That resource might be a person or a document, but the employee still has to find it. That’s where the machines come in. Software that learns about employees, their relationships in the company and outside the company can help humans navigate social environments more quickly, and even pull in resources that may not even be on the network. For example, Gutelius used the example of the Army realizing that one of its soldiers had figured out a new way to help deal with IEDs in Iraq. This soldier wasn’t even online, but by tracking the improvement in certain squads and soldiers the Army was able to identify this individual and promote him. He was also given a forum to teach soldiers more widely.

This example shows not only how creepy this type of software could be, but also how close it is to reality. Some people might resent having their relationships mapped at such a level. Imagine if you are in a department with a horrid boss and trying to switch roles within the company. Such software might draw unwanted attention to your wooing of the marketing department as you tried to escape product management.

Anyhow, creepy or not, Gutelius’ adaptive social computing is a few years away from widescale adoption, and no longer the stuff of science-fiction fantasies.

Photo by Pinar Ozger.

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Here is a breakdown of how to use Quora, Focus and Namesake to enhance your professional reputation.

Quora

I recently wrote about using Quora for getting answers to business-related questions. While I think the quality of conversation on Quora can be good, sometimes you feel like you are posting a question into a big, black hole. Still, with the amount of buzz happening around the site, getting in now to “stake your claim” in your areas of expertise isn’t a bad idea.

When starting to use Quora as a reputation-builder, make sure to fill out your profile information thoroughly, including the sections on the site where you can include your “bio” for various topics. Even if you aren’t ready to spend time answering questions, you want to make sure your expertise is showcased concisely, otherwise people will arrive at your Quora profile page and have no idea who you are or what you do. Keep the length down and make sure the first handful of words convey something meaningful because this is what others will see when you answer questions in a given topic area.

To get more out of Quora, follow the topics that you believe you can contribute meaningfully to. Respond to questions when you have a specific point of view or expertise that hasn’t yet been demonstrated. Follow the people with whom you are truly interested in getting on their radar, learning from, or interacting with.

Quora has a section in your profile where you can post content. This can be a good place to re-purpose some of your relevant content and tagging it with specific topic keywords to add your two cents without specifically answering a question. You can also answer a question and link to your content elsewhere, although do this sparingly as this can appear gratuitous if you simply use Quora to point people to your blog or site. Don’t think of Quora as a “gateway” to your other presences, like your blog, but instead think of it as an opportunity to provide a snapshot of who you are and what you do on a site where people are paying attention.

Because of Quora’s breadth of topics, you can choose almost any area and set of topics to show what you know. However, the most active areas are the tech, new and social media, and mobile spaces.

Focus

If your expertise is useful to small business owners, you may want to head over to Focus. This site has been around a few years now and while Quora came out of beta with a bang, Focus has been building a rich database of information and experts a little under the radar and now boasts over a million active users. While Quora tackles a broad range of topics, Focus looks to help business owners make better decisions, so expect to find more business topics and technology topics related to business.

On Focus, Q&A is only one of the site’s features. Think of it as an expert network or “expert market” where business owners can not only get answers to their questions but download published research and attend live teleconference events.

As you fill out your Focus profile, you can opt to check a box to apply to become an official “expert” on the site, but there is no guarantee you’ll be chosen. Focus takes a careful look at several criteria to assess if you are actually an expert in your field and if you have a proclivity for sharing your knowledge with others in a longer format such as on a blog versus Twitter. They also look at your interactions and the retweets your content generates to see if what you write resonates with your community of followers.

If interested in having you as an official expert on their site, Focus will conduct a phone interview. Some experts providing long form research are compensated but not those solely participating in the community Q&A. Otherwise, you can contribute to the Q&A section in basically the same way you might on Quora. The site is constantly undergoing incremental changes to improve how it works, so expect to see better integration of features over time.

Namesake

Namesake calls itself a “community for real conversation.” Namesake takes a more “live” approach to conversations on topics, with announcements of conversations happening on the site, and the people participating and watching.. The conversations are then archived and can be added to over time.

There is a little more chaos on Namesake compared to Quora or Focus.com; every response isn’t carefully composed and the best aren’t always “endorsed” or voted up to the top. These are “conversations” after all. Namesake groups people, conversations and experts by topic, so like Quora and Focus, you should follow the topics that are most interesting and relevant to you, to find experts and to identify conversations where you can be an expert.

The site claims experts in broad topic areas, from technology to entertainment to politics. You can claim your areas of expertise (up to 10) when you are filling out your bio, but you gain expert credibility and status through endorsements from others for your conversation contributions. A nice feature on your Namesake bio is the ability to add video to showcase who you are and what you know.

Whereas Quora might feel like a place for tech insiders, and Focus is more business-oriented and straightforward, Namesake has a scrappier feel where tech hipsters are jumping into a sandbox to play and experiment.

Tips for Q&A Site Success

As you can see, all of these sites have Q&A as a feature, but Quora emphasizes this aspect the most. Regardless of which site you choose as your platform for showcasing your expertise, know that the process can be time-consuming (and possibly addicting). Here are a few tips for making the most of your efforts:

1. Pick one site. Be great. While you might dabble in all three sites to get a feel for them and to make sure they offer you the best audience for your information, to get more out of a Q&A site, you really need to pick one where you’ll spend most of your time and energy. