The headline takeaway is that employees are shifting from being passive observers of social networks while at work to active participants, dramatically increasing their use of these networks (in fact, total social networking traffic more than tripled). But despite BusinessWeek claiming social-mad employees are hogging bandwidth, don’t be too alarmed about the increase in usage. All that posting and game playing only accounts for a total of about one percent of Internet bandwidth, and Palo Alto Networks is stressing that while some people are certainly slacking off, an increasing amount of social networking use is also for legitimate work purposes. File sharing is way up as well but also only accounts for about one percent of total network bandwidth.

“At first glance, the shifts in usage patterns may imply that there is a significant drain on productivity and a strain on the networking infrastructure, possibly jeopardizing other, more business critical, bandwidth sensitive applications. Clearly social networking applications are being used for both business and personal purposes, but the overall impact to the bandwidth infrastructure is small,” says the report. A more serious risk than wasting time or bandwidth may be threats to data security. The report suggests networks are harder to secure than many IT pros imagine.

Thumbnail image courtesy of Flickr user Franco Bouly.

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Part of the innovation in this new generation of products is that they are — largely — built on a Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) foundation, and getting up and running can be as fast as buying a book on Amazon. And because these applications are social at their core, they can be very viral. One member of a small company’s marketing team decides to manage a project using Yammer or Podio, and she immediately invites four other team members to get involved. This means that the tools are quickly adopted, at least in the small group level. (Note: I’ll talk with Soonr’s Martin Frid-Nielsen, Mavenlink’s Ray Grainger, and QuickOffice’s Alan Masarek about this topic onstage at Net:Work, on Dec. 8.)

The new “work media”

However, the more important side of this social tool innovation is that they are based on activity streams. Users’ activities within these applications are not simply captured in the metadata of directories or the states of information in databases: these activities — such as making a comment, adding a file to a project, or assigning a task to a project member — are published in streams, a la Twitter, Facebook, and a long list of other consumer applications.

To distinguish these modern business tools from earlier generations, I use the term “work media.” They share characteristics with well-known social media tools, but they are oriented toward getting work done. And like social media, work media is fluid, with streams of information finding their way to the individual user, who may opt to follow topics, projects, and other users. These applications share the core design metaphor of streams, though they differ widely in how streams are composed, displayed, and shared.

Open tools, closed data

Business has a bias toward privacy, and so work media tools support that tendency by — almost without exception — erecting a password barrier against access to a company or group’s information. Finer-grained access controls are provided for more specific information contexts, such as projects, folders, groups, or other “spaces” managed by the work media apps. In this way, a company can restrict access to a HR group so that only a few HR staff can see the resumes and pay information managed there, for example.

This tendency, along with the relative immaturity of the burgeoning work media marketplace, is rapidly leading us to a very strange outcome: a generation of business software — work media — ostensibly based on the principles of open social media, but which are inherently closed, and which are spawning a million information silos.

But the risks and costs associated with business information stored in these applications is much higher, at least form the view of the companies migrating onto these work platforms. So once a company commits to using a specific work media platform, they may find that the information stored in their projects becomes as fixed as concrete.

Streamed, not structured, data

Let’s lump the information managed in these systems into two piles:

• Concrete, structured, and relatively moveable information, stored in files of various sorts
• Fluid, unstructured, and relatively unmoveable information, such as internal links, social gestures and other application specific metadata

It’s relatively easy to imagine downloading all the files stored in a Yammer account, and uploading them into an IBM Connections instance. But other sorts of information — and semantics — won’t have the same ease of movement.

Consider a hypothetical work media tool — let’s call it Work Talk. Work Talk supports both milestones and tasks, and it also allows tasks to be optionally linked to a milestone. One of its semantic rules is that a milestone cannot be complete until all linked tasks are complete.

Imagine that Work Talk supports exporting all the structured information — files, user identities, and so on — and less-well structured information, like tasks, milestones, posts, comments, and the many relationships between them. Taking that information and figuring how to import it to a tool that is architected differently would be at the least a major programming task and, at the worst, an impossibility. And the semantics of milestones and tasks might simply fail, if the new tool doesn’t implement that capability the same way, even if all that information can be exported and imported en masse.

As the market matures, standards must evolve

We’re at the start of a new era in business software, and there is an explosion of new players and new ideas about how streaming information should be structured and streamed, and how the various bits relate to each other. This is much like the early days of email, when a single corporation might have several different email systems that couldn’t communicate to each other. That problem was solved in two ways: by the emergence of well-defined standards that enabled interoperability across different implementations, as well as the consolidation of the marketplace around a small number of vendors serving large numbers of users.

