, besides giving the clients better confidence. Also, when service offerings are focused on specific areas, Service providers see an increased ratio of wins, thus contributing overall to effectiveness of presales and the ensuing reduced overheads.

Again taking a cue from the manufacturing world, how the objectives may be achieved in the ITES sector are by a combination of the below.

• Increase collaboration among the stakeholders in the proposal creation process. The stakeholders are among Sales, Technology, Delivery and Finance. Each will have to bring in the flavor of the customer requirements.

• Facilitate reuse from process, & technology angles

• Facilitate searching of a repository of information

• Facilitate key operational metrics measurement

Introducing the concept of Collaboration

Enterprise Social collaboration can be applied to achieve good results. Collaborative tools like Wikis can be used to respond to an RFI. Blogs can be a repository of ideas, interests & opinions. The basic building blocks are mentioned below.

Benefits

• Reduced cycle times for response
• Collaborative inputs drive more efficiency in operations
• Automatic utilization reports

Google recently previewed “Wave” a Social collaboration and communication service. The service seems to combine Gmail and Google Docs into an interesting free-form workspace that could be used to write documents collaboratively, plan events, play games or discuss recent news.

Communication and Collaboration

“In Google Wave you create a wave and add people to it. Everyone on your wave can use richly formatted text, photos, gadgets, and even feeds from other sources on the web. They can insert a reply or edit the wave directly. It’s concurrent rich-text editing, where you see on your screen nearly instantly what your fellow collaborators are typing in your wave. That means Google Wave is just as well suited for quick messages as for persistent content — it allows for both collaboration and communication. You can also use “playback” to rewind the wave to see how it evolved.”

Google Wave

I found numbers (well, one number)! In the March 13 issue of Science, the letter by Ben Shneiderman includes an estimate for the number of readers to contributors for social collaboration sites: 100 to 1. So for our rubric, if you’re getting more contributors than 100:1, good job.

Crowdsourcing is a play on the idea of outsourcing for specialized help. One can crowdsource for the coolest song, or the nearest wireless hotspot, or for the most popular restaurant. Wired Magazine has a great article on how GPS systems and crowdsourcing connect seamlessly; it’s such a clever idea, one that is parallel to social collaboration and open source everything. 

I happened to stumble across athis blog entry from Buzz Machine which tells the story of how a university student wanted to crowdsource his tuition payments. I don’t know if the story is true or if it’s just another urban myth, but it’s incredibly cool.

Here’s another story, this time as a direct quote:

“Joanna Geary, a young journalist trying for a job at the Birmingham Post, told her readers about the task she had to perform for the interview: “I have to outline a training course that would convert traditional print journalists into ‘fully-equipped and knowledgeable multi-media, multi-platform journalists’ in just five days.” So she decided to ask for her readers’ help. I said in the comments that that act alone should get her hired. It shows she thinks in the new way: open, networked, relying on and trusting the gift economy and respecting her readers and what they know. “

This got me thinking about how people might use this concept in a Christian context. We all know that we can crowdsource for opinions, data, information, and connections, but why is it that so many people type in their prayers into Google (or any other search engine) and search for meaning? Would crowdsourcing within a Christian community not be a better way to get people praying for you, and if so, then wouldn’t Twitter be the best option? I’m just thinking out loud on this, and I’m sure there will be more to come.

Directly from SolidWorks World

In my previous posts, I discussed the technological possibility of leveraging the social platform capability of SharePoint. This has evolved from a possibility to a real discussion at SolidWorks World 2009. Simon Floyd from Microsoft Corp. discussed the topic of collaboration in his session, “Collaboration without Boundaries”. I think that this is a very interesting connection that can improve communication among people (including) facilitating discussion among designers.

You have the ability to initiate a discussion with people connected to you via Office Communicator, Instant Messenger. You also have additional abilities for video and voice communication, as well as capturing these video/voice interactions for future use. I think this is quite cool…

 I’d be interested to get your opinion on this subject. 

I have been dong quite a bit of research lately on social collaboration (and it’s affliated concepts: crowdsourcing, collective action, etc.)  There is very little research yet which looks at digitial insteraction, but i have found two excellent presentations/whitepapers on social collaboration which are worthy of review.  First a a brief definition of social collaboration (Lifted from the whitepaper below):

Social collaboration is digitally enhanced collaboration expanding networked human activity in the social sphere across the retracted time and space of the globalized 21st century. And as social collaboration moves into the mainstream and flourishes over the coming years, we can expect to see a growing impact upon the way we work together in every sphere.

I found both of these reports very helpful. The first is more enterprise-centric.  It provides an excellent overview of the social computing technologies helping to shape social collaboration.

and the second is a very good whitepaper that summarizes the body of research on social collaboration, including the work of thoughtleaders such as like Clay Shirky and Dan Tapscott.

