WikiOrgCharts CEO Farhan Memon got the idea for the collaborative org chart while he was working at AOL . During his time there, his team had monthly meetings with external partners. Because they lacked insight into the partners’ knowledge and reporting structure, the AOL group struggled to figure out how best to work with the outside team. A colleague drafted an org chart of the other company, and Memon thought, “this org chart is good, but what I’d really like to do is work with colleagues to fill in the blanks and append information to the org chart.” Having a clearer picture of the roles and relationships makes it easier to know where the bottlenecks are, how decisions are made, and how to manage the underlying connections throughout the project, explained Memon.

Building a wikiorgchart is similar to creating an online family tree. (Memon says that they looked at genealogy websites for user interface inspiration.) You drag a person into position and then use linking lines to show the relationship between people. The privacy settings let you shift from the default of identified contributor to anonymous contributor. When members contribute people and relationships to the org charts, they gain the points they need to do their own searches. (The premium membership does not rely on points.) You can start your own profile by linking to your Facebook and LinkedIn pages. This quickly provides information about where you sit in your organization(s), and earns you more points for adding to your profile.

When it comes to getting your resume into the right hands, WikiOrgcharts has some advantages over LinkedIn . Search results on LinkedIn can be limited by a person’s position relative to your existing LinkedIn network and the type of account you have (free versus a variety of paid levels). WikiOrgCharts provides unlimited access to the available information — as long as you have accumulated enough points through participation, or, similar to LinkedIn, have a paid account.

Like Wikipedia, WikiOrgCharts is always growing, but the company has given the site a head start. Said Memon:

We built out the site using a number of different data sources, including social graph information, SEC data, and data from federal government employees. We’ve accumulated 9 million profiles. Our system automates some processes such as bucketing people from different companies, but we’re improving other processes such as sematic matching of companies.

Sensemaking, social intelligence, and the ability to connect are critical skills for modern work. WikiOrgCharts provides a tool to gather the data you need to begin those activities.

Images courtesy of WikiOrgCharts.

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“More and more people becoming part of this uber talent marketplace … They are entrepreneurs of their own lives,” Nishar said. That doesn’t mean that they’re necessarily going out and starting up their own companies. But in the new talent economy, everyone’s in charge of their own destiny.

So what is LinkedIn doing to capture more users during this transition? And what can users do to take advantage of LinkedIn’s tools?

Nishar said the first step is for users to create their profiles, and for LinkedIn to help them to build their professional networks. According to Nishar, users with completed profiles are about 12 times more likely to find new jobs through the site than those who don’t.

But LinkedIn doesn’t stop there — it’s also trying to help users get relevant information about their field with its top headlines in the industries that users work in. Nishar said the goal is to make users aware of what’s happening in their professional world, but to allow them to do so in just about 15 minutes a day.

Finally, LinkedIn wants to be mobile, with apps and optimized web experiences that help users connect from wherever they are. LinkedIn recently launched a new iPhone app, but has yet to build a comparable experience on the iPad. But when asked if an iPad app was coming soon, Nishar demurred, saying he couldn’t confirm or deny one way or the other.

While LinkedIn is all about networking, it’s not about the same type of social networking and sharing as, say, Facebook. So LinkedIn isn’t interested in driving up the amount of time its users spend on the site, Nishar said. Since LinkedIn’s goal is to make people more productive, it can’t do that if users are there all day. Instead, LinkedIn tries to measure how much value users get out of the time they do spend on the site, by what they do when they visit.

Photo by Pinar Ozger.

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That’s the principle behind year old, Los Altos, Calif. startup Whodini, which is currently in pilot. A sort of extremely pumped up address book or internal LinkedIn alternative, the product scours the Outlook accounts of employees of large companies, analyzing the content automatically to create a profile for each person, which lists their areas of expertise.

This profile is searchable by employees anywhere in the company, whether they’re based in Mumbai, India or Menlo Park, Calif. So if a sales guy in Chicago is looking for an expert on a prospective client or a complicated technical subject, all he needs to do is search Whodini to find colleagues in any part of the world with the knowledge he needs.

Making sense of the mess

Of course, our email accounts are messy places, full of invitations to lunch or maybe even personal missives about topics we’d rather not have broadcast to the company. But they’re also a very rich source of information, explains Co-Founder, President and COO Ani Chaudhuri, using a revealing back of the envelope calculation:

In a large company people send out between 30-50 emails in a day, so lets take the average of 40. Each email, and this is statistical, is about 60 words, so that’s about 2,400 words per day. Now 2,400 words times 200 is 480,000. That’s almost half a million words written every year by an employee.

Contrast that with the once- or twice-daily updates to enterprise social media – and the very rare times, instigated by HR nagging, that people update their profile in traditional company directories – and it’s clear why Whodini focuses on email and why, with the right analysis, that data could prove so useful. Whodini aims to make sense of that disorder and make the results searchable, with the minimum amount of effort on the part of users – no laborious updating, hashtagging or other effort required.

“People document stuff already; it was just not in a form in which it was usable. Our job is to take all that data that is floating around and making it accessible. We are an analytics company rather than a communication company,” says Chaudhuri.

And don’t fret that Whodini will accidentally reveal your embarrassing love of Civil War re-enactments or confidential negotiations. “We show the profile to you before anyone else can see it or search it. It’s all permissions-based,” stresses Bjorn Stromsness, the company’s director of business development, noting that users have absolute control of what goes public. Profiles are also constantly refreshed with users’ expertise in a given area decaying over time, so out-of-date keywords are unlikely to appear on profiles.

Who’s Whodini for?

Whodini isn’t for everyone, as the ability to pinpoint specialized knowledge is more valuable, and more difficult, in some contexts. “If you have a company of 10,000, but 9,000 of them are retail employees, you’re not going to find a lot of utility in what we’re doing,” says Stromsness.