It’s not too early to see some market maturation. It seems that many of the vendors in the space are making highly similar products, but differentiated around specific market needs (such as integration with specific external tools), focus on specific business functions (marketing versus software development, for example), or emphasizing the size of the company best suited for the tools. I see very little activity on the software standards side, but that usually occurs as the intersection of successful applications, as happened with email and SQL. So, there is no immediate solution in sight, and I wager that a large number of headaches are going to arise from the proliferation of work media tools, especially when vendors go out of business, or when companies outgrow the tool they selected. And there is no simple advice to give to prospective or current users of these work media tools. It is inevitable that these tools will diverge in functionality, and even if two systems are very similar that doesn’t mean that it will be possible to easily and cheaply port from one to the other.

Despite these risks, I believe there are great benefits inherent in the use of work media, and because of those, the rapid adoption of these tools will continue at an unprecedented rate. Just like the adoption of the automobile and the airplane, though, we are going to see a few crashes.

Stowe Boyd writes and speaks about social tools and their impact on media, business and society. A GigaOM Pro analyst, Boyd also writes at stoweboyd.com and is working on a new book about the rise of a socially augmented world, called Liquid City: A Liquid, Not A Solid; A City, Not A Machine.

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From the DoubleDutch :

Leveraging the disruptive, geosocial capabilities of the smartphone, we hacked together a mobile productivity app that allowed our team to “check-in” to work objects such as customers, projects, and products with a tap of the phone. The result? Radical transparency from the CEO to the intern, eye-opening productivity analytics, and a dramatic fall in the use of company email….

Goals

1. Develop communication and collaboration tools to match our work
2. Develop holistic performance measures
3. Retool management for an open world
4. Create a democracy of transparent information

DoubleDutch built on entrepreneur Jyri Engestrom‘s observation that it’s a fallacy “to think that social networks are just made up of people. They’re not; social networks consist of people who are connected by a shared object.” In this case the shared objects are things like projects, customers and places. By letting people know what you are working on and tapping through the project, customer and place objects, you create a signal that can stand on its own, or be taken in context with broader analytics. Coburn noted that you can roll the data up to team and company views — but that it also works as a personal check. He says, “I want to know where I’m spending my time. Gives me a heads up if I’m spending too much time [on the wrong projects.]”

The behavioral change of checking-in regarding tasks is made easier by the commonality of the behavior in personal social media. That said, it’s still a task added to the day’s work. Coburn says HYVE works to motivate the effort through gamification and the ability to  “compete in a gentle way.”

In the middle of my interview with Lawrence, I received a call from my colleague, Al. He and I were collaborating on a teaching engagement that afternoon, but given how I feel about email, I hadn’t done an email “check-in” just to tell him I was ready to go. However, Al is conscientious and so was checking-in with me. I could see the value of HYVE as Al’s number flashed on my phone. With a HYVE mentality I would have checked-in from home, announcing my review of the class slide deck before getting on my call with Lawrence.  Al would have seen that check-in and known I hadn’t forgotten our engagement. Instead, he called, I texted during the call, I later listened to his voice mail, and then called him back as I hadn’t gotten a reply to the text. All extra work that a simple “tapping, not typing” check-in could have avoided.

Certainly the technology alone wouldn’t have reduced our extra effort, but if we apply the check-in gesture to work the way some people check-in at bars, all that workflow knowledge would already be in the stream. I don’t doubt that in great implementations, where human, technical, and organizational practices are adjusted with the addition of HYVE, that email is reduced by over 30% as it was in DoubleDutch’s internal test.

HYVE integrates with Salesforce Chatter and they are considering Yammer and Jive integration. HYVE Public launched for the iPhone on September 9, 2011.

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The key to remaining productive is to not let distractions sidetrack you from your primary job. Here are a few tips for taking charge of your day and kicking a few of the most common distractions to the curb.

1. Social media. Turn it off when you need to focus. Seriously. Shut down your Twitter client and log out of Facebook and other services for at least part of the day when you really need to focus on your work. If you can’t turn them off, you can still disable notifications so that you aren’t having them pop into view constantly. This doesn’t mean that you can’t check social media while you work, but you can minimize the impact by only checking in periodically. Maybe you look at Twitter and Facebook once per hour, or when you finish one task and are moving to the next. But really, if you are checking Twitter every few minutes, are you really going to get as much work done as you would if you weren’t checking it?
2. Visitors. Whether you work in an office or at home, people will drop in and distract you. I’ll admit it, I often listen to music or put my headphones in just to signal to people that I am not available. If people see that you have headphones in, they will at least think twice about bothering you. Leaving your phone headset on can also work. You might try “do not disturb” signs or shutting your office door, if you are lucky enough to have one. I’ve even had pretty good luck with hiding and working in a super secret location until I finished a piece of work that needed focused concentration.
3. Unnecessary or unproductive meetings. I’m a big fan of not attending meetings that aren’t valuable in some way. Now, this probably doesn’t mean that you can blow off your manager’s staff meeting or important meetings with clients, but you can probably skip a few meetings. I’ll often look at the agenda for a meeting, and if there isn’t anything particularly relevant for me, I’ll send the organizer an email to let them know that I won’t be attending. On the flip side, you should be considerate when scheduling your own meetings. Cancel them if you don’t have anything important for the meeting, and always send an agenda in advance to let people know whether or not they need to attend.
4. Email. Most of us get more email than what we can possibly read anyway, and it just keeps coming in! You could probably spend all day just responding to email, but then you would never get any work done. The first thing to do is turn off any pop-up notifications that you get every time someone sends you an email. Next, set up some filters and color code email from important people to help you notice the ones you care about while ignoring the rest. Now, the hard part. You have to actually ignore your email and focus on other work without that distraction. You can occasionally glance at your email on a regular schedule or between tasks and look for anything critical. If it’s not critical, ignore it for a bit until you are ready to spend a little chunk of time focused on doing email.
5. Instant messages. For really serious work, you might think about logging completely out of your instant messaging client. For most of us, we can use custom status messages to signal to people how urgent their request should be before they interrupt you. I recently set my status to “cranky, interrupt at your own risk”, and I don’t think I had a single IM during that time. I also use the generic, “busy – priority interrupts only” status, and you can get pretty creative with these to let people know that they really should think twice about interrupting. It is also perfectly acceptable to not respond immediately to an IM. If a friend or co-worker sends you a message on a topic that isn’t going to be critical, ignore it until you get to a good stopping point or when you are ready to take a break and respond when it makes sense for you.

