Twitter is a Little Bit Distracting

One place where thousands of people have taken this to heart is the social network known as Twitter.  Twitter is a social media site where users can post short, 140 character messages known as tweets that their friends can receive notifications of.  Twitter allows users to follow individuals, and corporations in what often amounts to an overwhelming flood of interesting information.   No other social media site promotes the sheer amount of information enjoyment than twitter does.  People often become addicted to twitter, constantly refreshing looking for new blog posts to read, or tweeting to famous (or twitter-famous) people in the hope that will receive replies.  Twitter itself functions as a hotbed for random, mostly useless information which distracts and creates compulsive behavior in the human mind.

Many wannabe personal development, social media, and marketing gurus have taken to Twitter, proclaiming themselves “experts” in their chosen fields.  Tens of thousands of these people utilize auto-following bots, and spam techniques in a vain attempt to break through and become a guru themselves.  Because twitter is so easy to join and start posting information,  it has become a hotbed for people who have deluded themselves into believing they are experts.  They have literally taken the advice of bloggers like Chris Guillebeau to “do something positive with your own work.”  In some strange way, it seems many people view the most effective means of doing “something positive” as becoming a guru yourself. This only adds to the pleasurable, narcissistic noise that permeates social networks like Twitter.

1. Personal Information/Knowledge Management

Until recently how did individuals inside an organization manage their own information and knowledge?  Well without having access to an official KM tool (which most don’t) they use email, their C:\drive and in some cases network file shares.  Now, with many E2.0 offerings the first way a user gets benefit from a tool is to manage their own information.  Think of social bookmarking tools, you first use it to store and retrieve your own bookmarks, then discovering other peoples contributions before finally contributing (with intent) to networks or topics of interest.  The same is true for wikis, and as I saw at Pfizer the first use people get value from is creating pages for projects they are working on to organize their own house before contributing to the community.  When we started selling the solution I part represent we called this ‘Personally Essential, Collectively Critical’, meaning that a tool should first satisfy the need of an individual (which in turn aids adoption) before leveraging network effects to become crucial to the organization.

2. Expertise Identification

One of the top benefits of leveraging E2.0 solutions I often quote is that of finding the experts inside (or external to) the company.  Historically if you worked inside a large organization and wanted to find someone who was an expert in, say, the IT aspect relating to acquisitions, you would first look at the company phone directory or person listing.  You’d try and find someone who indicated they worked in acquisitions or a related department and would have to rely on what their job title says.  Or you might ask around to see if colleagues knew anyone with this particular expertise.  The problem is that a persons job title does not necessarily reflect their real work involvements, expertise or interests.  The same is true for LinkedIn in many respects.  If I wanted to I could change my job title to Technology Director for E2.0 for ACME INC and start fielding inquiries from around the world.  Just because my job title is XYZ it doesn’t necessarily reflect reality.  Now enter E2.0 tools for the enterprise and you are quickly able to tie people to content and people to people.  After time you are able to identify people related to a topic or function not by job title alone but by their real life interactions.  Surely this is a BIG reason to implement E2.0 especially for large, diverse organizations.

3. Collective Intelligence

Often misunderstood and sneered at after being a term overused by KM consultants over the years, collective intelligence is my third capability enabled by E2.0.  Collective Intelligence is a product of both personal (but open) information/knowledge management and expertise identification.  By opening up an organization’s content, user defined networks and interactions you get to both feel the pulse of the company knowledge but also access it on demand for specific topics and queries.  All it takes is the correct implementation and integration of the various competence of E2.0 tools to create this ‘virtual brain’ of the company.

There are more, but these are near the top of my list.

Executive Summary
The current circumstances and challenges are unparalleled in recent times. Changes in business culture are accelerating to satisfy the individual demands of customers, employees and collaborators.

In recent years Web 2.0 technologies have facilitated individual participation in generating web content and reflect a demand from internet users and at the same time acting as a catalyst for further empowerment. Enterprise 2.0 covers the deployment of these technologies for collaboration and knowledge management within the organisation.

Organisations that have already embraced Enterprise 2.0 find it contributes to many if not all areas of their business including; improved employee, customer and supplier relations; enhanced resource management and cost containment; marketing edge and perhaps most importantly innovation.

The increasing value of knowledge amid capital devaluation highlights the need for a culture change embracing the key business drivers of an organisation; their customers, markets and resources.

Enterprise 2.0 can provide solutions to enhance the performance of these key business areas, using tools that can be easily tested and verified for their Return on Investment.

KP Lite – Sneak preview from Knowledge Plaza on Vimeo.

Pic and Mix aims to increase public access to Kent-related datasets including those generated by Kent County Council (KCC). For the purposes of the pilot, we have brought together a sample of the most useful information. Where possible, it’s been provided in a format that allows it to be ‘mashed’ and customised. Please help us shape this initiative by suggesting additional data and ways in which we can improve this site. And if you do anything clever with the data, we’d like you to share that with us too! …more

Initially Applied Trends was involved on the training side, and designed and delivered a training and informational package to the pilot group of users.  Later on we redesigned the public facing site and launched what you see today as Pic and Mix.