But if yours is the type of firm that has expert knowledge spread across a large organization, the Whodini teams feels its product can make a big impact. “We see the product fitting particularly well within technology, energy, pharma and legal and consulting worlds,” says Stromsness. Large firms of 10,000 should derive the greatest benefit. “The more people you have [who are] having complex conversations, the better we’re going to work for you,” concludes Stromsness.

The product is also probably more beneficial for some types of employees than others, the team concedes. Braggarts and self-promoters, for instance, won’t prosper on Whodini as its evidence-based approach rewards no points for horn-tooting skills. Instead, the product is “the voice of the quiet achiever,” in the words of Stromsness.

“When people are self-nominating themselves for things, sometimes those are more aspiration than they are actual,” says Stromsness. But with Whodini, “everything is validated. If you want to know who’s dealing with a topic, you can find out who’s actually having those conversations as opposed to the person who might want to have those conversations.”

Forget notices of cookies in the break room or chatty camaraderie, Whodini takes a no-nonsense approach to work. “This isn’t about finding out if you’re passionate about cats. This is about finding out if you have worked on UI concepts,” says Stromsness.

What’s next?

The company has raised $2 million in angel funding, and the product is currently deployed in three locations with one more due to be added this week and a large company pilot in the works, but there’s no definitive date for a public launch as of yet. So what is on the horizon for Whodini?

Looking more long-term, the Whodini team isn’t troubled by constant chatter that email might be on its way out. According to Chaudhuri, rumors of email’s demise are highly exaggerated. “Instant messengers are being replaced by enterprise social networking. Email is not going anywhere,” he says.  And even if communication should move to another channel in the future, “we will absolutely tap into that,” says Chaudhuri.

In fact, future plans include connecting to “other email clients and maybe other sources of unstructured data as well,” according to Stromsness. Other product improvements in the works include scores, which measure each person’s level of expertise in a particular topic, and a once-a-week alert showing users who in the company is working on similar things and worth getting in touch with.

And as the product develops, another hot trend in the business world could benefit Whodini — the rise of remote working and dispersed organizations can only help a firm whose aids people in pinpointing exact expertise spread across the globe.

“The way we look at it is the current platforms, whether it is email, social networking or collaboration tools, all of them assume that you know the people that you need to know – the right people are already at the table. Are the right people really at the table? By discovering people that you don’t know we increase the possibility of having better people,” says Chaudhuri.

Who wouldn’t want to know the perfect person at that critical point in time? It’s a fabulous concept which all depends on the quality of the analysis whirring unseen inside the black box of Whodini’s proprietary technology. Pretty soon public, real world field tests will prove if this is not only an awesome idea, but also an awesome product.

At Net:Work, we’ll explore how companies can harness social tools — and the data from them — both now and in the not-so-distant future. The event will be held in San Francisco on Dec. 8.

Image courtesy of Whodini.

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In 1991 British scientist Tim Berners-Lee posted a brief summary of the World Wide Web (or W3) project on the alt.hypertext newsgroup, writing:

“The WWW project was started to allow high energy physicists to share data, news, and documentation. We are very interested in spreading the Web to other areas, and having gateway servers for other data. Collaborators welcome.”

It’s safe to say that Berners-Lee’s invitation to potential collaborators went fairly well. That initial web page has expanded to more than 19 billion pages (at the last count) and there are millions and millions of workers across the globe who rely on the World Wide Web to go about their daily lives. In those 20 years, the changes to the workplace that have taken place thanks to the Internet are nothing short of remarkable. Email is as good a place as any to start.

You’ve got mail

Try to explain the workplace B.E. (before email) to someone under 30, and you could be describing life in the 19th century for all the relevance it has to their working day. Back then, we lived in a world in which quaint technologies such as the fax machine prevailed. With the fax machine, it was not unusual to wait days for a reply.

Later, when Web-based email began to grow in popularity, it transformed communication in the workplace. You could now receive a response to a question within minutes, especially once broadband connections became more commonplace. You could send information and documents to colleagues around the world at the click of a button.

Email overload

But technology was now developing at a pace that seemed astonishing even to those who worked in the industry, and email, after a honeymoon period, hit problems. “Too intrusive,” said some. “Too much of it,” said others. “Not quick enough,” moaned the rest.

When consumer-based instant-messaging technologies infiltrated the workplace – AIM launched in 1997 and Yahoo! Messenger (then Pager) in 1998 – users were suddenly able to communicate with co-workers in real-time. Years later, these tools would often be integrated into a platform that also included voice over Internet protocol (VoIP), shared whiteboards, video conferencing and file transfer features.

It was around this time that social networks also began to establish a presence. Some of these are undoubtedly more consumer-focused, but there can also be no denying that Facebook, LinkedIn and Twitter have had a massive impact on working life, too. The ability to communicate and share content with your extended network (and beyond) has transformed many of our traditional working practices. As well as enabling businesses to engage in two-way conversations with their customers, these social networks are now a central part of the recruitment process. Last year, I wrote a piece on how Facebook, LinkedIn and Twitter can enable you to find a team of peers without breaking the bank of recruitment agencies. You can tap into your workforce’s network and find like-minded, talented people to become part of your company.

Getting ready to collaborate

The net result of all the technological developments outlined above has been to change the very fabric of how we work. We now live in a collaboration economy. To share and communicate information, ideas and innovation has never been easier, or come more naturally to the workforce. The emergence of the Web has given rise to a global working village, with location and time zone utterly irrelevant. You can work as closely with someone in another country as you would with someone sitting opposite; work from home or on the move, and even send files from your mobile handset to someone on the other side of the world.

This has all been made possible by the World Wide Web. From Skype to smartphones and social networking to SaaS, it’s all underpinned by the internet and the changes to the workplace of 20 years ago are just extraordinary. With a global mobile worker population set to hit 1.19 billion by 2013, one can only wonder what the Internet will bring us next. Bring on the next 20 years!

Andy McLoughlin, Co-founder and EVP Strategy at Huddle, can be reached on Twitter@Bandrew.

Image courtesy of Flickr user thinknew.

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The IPO of professional social network LinkedIn is probably the most significant web stock issue since Google, so I wanted to take a moment to reflect on LinkedIn’s impact on the world of work. Though ostensibly a general-purpose social networking tool for professionals, and nowhere near as big as Facebook in terms of number of users (LinkedIn has some 100 million users, compared with over 500 million on Facebook), LinkedIn has become an important tool for connecting job seekers and employers, notably introducing several key innovations that repositioned the standard social network profile as a kind of “digital resume,” complete with features with which a user can showcase their skills and demonstrate their professional reputation.

A Digital Resume

Like other social networking apps, LinkedIn enables its users to build a profile and connect with other users. LinkedIn differs from its competition because it defines a user’s profile in terms of work history, rather than other personal details. At its most basic, it’s simply an online version of the traditional printed resume, listing a user’s work history and academic qualifications. However, coupled with LinkedIn’s reputation tools, the profile becomes much more powerful, giving employers more insight into the capabilities of a particular candidate — an attractive proposition for both employers and job seekers.

A Way to Demonstrate Reputation

LinkedIn introduced two key social network profile reputation innovations: Recommendations and LinkedIn Answers. Recommendations allows users to post endorsements from people they’re worked with on their profiles, which are then associated with the particular job the recommendation is for; they’re like an online version of the traditional reference. Despite concerns that the Recommendations system can be gamed — users offering to give each other fake recommendations to bolster their profile, for example — it does provide a way for employers to screen candidates. Employers using LinkedIn Jobs can even limit applications to users with a certain number of Recommendations.

LinkedIn Answers provides a way for users to demonstrate their expertise by answering business questions posted by the community. These answers are then added to the user’s profile, enabling users to showcase their knowledge and providing potential employers or business partners with more information about a potential candidate.

Recommendations and Answers are complementary. While Recommendations can be used to assess what a particular user is like to work with, Answers is a way to assess a user’s knowledge.

The Future

While LinkedIn would probably like to be more than just a Web 2.0 job board, those functions drive a significant portion of its income, so it needs to make sure its digital resume stays relevant. While a LinkedIn profile was once the best way for people to showcase their skills and experience online,  there are now many more ways to measure a person’s digital reputation — Klout score, Odesk and Elance reviews, and Quora answers, for example — which arguably could be even more valid; LinkedIn will need to make sure it doesn’t get overtaken by these newer services.

Additionally, with an increasing number of freelancers in the work market, LinkedIn needs to cater to them specifically. Currently, LinkedIn’s Jobs section is heavily skewed towards traditional employment, while its Answers section is seemingly mainly inhabited by consultants and freelancers. It should reconcile this disconnect by providing a way for freelancers and consultants to find employment though the service, perhaps by modifying its existing Jobs section, or perhaps by integrating an Elance-like freelance jobs marketplace.

As Stacey noted when the IPO was filed, the funds raised should enable the company to make some savvy acquisitions to round out its business offering, perhaps even including acquiring some companies that currently provide services to freelancers, or reputation-based services. Whether those purchases and its own innovations will keep it ahead of competition like Facebook, the newer reputation-based start-ups, and even the traditional job boards like Monster.com, remains to be seen.

Photo courtesy Flickr user Coletivo Mambembe

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CrunchConnect’s web conferencing and screen-sharing system has some useful features, including:

• Dedicated web addresses and phone conference numbers (users can also have the service call them directly)
• Option for participants to sign in via LinkedIn, so others can see their profiles; the system also displays participants’ Twitter profiles
• A “waiting room,” where participants can communicate before an event begins
• Ability for hosts to upload presentations in advance
• Ability to record meetings
• Analytics tools, to track what parts of presentations are viewed and for how long.

CrunchConnect was developed with sales in mind, so it has some SlideRocket-like features, such as being able to update presentations even after they’ve been shared. A “company” function will shortly be added, for creating libraries of slides that can be shared and updated centrally. CrunchConnect doesn’t have the sophisticated online editing functions of SlideRocket, though; you’ll need to create your presentations offline and upload them. The service supports PowerPoint (.ppt, .pptx) formats, as well as JPG, PNG, and GIF images. PDF support will be added soon.

I experimented a little with CrunchConnect as a presenter and as a meeting participant, and so far, I’ve found the web-based system works pretty smoothly. It doesn’t require any software to be downloaded, which is helpful. There’s not much documentation yet, although I haven’t really felt the need for it.

CrunchConnect is currently in private beta, but the developer has provided 500 WebWorkerDaily readers with access. You can sign up here. The service is free for now; after the beta period has ended, users will be able to choose from free and paid plans.

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That’s the idea behind Noteleaf. The service has just been in operation for a couple of months, having received funding from Y Combinator, but Noteleaf is already adding features. As of today, its SMS notifications will include some new data:

• Participants’ last three tweets, plus links to their Twitter feeds. Twitter handles are retrieved from LinkedIn profiles, but the actual tweets are pulled directly from Twitter.
• A list of connections you share with each participant.

Some of Noteleaf’s features will sound familiar to Gist users, which we’ve written about several times. But Noteleaf’s co-founder Jake Klamka assures me that the company isn’t interested in competing with Gist or Plaxo; rather, he and his colleagues want to maintain a service that’s extremely simple to use, and requires no special apps or changes of behavior. Indeed, it’s likely that once users sign up for the service, they’ll hardly ever need to visit Noteleaf’s website again.

The signup process is very simple indeed. Authenticate your Gmail or Google Apps account through OAuth, do the same with your LinkedIn account, and (optionally) provide your cellphone number for delivery of text messages, and that’s it. If you don’t have a U.S. or Canadian cellphone, Noteleaf will insert the information about meeting participants into your calendar’s notes.

At the moment, Noteleaf’s notifications only work for meetings scheduled through the web interface of Google Calendar or Google Apps Calendar (only the primary calendars are recognized). And it helps if you’ve had Gmail or Google Apps email exchanges with the participants before the meeting. But Noteleaf plans to expand the services with which it’s compatible.

Meanwhile, though, Noteleaf’s extreme simplicity should appeal to teams that coordinate meetings using Google Calendar. The service is currently free while it’s in beta; the developers are considering a freemium model in the future.

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You can start a new Discourse account by logging in with your LinkedIn credentials. You can immediately choose whether to import your LinkedIn connections to your Discourse account. This doesn’t necessarily make them all into sales leads but does fill up your address book. Discourse’s use of your LinkedIn connections is logical because they are typically straight out of your business network and so are most likely a subsection of the connections that will wind up in any sales tool you use. Discourse also encourages you to import your Gmail address book: something I’m less inclined to do, since my Gmail account has many non-business contacts in it.

Once you’ve got your account set up, you’ll have access to tools to manage deals, projects and tasks. You’ll also have a fairly robust address book, and metrics on how your sales process goes. The most important of these tools is the “Deals” tab. Within that section, you can track the entire process for a given sales lead and decide the next best step. The initial set-up follows a path of non-qualified lead, qualified lead, price proposal, negotiations, and deal won or lost. However, you can change the ordering of the steps, add new steps or delete those that aren’t used in your organization’s sales cycle.

You can also automate the process of getting new sales leads from your website into Discourse. The web app allows you to generate forms that you can add to your website, allowing you to receive leads by email.

Pricing for Discourse comes down to choosing between four plans, based on the number of deals you need to track. There’s a free option, with just a handful of active deals,  but most organizations will need more. There’s a basic plan priced at $5 per month which allows you to manage 20 active deals at any given time. Both the intermediate and premium plans — $30 and $45 per month respectively — offer unlimited deals, but the premium plan includes API access.

Overall, Discourse streamlines the sales process., and while it may not be the right tool for organizations with a large number of staff dedicated to sales, but for a smaller organization, it might just be perfect.

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Recently, a recruiter asked me how I found great people to recommend for jobs, and I told him that it was because they were all people I had met somewhere that I had kept in touch with online. When the right opportunity came up, I had people that I could reach out to that I knew were likely to be a good fit because of my past experience with them in some other context. Because there are so many ways to keep in touch with people, I can maintain connections with them for longer periods of time and know how their lives and careers have evolved since the last time I saw them in person. The end result of these maintained connections is that my company can use me as a resource to help find great talent.

Gathering information also becomes much easier with these social connections. I remember doing market research before we had so much data in online databases, and to get information I went to libraries to find the data I needed. Now, I can get most basic information with a simple search query in a browser, but for certain types of information, the social networks are the best resource available. I often reach out to my Twitter followers for answers to questions such as, “what is your favorite tool to analyze x?” or “I need a device that does y, what should I get?” Sometimes I just need to talk to someone who works at a particular company, so I often use LinkedIn to find friends who work at that company or who know someone who does. Without an online network like LinkedIn, it would have been harder to find the right person to contact for information.

I can rely on my network of contacts because I’ve spent some time over the years building and maintaining the right kinds of social connections with  people. But this is where things get a little tricky: you need to spend time building those connections now to get the benefits later, and you don’t get the benefits without giving as much as you take. This means that you need to spend time answering questions and pointing people in the right direction when they ask something from you. You don’t want to be “that friend” who only comes around when she needs something. The way you build these relationships over time is by being there for people when they need you now; hopefully, someone will be there in the future when you need help. Like all relationships, it involves a balance between give and take.

This doesn’t mean that businesses should let their employees spend all day on Twitter, but it does mean that everyone needs to build time into their work for relationship building. As a community manager, keeping in touch with people is part of my job, so I spend some time using social tools, like IRC and Twitter, to keep in touch with people. But, I also know when to turn it off and focus on other work. As long as you take a balanced approach to relationship building as part of your jobs, you can still get all of your real work done today, while setting yourself and your team up to be even more productive over the long-term.

This is why I am sad to see organizations blocking access to social networks for employees. This is a short-sighted move made out of fear that a few employees will abuse it without any thought to the long-term benefits. Educating employees about productive uses of social networks and measuring employees based on what they deliver and accomplish is how you make sure that people are doing real work and not goofing off. You could block most of the Internet, and the people who want to goof off will still find a way to avoid doing work. However, if you stay focused on measuring output, you can deal with poor performers and figure out which employees are doing great work without preventing them from building longer-term business relationships that will make your organization more successful over time.

Photo by Dawn Foster used with permission.

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Are you looking to convince a colleague or a client of the value of social networks? Or perhaps you are still not quite convinced they are actually useful for work? Here’s a list of some basic ways you can use LinkedIn, Facebook and Twitter for specific business activities. No bells, no whistles, just business.

LinkedIn

LinkedIn is a business-oriented network. Useful networking and information gathering tools are built right into the tool that you can use immediately with good results.

1. Get answers. LinkedIn offers an integrated feature on its network, LinkedIn Answers, to help you ask questions of up to 200 of your immediate contacts. You get up to a seven days to gather answers to your question, then you rate the answers you’ve received.

2. Showcase your knowledge. The flipside of LinkedIn Answers is that you can respond to other people’s questions and get rated for the value of your answers. It’s good way to network with others while showing what you know.

3. Distribute polls. You can create and send a poll to your first degree contacts for free and feature it on your profile page using the LinkedIn Polls application. Do quick and dirty market research via your network. For a fee starting at $50, you can also send your poll to a targeted slice of the 75 million or so LinkedIn members.

4. Get (and give) recommendations. You can strengthen your network and expand your presence on LinkedIn by giving kudos to other members you know through the LinkedIn Recommendations feature. You can also solicit recommendations from colleagues and clients to add testimonials to your profile.