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Before you get started, you’ll need to fill out a few details or sign up using your OpenID, Google or Yahoo account. Authorize the app to work with your Twitter account(s), and you’re ready to go. The Twimbow screen is divided into three main columns: “Personal Buzz” (your tweets, @ replies, and DMs), “Home Buzz” (your main Twitter stream) and search.

Color-coding your tweets

The “Personal Buzz” column is color-coded by default. As shown by the icons at the top of the column, your tweets are blue, @ replies are green, DMs you’ve sent are yellow, DMs sent to you are orange, tweets retweeted by you are pink, retweets of your tweets are olive, while tweets you’ve marked as a favorite are red. Clicking on one of those icons at the top of the column filters those tweets from the column, so clicking on the red star will remove favorites from the column.

The “Home Buzz” column contains your main Twitter stream. Similarly to the “Personal Buzz” column, it also has color coding, but you’re left to define your own system. You can define labels (such as “News,” “Friends,” “Work,” and so on) and give each label its own color. Apply a label to a tweet and it (and all of the other tweets from that user) will be color-coded. You can also filter the stream to show or hide tweets with each label.

The column to the right has a real-time search feature. Saved searches can be moved to the “Monitor” box at the bottom of the screen if you want to keep an eye on a particular phrase.

Filtering noisy tweets

As well as the color-coding, one other Twimbow feature that aims to help clean up your Twitter stream is the “noise killer,” which enables you to set up a filter to remove tweets containing specific keywords from your stream. This could be useful when an event is happening and there are tweets flooding your stream that you’re not interested in, for example (although you’ll need to make sure to remove the filter after the event has finished).

Twimbow certainly has a pretty interface, but it’s not without a few drawbacks. Despite working well on my smaller laptop screen, there’s no mobile version. You can’t check out trending topics. And while the interface looks pretty, it’s not exactly intuitive — it took me a little while to figure out how the color-coding and search columns worked, for example.

It’s not a full-featured social media dashboard

You should also note that, despite its use of columns, Twimbow is not really a full-featured social media dashboard like, say, HootSuite or TweetDeck. You can’t add additional columns beyond the three that Twimbow provides, nor can you configure how each column works, as you can with HootSuite and TweetDeck. However, as an easy-to-follow and novel web-based Twitter client, it works really well, and for a web app, it’s impressively responsive. If you’re finding it impossible to keep up with your fast-moving and noisy Twitter stream on the official Twitter website, even with the help of lists, Twimbow is definitely worth checking out; it’s free.

Twimbow was previously in private beta and required an invitation to access, but it’s now open to all; you can sign up here.

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In last week’s post, I talked about how technology is creating an “always on” social media world. Like it or not, these days, if you’re in public (i.e., out of the safety of your own house and/or in the presence of a another person with a camera or camera phone), you’d better be comfortable with anything you do being captured and possibly even posted online.

For this week’s post, I thought I’d provide some tips from the PR industry to help you feel better prepared for those impromptu publicity events.