Rather than offer my own glowing views on the project, here are some excerpts from Simon Wakeman’s blog who is Head of Marketing at Medway Council in south east England.

The site (picandmix.org.uk/) has two main parts. First up the data section shows all the different data sets that the council has managed to make available – as RSS or Excel downloads.

The second part of the site allows users to post mash-ups that they’ve produced with the data – for example using Google Maps or Yahoo Pipes.

It’s early days so there aren’t all that many mash-ups posted yet, although some early ones do give an obvious nod to the potential of this kind of thing in the future – for example the “schools by postcode” map is a simple mash-up that I would have found useful this time last yer when looking at primary schools for my son – in fact there’s no reason why this shouldn’t be on the main council site before long I expect.

At the moment most mash-ups are combining a single data set and a visualising tool (mainly maps). It’ll be interesting to see when someone posts a mash-up of multiple data sources as for me this is where the value of open data really starts to be demonstrated.

Hats off to Kent County Council for doing this – hopefully it will show other public bodies the potential for open data and we’ll start to see this kind of functionality appearing more often on main council websites.

I couldn’t have said it better myself, thanks Simon.

Ed – the SlideShare presentation has been removed for some reason.

The word vendor often has negative connotations especially when you’re exhibiting at conferences and trade shows.  The default people expect is lengthy and bullshitty sales talk, removed from the realities of what people actually want and smooth talking guys just pushing a square peg into a round hole.

As an example a few weeks ago I attended Knowledge and Content UK (KCUK) with Gregory Culpin and manned the Knowledge Plaza stand.  We were one of only 4 or 5 ‘vendors’ in attendance who’s sponsorship money helped to make the event a reality.  Things started off well, and as usual we stood out with our slightly different stand, stance and general approach.  We were there not just to promote the product, but to network, meet people share our experiences (good and bad) as practitioners and to have a good time.  To be honest, sales talk comes a definite second to conversations and sharing.  If only the other vendors were the same.

We were due to present a case study and general informational presentation on Social Software and Information Professionals in the afternoon.  However by the time we got to our designated slot the audience had already endured at least two terrible sales pitches by the other vendors.  In fact they were so bad and so blatant that people were seriously avoiding all the vendors.  Wild product claims, a lack of useful information and general ignorance of the subject matter pretty much alienated the audience.

Luckily we did manage to pull in half of a large room for our talk and we started as we would normally start by introducing ourselves, covering our personal professional backgrounds in relation to the conference and reassuring the audience this was NOT a sales pitch.  Over the next hour we shared our views, experiences and relevant product information with the audience.  We initiated dialogue, invited challenges and generally had a good time!  The aim was to educate, share and of course raise product awareness but not at the expense of the former.  The reaction?  Excellent, we immediately had people come up and congratulate us on a ‘superb’ presentation which stood out from the crowd and the other vendors.

So as a summary here are my personal do’s and don’ts for vendor presentations at conferences:

Don’t;

• invent new terms around your product i.e Knowledge Management 3.0 – it’s not credible
• just talk to the audience and not converse – people get bored
• only talk about your product  – people are there to learn stuff so offer some insights into the industry at least
• be arrogant – bold arrogant claims are often sneered at whether they are true or not, so if you do make them, back them up with customer references or comments

Do;

• teach people stuff – as stated above, people are there to learn
• discuss your wins and failures – transparency is great to get the audience on side
• engage and encourage feedback and discussions
• be flexible with the approach and style – be prepared to adapt
• be seen as individuals and experts in a field – not just sales people from XYZ corp

For our next trade show and conference appearances we’re trying to find a way to present our stand and ourselves as individuals as well as product representatives.  We want to engage, educate, discuss and have fun, not just push a message!  Maybe we’ll do something like the Geek Squad and present our personalities alongside the product merchandise….I’ll let you know how it goes!

Anyway, here’s our presentation from KCUK.

Below I’m sharing a presentation format I’ve been using with Knowledge Plaza. It’s based on my original Meet Charlie and Daniel Siddle’s Meet Charlotte follow up.

This version is based on an imaginary Pharmaceutical company.

I’ve adopted this presentation style when visiting a client’s site after discussing their aims, ecosystem and aspirations.  Each slide-deck is customized to include their own tools, terminology and vision.

The feedback has been amazing.  Apparently most vendors go in with narcoleptic slide-ware without considering how their solution plays with a broader strategy.  I’m not blowing my own trumpet, merely highlighting a successful presentation style and somewhat naive but well received approach.

If you use these slides please credit me/Sid, unlike a few large consultancies I could mention who embedded my slides into their own narco-deck without a mention :-0