5. List your business. You can list your company in the LinkedIn company directory for free. You can connect your profile and the profiles of your team members to the listing and provide news updates.  Other business professionals can then follow your business to get the latest updates.

Facebook

Facebook isn’t the most straightforward business tool; it’s primarily focused on socializing. Still, you can’t beat its interconnected features and the potential reach you can have by creating a Page on the network.

6. Build a global — or local — presence. Your Facebook Page can actually be as global or as hyperlocal as you want it to be. It’s a matter of how you design it, market it and manage it. Using Facebook Social Ads, you can zero in on your ideal target audience from Facebook’s rich demographic and psychographic data. When set up strategically, you can get a lot of impact and results for a very affordable price.

7. Build a following. Understanding how to build value into your Facebook Page as well as the dynamics of building an online community are essential for building a targeted, engaged and evangelizing following. Once you hit a critical mass, your Facebook Page’s community will take off, but it will need constant guidance and strategic direction to translate into conversions to sales.

8. Identify and engage “superfans.” I’ve written before about identifying your superfans on Facebook and converting them into grassroots brand ambassadors. Actively engaging your customers in an open dialogue and providing them with the tools they can use to help you spread the word about what you do takes a great deal of thought and consideration but it’s tremendously useful when  done appropriately and effectively.

Twitter

Twitter can be a very effective business tool, but building the kind of following that is large enough and pays enough attention to what you say to be truly valuable takes time.

9. Build your brand. By tweeting relevant and useful information you can showcase your expertise, define your point of view and create a springboard for conversations. Compared to Facebook, it takes time to build a brand on Twitter, but it can prove to be just as valuable.

10. Broadcast timely information. When you have something you need to get out to the public, you can tweet it out. The response you get will be commensurate with the quality of your following, of course.

11. Drive traffic. Again, the usefulness of Twitter as a traffic driver depends on how engaged a following you’ve cultivated. It takes time, attention, and care to build real connections with your customers or potential customers. But once you have an avid following, you can include include links in your messaging to direct people to a website or blog; just make sure there is value for them when they get there.

What business uses are you finding for social media tools and channels?

stock xchng image by user bugdog

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And now what are we going to do because the “New Twitter” features are wider and cover our painstakingly designed custom backgrounds? Why did they make those changes? Are they trying to drive us crazy?

When we use a social network religiously, we feel a sense of ownership. Which is what the social network’s parent company wants us to feel: a sense of loyalty. But with that sense of ownership, we feel entitlement as well. Entitled to being part of the process of change, to be able to give our input before change happens, to be able in some way to control the change.

While some smaller companies do gather input from their users to determine modifications of their services, most larger ones, like Facebook, will make changes often, and seemingly at random. We’re left scratching our heads or panicking because of the potential negative impacts of the new changes on our social media presences.

We all need to remember a few important things about using social networks for our work:

• We are not in control. Hard as it is to accept, we are not in control of the whims and fancies of Mark Zuckerberg and his team of whippersnapper 20-somethings whose tech changes are pulling the proverbial rug out from under us on a near-weekly basis. Understand that if you are using social networks as part of your work, you are creating multiple dependencies on somebody else’s business model to succeed.
• If they go down, we will lose something. Our dependence on social networks is different from our dependence on an Internet Service Provider. If your ISP goes down permanently, we (hopefully) have a backup of our websites and can upload our site files somewhere else. But what if our Facebook Page or Twitter account or LinkedIn profile is gone one day, along with all our friends, fans, followers subscribers and contacts? Now what?

In order to stave off panic and mayhem, here are some actions we can take:

1. Find a way to back up. If you have a blog, most blogging platforms offer instructions or a tool to back it up. Backupify is one of a number of automated backup tools for social networks which covers Facebook (personal accounts), Twitter, Flickr, Google Apps plus blogs.
2. Develop a contingency plan. What would you do if you lost your Facebook Page and thousands of fans tomorrow? What if Facebook was gone forever? Now where would you go? And how would you get in touch with your thousands of fans, much less migrate them over to a new service? Right now, the only way to back up a Facebook fan or “liker” list is to copy and paste from each window’s worth of fans (50 per window-full), and paste into a document. That’s tedious but not unbearable at several hundred fans but what if you have over 10,000? These are problems we need to figure out, or hope someone else already has — and connect with their service.
3. Be vigilant. Make sure you have someone on your team or are connected with someone who makes it a point to be on top of development changes on the core services you are using. And think globally: who can you follow or team up with in another country and time zone who can be on call to address major changes that happen suddenly?
4. Have a plan for change. Were you ready for the Facebook Page width changes? If you consult clients, did you notify them the moment you knew changes were pending and lay out a plan in advance for handling the necessary modifications for their custom FBML Pages? What about Twitter? Until I saw New Twitter, I was unaware of how the feature changes would cover up some key branding and information on my Twitter background. The moment I saw this, I notified my company’s production team to make sure they were addressing them even though some of them did not yet have access to New Twitter. Determine the costs involved in making these fixes to adapt to social network feature changes and decide what you’ll pass on to your clients.

One thing I think some of us who manage social media for clients may have neglected is to put into our proposals and contracts a disclaimer that states that we are not in control of third-party social networking services and to spell out what we can and cannot do if something changes or permanently disappears. Do you have these in place? When using social networks for work, expecting the unexpected is probably your safest stance. You can never be too prepared.

How are you prepared for sudden changes on social networks? How have you handled recent changes from Facebook, Twitter and the like?

Related content from GigaOM Pro (sub. req.):

• Who Owns Your Data in the Cloud?
• Can Enterprise Privacy Survive Social Networking?
• Social Media in the Enterprise

Isn’t social media inherently unproductive, though? After all, studies suggest that it wastes money. Gobs of money, in fact, according to more than one survey, like this one reported by Mashable that estimates the cost of social media at more than $2 billion for UK firms alone. But is that the whole story? Even before social media, people found ways to avoid working. Luckily for those of us who work remotely, we can both “avoid work” and accomplish something at the same time.

LinkedIn Fall Cleaning

If there’s one thing I don’t like about LinkedIn, it’s how it tells you when your profile is “100 percent complete.” If you’re reading this, LinkedIn developers, take that completion bar out. Or make it stop at 99 percent complete no matter what you do to your profile. If I see something’s done, then I’ll check it off my to-do list and forget it completely.

Which is exactly what happened with my LinkedIn profile. Of course, if I receive a connection request, I’ll pop back in to see how things are doing, maybe add a few people suggested to me by the site, and then I’m gone again till another message or request prompts another flurry of activity. For Social Media Week I’m making a concerted effort to do more.

I’m going to start by writing recommendations. Not for people who’ve requested them (though I’ll do that too), but for anyone whose work I’ve found to be truly impressive, be they colleagues, peers in the same field, or former employers. Not only is it a great good faith gesture, but it’ll help you identify qualities you value in others, and evaluate whether you share those same qualities or whether you could stand to improve in the same areas.

After that, I plan on looking at my group membership, joining more, and becoming involved in the discussions that go on there. Online workers have more of a challenge finding professional organizations to join, and ways to interact with them, but LinkedIn groups is a great way to make up for any lack of real-world interaction you may have. Plus, it can actually be fun and useful, and it doesn’t involve membership fees.

Start A New Facebook Group/Page

A while ago now, I started a Facebook Page for my favorite daily online distraction, a webcomic called “Scary Go Round,” penned by John Allison. I only did it because I wanted to “Like” it on my Facebook profile, and there wasn’t one in place despite the comic having a strong fan community. Later, when Scary Go Round came to an end and was succeeded by another effort by Allison, “Bad Machinery,” I likewise started a page for that, too.

Years later Allison contacted me and wanted to share admin privileges of the two pages. Planting that seed led to the building of a working relationship with someone I admired and respected. Yes, doing things on Facebook can actually do that for you.

Not to mention that if you do it successfully, it will prove to potential employers and contracting agencies that you can run an online community, and do so even when not compensated for your efforts. All that’s left for you to do is to convince them that you can do a even better job when paid.

Use a New Tool (or an Old One You Didn’t Like)

Chances are you don’t jump on every single social media bandwagon that comes along as soon as it appears. If you do, you’re probably Robert Scoble. If you aren’t, then you should look around and see how the social media landscape has changed recently, or give a second chance to something you may have dismissed.

There are two major social media apps that I’ve tried and left behind that continue to be popular. One is Posterous, the ultra-simple blogging site that works incredibly well with photography and other graphics work, and with straightforward text, too. The other is Foursquare, the location-based social network that at times felt more like a chore than anything else.

I’m going to use Posterous again because I’ve got a better mobile camera in my iPhone 4, and because I no longer post on a personal blog of my own, so there’s a greater chance I’ll have something worthwhile to say in that forum. Foursquare I’ll be trying again with automatic check-in tools.

Posterous is just another facet of your public face as an online worker, and it can be a great one if filled with professionally relevant content. Foursquare I see as more of a secondary tool designed to fill gaps in your tweeting, Facebook and LinkedIn activity, or to add greater depth to all of the above. It could result in a business lunch if the right person is watching when you happen to check-in near them or at a conference you’re both attending.

September 20-24 is Social Media Week, but that doesn’t mean you have to stop doing any of these things when the week is over. In fact, the idea is to foster productive new habits that should help you network, build relationships and grow your business. And that’s something that’s a good idea 365 days a year.

What are you doing for social media week?

Related GigaOM Pro content (sub. req.): Social Media in the Enterprise
Related GigaOM Pro content (sub. req.): Can Enterprise Privacy Survive Social Networking?

Your websites are probably on servers owned by a hosting company that guarantees you “no downtime” because they have (ostensibly) an intricate system of backups to keep your site up 24/7. Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn and the rest have zero contractual obligation to you to stay online. Yes, they have good reasons to not go down. But what will we do if they do? It isn’t as if we have many other major choices of social networks where we can disseminate our messages on a massive scale.

Sure we can hop from Twitter to Facebook, but what if Facebook also goes down? I don’t see a mass exodus to MySpace happening. Maybe we’ll hunker down in our niche networks or micronetworks like Sprouter or BizNik or a Ning community waiting out the storm. Maybe we’ll check in furiously on Foursquare, Gowalla, Whrrl and the like, hoping someone notices that we’re still alive. Maybe we’ll sit in our blog and send out an email blast inviting people to join us for some conversation in the comments.

What Are We to Do?

If you’ve ever used Second Life for business, you’ve probably faced chronic downtime on a network where you’ve have put creative energies and efforts into building up a storefront or holding a major event, only for the Linden Lab servers to go wonky and you’ve lost sales or had your event ruined. With Second Life, those of us who were entrenched in making it a viable marketing and commerce play for our companies would curse the company that we loved for creating the platform but hated for putting our ventures at risk. Then again, it has never been Linden Lab’s fault that we’ve decided to depend on the servers of a single company for major business transactions.

We Are at Fault

What are we thinking? We wouldn’t build our company headquarters on somebody else’s land that they owned without a contract, some guidelines, guarantees and stipulations. And yet we spend hundreds, thousands, tens of thousands of dollars creating assets and putting them on somebody else’s servers — and not even companies that are in the business of keeping things their servers up 24/7. They are in the business of getting you to be on their networks, because the more numbers they gain, the more powerful they become.

Our tolerance for their outages just goes to show how dependent we are on them. We think of these moments as par for the course because we are on the “cutting edge” and dealing with “new technologies.”  We’ve been mesmerized by the promise of exponential reach. We’ve been hypnotized by the potential numbers. We’ve been sold a bill of goods and come out of these moments of outage when some of our marketing and customer service efforts come to a screeching halt, wipe the sweat from our brows, smile feebly, put out our hands and say “Please sir, may I have some more?”