1. Stay (at least somewhat) presentable. Make sure that you’re at least presentable most of the time. My solution is to keep my closet up-to-date so that I feel “put together” enough, no matter what I might wear on a given day.
2. Get comfortable with public speaking. Fear of public speaking is often reported as the #1 fear of most people, so it’s no wonder we’re a little resistant to having video of ourselves broadcasted to the world. A public speaking or improv class can help alleviate anxiety and instill confidence for those times when you’re placed on the makeshift stage of the World Wide Web.
3. Spruce up on interpersonal communication skills. Learning to manage facial expressions and body language and to maintain eye contact can greatly improve how you feel, as well as your effectiveness, when communicating with others.
4. Control your energy and attitude. Sometimes we leave the wrong impression with people, even our loved ones, simply because we aren’t in the best of moods or because we’re not quite feeling up to par. Doing things to better manage how we feel overall can improve how we handle stressful situations.
5. Mind your manners. I often wonder about celebrities who are dismissed as rude, thinking, “Did they just have a bad day and get caught on camera at an inopportune moment?” Bad habits, poor manners and language, and being less than courteous can be a big turnoff for prospective clients and business associates, so it never hurts to err on the side of caution in this department.
6. Try not to appear defensive or guarded. If you come across on video like you’re fighting off paparazzi, it can easily be taken out of context so that others think you have something to hide or have a bad attitude. As nerve-wracking as it can be to appear on camera, try your best to relax and be natural.
7. Get comfortable making smooth transitions. You can expect to be asked a question at some point that you either can’t or don’t want to answer. Learn to make smooth transitions to another topic so that you avoid sticky situations or avoid coming across as uninformed or elusive.
8. Watch what you say and do. As many celebrities can attest, one careless slip in judgement can quickly put you front and center of a debate or media firestorm. Even if you think you might not be that powerful or important to warrant that kind of attention, you could still get into hot water with friends or family, your clients, or your boss, so be careful not to do or say anything that might be insensitive or offensive to someone else.

While it was once the job of publicists to manage the images of high-profile individuals and companies, these days, with the ever-present social media and devices to share content like photos, audio, and video, it’s becoming increasingly necessary to take charge of our own publicity and image as it’s presented online. Fortunately, a little preparation goes a long way to keep you in the good graces of clients and business associates online.

What other tips do you have for preparing for social media close-ups?

Photo courtesy Flickr user Carnoodles

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The rise of curation

Social recommendation isn’t new; marketers have long known the value of vocal advocacy. The difference is that now, a brand’s audience (or its followers) can register direct and extremely visible benefits from their advocacy.

Thus, curation is a valid, and valued, technique for gaining currency with audiences. We benefit from our own curatorial advocacy (which builds our credibility), and we rely on our favorite brands or businesses to sift through the web and point us to good resources, insights and opinions.

Little wonder, then, that many business brands have built large audiences using the curation approach. These brands are seen as leaders because they have the ability to tell the good from the bad, and they have market-leading contacts who keep them abreast of the latest developments.

In the curatorial approach, the network is critical, along with the brand’s ability to sort the dross from the diamonds.

The role of creation

While curatorial communication dominates some social media right now, it’s important not to forget the valuable potential of creation in audience engagement.

After all, curators curate creations. So when you make, do or say something new and valuable, your online presence will be more likely to be included in the curations of others. It’s the basis of viral marketing, but thanks to the nuances of social media, your creation doesn’t need to go viral to deliver value to your brand, or your team.

If everyone else is funneling or channeling information, those brands that create have a point of difference. When you make ideas, products, or thoughts, the information you deliver to your audience is unique.

Your creative work gives you the scope to engage customers, stakeholders, and other parts of your organization, by inviting them to join the process of creation and development. But more importantly for collaboration, creation allows you to share stories of experimentation, learning and application through social media, the company blog, industry events and so on.

That experiential information can form the glue for engagements with third parties, which, over time, can prove mutually and deeply beneficial. Such benefits could be something as simple as landing a spot in an invite-only beta test, or something as valuable as hearing about a bug that may affect you — in time to preempt disaster.

If you create, you have a lot to gain by sharing your experiences online, and connecting with others doing similar work. If yours is known as a creative brand, you likely already have followers and connections who are craving your creative insights. The question is: are you using that opportunity?

Striking a balance

How can you make the most of the opportunities for curation and creation in your social media activity?

Your team’s online presence may address multiple audiences. But whether you are concerned with engaging with customers, suppliers, or peer organizations, your team has a lot to gain by creating, as well as curating, information. This is particularly the case if your team is an isolated unit of specialists, or has a specific technical focus. It should be imperative for such organizations and teams to be directly engaged in the business of creation.

Connect with the creative leaders in your field. Share product development stories and updates on your blog. Invite creative third parties and peers to contribute their ideas for overcoming challenges, or addressing issues you face in your own creative process — and publish your own thoughts to get the ball rolling.

Traditional businesses may be concerned that asking questions or seeking advice from others, even peers,  online has the potential to damage the brand. Adopting a strategy that encourages individuals in the creative team to seek peer input through their own online activity (as employees of the brand) may be a solution to this impasse.

Do you leverage creation in your online engagements, or do you stick largely to the territory of curation?

Image courtesy stock.xchng user rolve.

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Clearvale is a cloud-based, Software-as-a-Service, enterprise, social networking solution that includes interconnected internal and external social networks. It allows customers and employees to collaborate and communicate directly for customer support, idea management, and other needs. Both the internal and external interfaces have familiar components: activity streams, project management tools, communities, discussions, blogs, profiles, embedded media and links.