Dion Hincliffe is a well known blogger in the Enterprise 2.0/Web 2.0 space. He recently posted an article on his predictions for Enterprise 2.0 in 2009.

One thing that struck me as I read it is GroupSwim is completely aligned with the majority of his predictions:

1. Tight budgets will drive the adoption of low-cost Web 2.0 and cloud/SaaS solutions.
   No doubt about this one.  The current economic climate is going to require all companies to spend more wisely.  Other than “free” or consumer oriented solutions, there is no better value for money for businesses than GroupSwim.
2. Online community and 2.0 technologies become a priority for most organizations.
   I hope he is spot-on here.  This is exactly what we have built. GroupSwim Community and Community+ were created to provide online communities that leverage web 2.0 technology and techniques.
3. Cloud computing will remain one of the biggest new Internet developments.
   GroupSwim is a great example of cloud computing.  We use Amazon S3 to store documents and we will soon use EC2 to scale our computing power and enhance performance.  We will be able to innovate, grow and keep our prices low by taking advantage of cloud computing.
4. Internal use of 2.0 will continue growth in large enterprises while the struggle continues with market-facing 2.0 products.
   GroupSwim Collaboration is a product directly aimed and internal use of 2.0 technology.  We hope and agree that it will continue to grow and thrive.
5. The economic climate will at long last drive major advances towards aligning IT with business.
   Businesses can no longer afford to have IT fiefdoms.  Business will continue to drive IT more aggressively and more and more components of IT will go off-site or be outsources.  Managing email servers, databases, etc. are usually not the core competencies of companies, and there is no reason to keep them in-house when there are cheaper and better solutions elsewhere.  We see business units coming to GroupSwim for help, because they can’t get it from IT and the plethora of solutions that aren’t integrated or easy-to-use that are forced on them.

On behalf of Ronni… Inspired by recent family events and PLM Think Tank recent posts . 

Another case for Microblogs or a collaborative social software platform.

 How did I become the single point of access for transportation to and from a movie theater during the holiday season?  It started innocently enough.  A gifted class of thirty, residing geographically within 30 kilometers or so of the Tel Aviv metropolis, went on a week of winter vacation from school. Their platform of communication with each other is text messaging and emails.  Although they may be the most technologically talented group of teenagers, able to grasp new ideas at a rate much higher than their parents (who were also born before personal computers existed), their inherent organizational skills lag far behind their IQs.

 So what’s a parent to do?  Suddenly I found my cellphone being the central point of contact for this group of teenagers.  One of them initiated an evening at a movie theater but left the task of getting back and forth from the cinema ‘open’.  They decided to call me and ask if I had room in my car back and forth from the cinema.  I had already relayed the information about my son’s transportation to two people, and yet the phone calls continued.

 Would a Microblog be a solution? Or some sort of platform where the children would communicate with each other throughout the day, accessing one Microblog where they would know the number of children attending, which cities they were coming from, number of movie tickets to purchase, and number of places vacant in their parents’ cars in both directions.

 I am familiar with www.airset.com and have heard of Twitter, but it seems like these teenagers know more about the technology regarding the animation of the movie they have chosen to see than the logistics regarding collaborating on their destination and transportation. 

 This is just one example of one community collaborating on what should be a simple task, and yet the factors affecting this community are only some of those challenges affecting an small organization in its day-to-day operations – short deadlines, not all have access to computers  and the same data during the day, no license to drive cars (have to outsource transportation to their parents or older siblings), no authorization to use credit cards independently in order to purchase tickets in person (thus losing out on 2 for 1 discounts, etc.) and geographical dispersion within one country. 

 Microblog or Mommy to the rescue?  I’m not sure.

I’m pleased to invite you to an exciting webinar on November 20th at 1PM EST / 10AM PST. Brian Krug, Director of Professional Services at newScale, will join us to discuss how using social collaboration technology like GroupSwim can measurably improve the results and customer satisfaction associated with large, complex projects.
During the session, we will discuss how social collaboration can get projects started on the right foot, keep consultants and customers on the same page, and reduce the frustration and errors associated with “Reply All” emails and multiple document versions.
We will cover the following topics during this session:
1.    Utilize GroupSwim during the sales cycle to set expectations and impress customers before the project even starts
2.    Provide a place to level-set and communicate before the official project kick-off
3.    Communicate effectively across relevant projects and project teams, all while creating a permanent record of knowledge and documents
4.    Leverage collaboration tools like wikis that enable “inter-creativity”, which gets consultants and customers deeply engaged and improves project deliverables and/or products
This webinar will take place on Thursday, November 20th at 1PM EST / 10AM PST.
Please register here to join us on November 20th for this interesting and informative discussion. I hope to see you there!