Can We Stop this Madness?

Unfortunately, no. We’re too far gone. We’re in this thing too deep. We’re intoxicated by those moments when we get some genuinely impressive results with our Twitter outreach or our Facebook engagement, and we salivate at the possibility of more of that good stuff. We’re hooked.

So if we can’t stop it, what can we do? Here’s my advice:

• Don’t replace your stable marketing tactics. Look at social networks and social media marketing as an augmentation of your traditional marketing, not a replacement. Don’t give up the rest of your outreach and marketing efforts.
• Have a contingency plan. Downtime on the big networks is inevitable. If you can’t be real-time on Twitter or Facebook, where will you go and where can your customers find you?
• Support niche networks. Yes, Twitter and Facebook are huge, but they’re not the only places offering the same kind of messaging capabilities. Set up shop in a smaller network and support their efforts to be the next Twitter or Facebook. They’ll love you for it and give you the best darned customer service, because they want and need you.

And keep in mind this mantra: Don’t put all your eggs in one basket. It’s an oldie, but a goodie.

What are you doing to better distribute your social media presence to safeguard against the Fail Whale?

Fail Whale screenshot from twitter.com

Related GigaOM Pro content (sub. req.): Can Enterprise Privacy Survive Social Networking?

• Lack of consistent platform. Each social network functions in its own way. There isn’t a set of agreed-upon industry standards for marketing or advertising in social networks. Even if there were, every company that develops and hosts a social network sets up their own rules.
• Emphasis on community. Social networks may reside on websites but they are much more akin to online communities; they’re considered “non-commercial spaces” where marketing is frowned upon. While old-fashioned courtesy still applies, you can’t just “join” any conversation.
• Users are jaded. We’ve all seen the decline of the banner ad. As web users become even more active as social media users, they are becoming more overwhelmed by marketing messages daily and less likely to click on anything they don’t recognize from anyone whom they don’t know at least peripherally.
• Users are listening to connections. Increasingly, people are getting their product and service recommendations from their peers, real-life friends, colleagues and even more distantly related social network friends, fans and followers than from ads.

As we ramp up our marketing efforts in social networks, what we’re all trying to do now is to become a trusted connection with a large number of people who are either our current customers, our potential customers or who can be evangelists connecting us to our target audience. Who do we think we are?

People Following People

It stands to reason that because people use social networks to connect with other people, making sure that your brand’s social media identity is tied to a person or people will increase the likelihood someone will follow your company or organization on Twitter or Facebook and the like. That’s not to say that a firmly established big brand or an organization with a large constituency cannot ramp up their friends, fans and followers quickly. But most smaller brands or new brands will struggle.

Sure, you can buy followers, but having 10,000 new followers you just purchased won’t provide long-term benefits, particularly not in building deeper relationships with your customer base and converting them into evangelists. How do you build a meaningful following?

People Following You

The challenge of building a following in the more popular networks — Twitter, Facebook and LinkedIn — is that those platforms differ greatly. What you do on Twitter to gain followers usually won’t work on Facebook. Trying the same tactics on LinkedIn could be the kiss of death to your professional social reputation. Here’s a breakdown of some of the ways you can build a following and where those tactics are best put to use:

Not every tactic for building your social network followings will bring relevant friends, fans and followers to you. Relevance often comes when someone makes a conscious and deliberate choice to follow you after perusing what you have to offer, or if they recognize you or they are referred to you by someone they know.

How are you building your followings on Twitter, Facebook and LinkedIn? What is working and what falls flat for you?

stock.xchng image by buzzybee

Related GigaOM Pro content (sub. req.): Social Media in the Enterprise

I’m a tech addict. How much tech and social media is too much? Not monetarily, mind you, but quantity (in order to) produce quality?

My response discussed one of my personal theories on social media marketing:

I think of my Social Media Triad: Three very strong social networks where I’m building a good following and where I can do the bulk of my promoting. Everything else is the icing, while those three places are the cake. My triad consists of Twitter, Facebook and LinkedIn. Then when I want to cast a wider net, I use HelloTxt or Ping.fm to spread a little icing!

The term “Social Media Triad” is my own, just my way of stating that three good social media sites or tools can be your foundation; where you need to focus to build a following, engage meaningfully with others, and promote what you do in appropriate ways. Sure, it is tempting to have presences and profiles all over the place, but when it boils down to it, there are only a handful of places where you need to spend most of your time.

Your Social Media Triad could consist entirely of social networks, comprise a blog, microblog and a social resume, or be any combination that provides you with the right doses of:

• Presence. You want to be places where it makes sense for you to be. If you are a graphic designer, LinkedIn might not necessarily be your first choice; perhaps a more portfolio-based network could be more appropriate. For a photographer? Maybe Flickr is the right place to start.
• Reach. You want to have the potential to not just reach a lot of people but a lot of the right people. But remember, sometimes you can reach the right people through others who know and trust you, or can vouch for your work.
• Interaction. You want to choose a place where you can interact with others in meaningful ways — in this case, for business. If you hate tweeting, chances are that Twitter is not a great place for you to be in terms of interaction.

Here’s how I break down my own Social Media Triad and how each one has helped me business-wise so far:

Twitter

I’ve been on Twitter since March 2007 and have taken a very personal approach to my main account @alizasherman. I dance on the tightrope that divides professional and personal. I share a lot of my own writing and work, my client projects, interesting articles and posts I’m reading, and my thoughts on all things social media. But I also riff about food, share personal photos, talk about how I’m feeling — and can get a bit confessional after a glass or two of wine. Blending the personal and the professional can be risky for many people, but that’s who I am and who I’ve been since I started my first website in 1994. I “live” online in ways that may make some people uncomfortable, but it works for me.