While there are many  tools to meet these needs individually, Clearvale’s strength is in its ease of use, and in the systems it offers to manage and integrate the internal and external communities. Businesses can create separate social networks for each of these groups, but manage them as a whole. Employees can access the networks using existing tools such as Active Directory, Google Apps, and OpenID; Clearvale has tools to let external partners and customers use various authentication systems. Clearvale can even integrate with e-commerce websites.

The company says that the Clearvale solution gives organizations greater control, with the appropriate levels of access and security, while still enabling deeper customer engagement, and providing the means to integrate with existing social networks.

When I spoke with Richard Hughes, director of product strategy at BroadVision, he told me that after 18 years of experience with developing e-commerce portals, and their recent experiences with enterprise social marketing, the company feels that there is a market for a solution that allows businesses to manage internal collaboration and CRM in one platform.

He feels such a solution will be more effective than trying to use separate social networks for each activity: “At BroadVision we don’t agree that Social CRM is about tightly controlling customer interaction or that it’s primarily about social media monitoring. It should be about integrating all of a company’s customer engagement channels to enable better communication among customers and employees.”

Clearvale is mainly aimed at medium to large businesses of 100+ employees. More information, including a video demo of a Clearvale ecosystem and a more detailed product demo, is available from the Clearvale website.

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SocialBase “is a team collaboration, tools integration and task management system to bring your social media workflow into one central dashboard.” Tasks related to social media can be managed through the dashboard, and team members assigned to specific tasks. The interface also includes a “tools” pane where users can log in to social media directly.

The developer has some interesting suggestions for how to use SocialBase, but I’m not sure what sorts of businesses it will appeal to. I doubt that those already using one of the many project management tools that we’ve covered will want to pay a hefty monthly fee for another system to manage (and another login to remember). Organizations that aren’t using a project management system will probably be better off looking at other enterprise-oriented social media solutions like HootSuite and CoTweet.

SocialBase has three pricing plans: a “Solo” plan for $50/month, a “Team” plan for up to 10 users for $200/month, and an “On Call” plan with unlimited users for $2,000/month. A 30-day trial, a video tutorial, and more information is available at oneforty’s website. You’ll need to log in with Twitter.

How do you monitor and manage your organization’s social media presence?

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Technology is rapidly changing, becoming more social and is quickly becoming an integrated part of our lives. With ever-evolving devices, social networks, and online video capabilities, we’re increasingly moving toward an “always on” existence.

Yet it’s almost as if a strange dichotomy exists: on one hand, we’re steadily moving in this new direction where Facebook and Twitter are a central part of our lives, but on the other, many of us are still slow to adopt video and video conferencing. While a great number of people are embracing constant connectivity, others seem to be too leery of the close-up.

The spy in your living room

An acquaintance of mine has a bad habit of recording people on his cell phone without their knowledge or consent. While casually hanging out with friends or family, it’s common to catch him capturing video of someone in the group and jokingly saying that he’s posting it to Facebook. It’s really annoying, but it also shows how when we could innocently be in the company of others without worrying that the things we say or do will end up broadcasted online are gone.

We advise teenagers and college students not to post lewd or indecent photos of themselves online, as they might come back to haunt them in future job searches and so on, but what about our own everyday conduct? Are we comfortable having that streamed live to the world 24/7?

In effect, life is becoming an all-access, behind-the-scenes pass where anyone with a cell phone and an Internet connection can follow us wherever we go, watching and recording everything we say and do.

Our resistance to the spotlight

Certainly, one could argue that this brave new world of social media, with no privacy and complete (perhaps to a fault) transparency, means greater truth and authenticity, but for most of us, I think there are certain times when we want to be able to let our guard down, and that doesn’t mean that we’re being dishonest or that we’re hiding our “real selves” — quite the contrary, during those times, we might feel the least like ourselves and don’t want that to be how we are ultimately perceived by those around us or by anyone online, especially those who generally see us in a more professional light.

Feeling as if we’re always in the spotlight also has the potential for leading us to a lack of intimacy and closeness with people in general, since relationships restricted to those created online often lack depth and meaning. For example, if we have sensitive conversations with close friends or family members, we might divulge details or thoughts to that person, as we’re in the process of developing our opinions around the subject. That doesn’t mean that those details are our opinions, but rather are helping us form our opinions, and the conversation itself is very much a part of that process. If we’re never allowed to have those types of conversations, how will that impact us developmentally and socially? At some point, there have to be boundaries to what gets broadcasted to the world and to what is considered for or against our reputations, online or off.

In short, we can’t be polished and professional at all times, nor can we ever be perfect — we’re human, and being human means bad days, bad moods, and even slumps sometimes. Yet the reality of our world today is that everything we say or do is displayed as if on an overhead projector, and we’re keenly aware of the fact that first impressions count, so how do we find the balance so that what we say or do today doesn’t come back to bite us tomorrow and so that we don’t become today’s version of Stepford wives, behaving just so, in order to avoid a bad rap?

How are you handling being “always on”?