For business: Twitter helped me to re-establish my visibility in my industry after a several-year hiatus. Twitter has helped my company find some of our key team members. I get my daily news and information about my industry and the world around me from Twitter. I get answers to my tech questions, lots of feedback on my projects and ideas, and some incredible business advice in general. My support network on Twitter is phenomenal, even for business.

LinkedIn

I’ve been on LinkedIn since 2002 although my original LinkedIn account became inaccessible to me so I actually have two accounts; this is the corrects one. I love LinkedIn and know that you get out of LinkedIn what you put into it. When I’m diligent with updating and reaching out to my contacts in meaningful ways, LinkedIn becomes a bustling hub of true business networking. If I need to find someone or something strictly for business, LinkedIn is the first place I go. But when I neglect LinkedIn, it tends to sink back into the shadows and is far less fruitful.

For business: I’ve found excellent candidates for positions with my company and some leads to new clients. I’ve been able to get top-notch advice on business issues, and try to reciprocate with answers to questions where I have expertise.

Facebook

I’m not a huge Facebook user. I jump in when I have something to share but tend to leave it for days at a time. I struggle with keeping my Facebook Page updated and have yet to engage often with people there. The real engagement that I get with my actual friends on my Facebook Profile is a wonderful thing, just not directly business-related. Still, I cannot deny the power of the sheer number of people using Facebook and the friendly networking that goes on that could lead to business deals and strategic partnerships. To me, it feels like while LinkedIn is the high-powered networking event, Facebook is more like the backyard barbeque.

For business: I’ve gotten a few client contracts from Facebook, back when I was still a sole proprietorship. Now that my consultancy has grown into an agency and our charge is to reach Chief Marketing Officers and VPs of Marketing at bigger companies, Facebook is a good place to have a presence, but in many ways it requires a lot more time and finesse for true B2B outreach.

Finding Your Triad

There is no combination that will suit everyone, and not everyone needs three social media accounts. Yet many of us have dozens, because we also have accounts on YouTube, SlideShare, Flickr, Foursquare or GoWalla, even MySpace. Then there’s Delicious, Digg, Reddit, not to mention accounts on online communities of interest and our blogs. Linking some of these sites together or occasionally using a broadcasting or cross-posting tool — like Hellotxt and Ping.fm or any number of new social media management systems (SMMS), like HootSuite and Sprout Social — can help make managing your multiple presences on multiple channels easier.

But if you want good quality business interactions in social media channels, pare down and focus — create value and vibrancy first. You can always expand out onto other networks again as you grow your connections, fans, friends and following. Always keep in mind what you are trying to achieve with your social media presences. And always remember the adage: less is more. Don’t spread yourself too thin, or real value is lost.

What is your social media triad?

stock.xchng image by blogless
diagram by Aliza Sherman

Related GigaOM Pro content (sub. req.): Social Media in the Enterprise

Here’s a handy list of community and communications iPhone apps to help you network:

• Sprouter. Sprouter — the global collaboration and networking community for entrepreneurs — has a new iPhone app. Although my Sprouter account is woefully neglected, I do like how it feels similar to Twitter, but with a clear focus on work. From your mobile device, you can manage posts, filters and communications.
• Gist. This service connects your inbox to the web and feeds you important business-related information about the people and companies with whom you’re interacting. It’s like having a personal assistant at your ear ready to feed you critical bits of info about the person you’re about to meet.
• Foursquare, GoWalla, BrightKite, Loopt, Whrrl. Are you ready to check in? Are you willing to announce your location to your friends? Your activity on these sites is predominantly mobile-based as you use your device’s GPS to provide location-related status updates. Want to check into multiple services from the same place? There’s an app for that: Check.in. There are even hyper-regional location-based social networks cropping up, such as TriOut for the Triangle in North Carolina.
• LinkedIn. Of course, the top social networks have their very own mobile apps, including MySpace, but LinkedIn’s is particularly robust. I can check updates, update my own status, view connection profile updates, monitor discussions, access my connections list, check my inbox and respond to correspondence, manage invitations, and connect instantly with other LinkedIn users (both parties need Bluetooth enabled on their mobile devices). Kind of like Bu.mp but integrated into your LinkedIn account.
• Facebook.The Facebook app lets you review your news feed where you can “like” or comment to your heart’s delight; access your profile page, manage friends and friend requests; read or send messages; view photos, events and notes; and even chat live with other FB friends. What I really like about the app is the ability to add Facebook Pages so I can monitor and manage them. (Note: When using the iPhone app, any posts to a Facebook page will be made via your personal Facebook account.)
• Hootsuite, Tweetdeck, Seesmic. Some of the most popular cross-channel social media management tools have iPhone apps. You can post to multiple places such as Twitter, Facebook and LinkedIn from a single dashboard and create multiple views or columns to monitor different aspects of your account such as @ messages and DMs on Twitter, along with your Twitterstream. Cotweet still does not have a native mobile app but does provide mobile access at http://m.cotweet.com/m01.
• Skype. Skype takes care of a lot of my conference call needs, long-distance calling and IMing. The iPhone app does the same for me on the go, plus you can connect by voice to another Skype contact, although you need to make sure you have a good and steady connection.
• Tumblr, TypePad, BlogPress, WordPress (please see disclosure at the end), Posterous. Avid blogger? You can feed a blog post straight from your mobile device to your specific blog. The Posterous app, PicPosterous, makes it easy to manage sets of photos or videos.

So many iPhone apps, so little time — yet I actually find I save time thanks to these useful ones. And in case you’re curious, Sparkle (shown in my iPhone home screen image above) gives me access to my Second Life account for my avatar, Cybergrrl Oh.

What apps are you using on your mobile device for communications and community?

stock.xchng image by lusi

Disclosure: Automattic, maker of WordPress.com, is backed by True Ventures, a venture capital firm that is an investor in the parent company of this blog, Giga Omni Media. Om Malik, founder of Giga Omni Media, is also a venture partner at True.