Photo courtesy Flickr user Malias

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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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• Finding the Value in Social Media Data

These days, everything is distributed: our teams and co-workers, our customers and clients, and even our networking efforts. You can live in San Francisco, have an assistant in New York, and serve clients in London. It’s also possible to have many followers on Twitter and Facebook, and tons of posts and comments written about you or your company on a daily basis around the web. Somehow, you have to find a way to manage all that interactivity, and keep your team, your customers and your followers in the loop as well. It’s a lot to handle, and it can easily become overwhelming.

Postling enables you to post to your blog, schedule tweets and respond to comments using virtually any social media outlet. You can write a post once and publish to all your social media accounts at the same time, including Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, Tumblr and Flickr.

Organize and Schedule

You can group your social media accounts by brand so that you can stay organized and work efficiently, which comes in handy if you own more than one business, have multiple locations, or want to manage your business and personal accounts from the same place.

On top of that, you can also connect multiple users to your accounts so that assistants and team members can post to your social networking and media outlets, too, and with granular permissions for every person, you can easily protect your privacy by only allowing access to certain accounts.

Another helpful feature of Postling is its ability to schedule posts, which means you can write posts ahead of time, then schedule when you want them to be published.

Monitor Comments

Postling also gathers all the comments your readers leave on your blog, Facebook, Twitter, and other platforms and organizes them in a single place, making it easy to respond across all social networks without having to access multiple sites.

The Postling dashboard provides an overview of your recent posts and the comments they receive, and each comment gives you the option to reply directly to the correct account. Comments are threaded, so it’s easy to understand the flow of a given conversation and chime in at any point.

You can monitor what people are saying about you and your business by tracking your streams, RSS feeds and reviews from around the web, such as Yelp and CitySearch, and with email alerts of comments, you won’t miss anything.

The Postling analytics dashboard allows you to gauge the effectiveness of your social media and networking efforts by showing which days your posts are most effective, as well as your post-to-comment ratio.

Postling currently supports integration with most social networking and media platforms — including Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn — most major blogging platforms, as well as YouTube, Flickr, Bit.ly, Yelp and CitySearch.

The starter plan is free and includes one account per social network; if you need more users and accounts, Postling’s has plus ($9/month) and premium ($49/month) plans.

Of course, Postling’s not the only app that enables you to work with multiple social media accounts. Alternatives include tools like TweetDeck, CoTweet, HootSuite, and Engage121, but Postling’s ease of use, along with the number of platforms it supports, makes it my preferred choice.

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Social media needn’t be an end in itself. It’s one thing to “engage” and “lead thinking” in your social network. But social media really starts having a direct benefit when you can tap into the information it’s providing you and feed it back into your business, and your team.

One way to look at the social media picture is to ask the team members who use and manage your social media presence two basic questions.

What Are Our Contacts Saying?

The ongoing review of what contacts are saying — an essential part of engaging with social media — reveals trends that can be invaluable to your team.

What are contacts are saying about your organization, product quality, service levels, team members, marketing approaches and public presence? Are they happy to engage with you? Are they telling their contacts about you?

This kind of information can be fed directly back into strategy (for example, if customers are complaining about your phone support, perhaps you need to review call center opening hours) and your team’s task lists (if clients have identified a bug that’s not yet documented on your product site, that can be added to a team member’s priority list).

What Aren’t Our Contacts Saying?

This may seem a silly question, but with a little effort, you can identify gaps in your strategy, and opportunities to improve both your offering and your contact relationships.

How do you work out what people aren’t saying about you? Look at your competitors’ engagement with their audiences. What are customers, suppliers and industry players saying to or about peer organizations that they’re not saying about yours — and what does that mean?

Also compare the information you obtained from investigating the first question (what your contacts are saying about you) against your social media goals. If you’re meeting those goals, there won’t be any gaps between what you expect to see in your social media engagements, and what’s actually happening. If there are gaps, you’ll know something’s missing, and further research and discussion are necessary if you’re to lift your game.

Identifying what customers aren’t saying is only half the problem. The other half is your team’s interpretation of what those gaps mean, and the practical approaches you devise to address them.

Making It Work

In large teams, teams where the social media effort involves multiple parties, or teams where the person who looks after social media isn’t a leader or manager, scheduling a regular, focused discussion of these questions is probably ideal.

This kind of semi-formalized approach to feeding the knowledge obtained though social media back into business strategy allows you to understand the value your social media contacts can add to your business. It may also give you the objectivity to consider those findings — and possible responses to them — from a strategic viewpoint.

For example, if a customer complained about product quality, how does this information compare with the broader research you’ve done into customer satisfaction? What processes do you — or could you — have in place to respond to these comments? The same questions could be asked about your most loyal advocates, assuming you want to maintain that position in their minds.

How does your team understand and interpret the qualitative information that social media provides to you? What techniques are you using to feed this information back into business strategy, and/or team member to-do lists?

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I recently spoke with Ross Daniels, Director of Marketing for Cisco, about the challenges of deploying social media monitoring and management tools inside a larger enterprise. I’d spoken with Daniels about Cisco’s SocialMiner, a product that companies can use to capture, analyze, prioritize and take action on consumer posts in social media channels. The application is not aimed at the marketing function but instead focuses on customer service, customer support and sales in the social media ecosystem.

One of the first things companies should do before deploying any software solution to help harness social media activities and actions, says Daniels, is to make sure social media is positioned — or repositioned — as residing between marketing and customer service. If customer service and marketing aren’t talking to each other, there is a high likelihood that social media marketing efforts will fail. Customer service is built for listening and for scaling and can be an integral “pillar” alongside marketing to manage social media.

Here are some suggestions for managers to consider to pave the way for more effective social media management that came out of my conversation with Daniels.

1. Connect customer service with marketing. Start making introductions between departments to establish a more collaborative relationship if it doesn’t already exist. The heads of both your marketing and customer service departments should meet regularly. Marketing plans should be shared with — and can even be enhanced by — customer service. Each side should know how to use social media to not only fulfill their own goals but to help one another to get closer to reaching overall company goals.
2. Assign dedicated staff to social channels. Pick or train people who can develop an expertise in social media engagement and response in social channels. Consider representatives from both marketing and customer service or a shared liaison. Cross pollinate social media activities so no single department — or person — holds the responsibilities.
3. Measure results together. As expectations are high for tangible returns on social media marketing investments, bring customer service in to help measure, analyze and tell the story of how social media is effective for the company. The measurements and analysis customer service already does will bring value to the analysis of social media. Both departments can contribute to generating reports and presenting findings.
4. Mine social media for more than sentiment. Instead of just looking for the positive, negative and neutral of what customers are saying about a company’s product or service, look for clues to how the public perceives the company as a whole. Social media can be used to identify places within an organization where there are silos hindering cross-departmental communications and other operational issues. Use the findings in social media channels to make functional improvements in how the company works, not just what they offer.

As you manage, monitor and respond to social media activity around your company and brand, make sure to spread the awareness and responsibilities across multiple departments. When it comes to social media, operating in silos can be the kiss of death. Social media can also help identify and break down silos, but these changes must be articulated as a core shift in both internal and external communications and interactions. Present social media not as yet another burden for someone to add to their already overloaded work day but as an inherent change in the way the company communicates with the public and within its own walls.

Where do social media responsibilities reside within your organization, and how is that working?

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In reality, that description extends beyond social media to any form of online collaboration, including team members collaborating on work projects. In the past week, I’ve seen some serious missteps occur in teams with a tool focus, rather than a team focus.

In the race for greater productivity, team leaders eagerly latch onto the latest tool or productivity philosophy. It’s only natural: we’re keen to try new ways of getting things done. That need is even more important in a creative age, because the quicker we get the mechanics of our working day out of the way, the sooner we’ll be free to focus on the challenges of innovating.

But in doing so, have we inadvertently become slaves to the machine?

The Tool Trap

Paradoxically, tools that centralize individual’s work processes and progress tracking to facilitate collaboration can, in a team management sense, have the greatest potential to drain team efficacy.

Team members diligently tracking their time, sharing documents, coordinating calendars and logging stakeholder contact events may not have the time, headspace, or opportunity to explain to the team leader that the stakeholder seems oddly uneasy about the project, or that a colleague hasn’t really been herself for the last week or so. Yet these factors may eventually prove to be productivity — and project — show-stoppers.

Growing a process around tools is another common problem. To really work, collaborative processes must put people first. But often, a vague notion of a process is only made concrete once the team leader begins to think about the tools involved. This can lead to issues in the production, tracking, and maintenance of work outputs, as well as dissent and motivational issues among team members themselves. It’s always better to map the process first, then work out where collaborative tools could add value.

Switching between tools can cause serious confusion for team members trying to remember logins, which folder is which, and where they can find a resource among a myriad potential locations. It can also lead to miscommunication: did my colleague say he put that file in Dropbox, Basecamp, Google Docs or the shared drive on the server?

Getting Perspective

All of these eventualities are bad news for your team’s collaborative output. They can also negatively impact motivation and productivity. But they can cost businesses much more than that.

The more time you and your team spend engaging with, learning to use, focusing on, and working with your selected (or growing) suite of collaborative tools — and the problems they present — the less bandwidth your colleagues have to step back and think intelligently about projects, stakeholders, and the opportunities they can see to help advance the business.

The skilled professionals you’ve hired have more than qualifications, can-do attitudes and nerdy tendencies. They’re experts in their disciplines — and it’s the team leader’s role to make the most of that expertise. Giving staff the space and time to think about projects, formulate ideas, and share them should be central to the practice of collaborative business.

Force your team to record new ideas on the company wiki, and you’ll register only a handful of the possible theories they’re tossing around on their coffee breaks, toying with in notebooks, and chatting about in late-afternoon IM conversations. Require that everyone’s task list is up-to-date in Basecamp by 9.30 each morning, and you’ll likely be wasting energy reviewing tasks that could have been done in less time than it took your team members to add them to the task manager.

As Solis alludes, the currency of truly productive collaboration entails the ability to learn, adapt and earn relevance. This is especially true for team leaders managing the collaborative process of work in a highly competitive and changeable space. Here, the manager needs to invest the time to exchange and discuss ideas — to learn about their team members and adapt to their working styles and preferences. From there, they can choose tools that support intelligent collaboration, rather than making the sharing of even the most basic information a burden.

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Let’s take a look at some of the times when hiring out your social media efforts makes sense, starting with the most dire — and undesirable — situations first:

1. When things blow up

You’ve been managing your social media channels, communications and community building. Then something goes terribly wrong. It could be that your company is experiencing a crisis communications incident, and your social media channels have ignited with vitriol from the public who see your Facebook Page and the Twitterstream as a battleground to lob attacks against your company.

What now? This is a critical time. Admit you’re over your head and that you need help. Look for a social media marketing agency that has experience of crisis communications in social media. A more traditional crisis communications firm may not yet understand the complexities and nuances to minimize or putting out fires in social media channels. While a crisis isn’t ideal, if you see the warning signs in your traditional or offline channels, bring in a qualified social media consultant sooner than later. They may be able to keep the crisis from blowing up online entirely or help minimize the damage.

2. When you’re overwhelmed

You’ve managed your social media channels internally for a while, and you’re finally getting traction. Then something good but unexpected happens — like a mention on Oprah, perhaps — and all heck breaks loose. Suddenly, your once manageable Facebook Page is abuzz with conversation via hundreds of comments. You may be tempted to throw some emergency internal resources at your channels — pulling in Joe from Marketing and Jane from Product Management — but neither have been properly trained in handling external social communications much less an onslaught of posts, comments and tweets.

What now? You should be so lucky to have sudden and massive growth of your social media channels, but if you’re not prepared to handle the load, an external agency could do three critical things for you: come up with a rapid deployment strategy for harnessing the energy within your channels; supplement your internal team with skilled social media specialists to handle appropriately selected tasks; and train your internal staff in the skills they’ll need to properly manage your company’s social media assets.

3. When you’ve hit a wall

You’re plugging along pretty well in social media, but the growth of your channels and the activity just seems a little flat. You’re participating in conversations, you’re being pretty responsive to your friends, fans, and followers, and you’re posting updates and useful content pretty steadily. You have a loose strategy in place that seems to be working OK. You’re a little frustrated, though, because aren’t seeing the response you think you should be seeing.

What now? An experienced social media marketing agency will first assess what you’ve done to date, analyze your metrics, and identify gaps in your social media marketing strategy. They can then come up with a more comprehensive strategy that fills in the gaps and makes creative recommendations that may not have ever come to your mind. Sometimes when you’re in the thick of it, you can’t see the proverbial forest for the trees. Getting outside input can take your social media efforts to the next level.

4. When nothing’s happening

You’ve been immersed in social media for months but are getting very little response to your updates on Facebook or Twitter or to your uploads on YouTube, or wherever else you’ve set up a presence and have posted something. You’ve been charged with building your friend, fan and follower bases to a certain number, but that number seems completely unattainable at the rate you’re going. Not only are you not getting many comments and no retweets at all, but you haven’t seen any mentions — positive, negative or neutral — about your company in any social media channels. It’s like you’re working in some cosmic vortex where all of your efforts seem to be sucked into a black void.

What now? Just because you build it, they won’t necessarily come to your channel, much less interact with you or take any of the business-critical actions you’d like them to take. Bring in that social media marketing agency for a more thorough assessment of your social media marketing efforts and maybe even a broader analysis of your competitors in social media. They can craft a more proactive strategy and lay out specific tactics you can employ to put your social media marketing efforts on a more positive trajectory.

5. Before you start

Still considering social media marketing as part of your integrated marketing mix but not sure where to begin? A hit or miss approach will be mostly misses. At this stage of social media marketing maturity, you shouldn’t look at your efforts on Facebook, Twitter or YouTube as a little experiment.

What now? This is the ideal time to turn to a reputable social media marketing agency with a strong portfolio of work and case studies. If you can find an agency with some relevant experience in your industry, that’s a plus. A strategic agency will start with assessing your brand, messaging and company assets as well as the competitive landscape to determine opportunities and potentially challenges that you can address head-on. They’ll design and build your social media channels properly and set up the processes so you can co-manage them. They’ll also train your staff to participate in social media communications and marketing and supplement your company’s efforts over an extended period of time until you’re ready to ramp up internally and bring the work in-house. Or you may decide it is more effective in the long run to keep outsourcing.

When not to outsource

If you have assessed both your internal needs and assets and external social media landscape and have put a comprehensive social media strategy in place, plus have ramped up internally with experienced or well-trained staff to handle social media duties, then you’re probably set.

How are things going with your company’s social media marketing efforts? When did you or would you bring in a social media marketing consultant or agency to help?

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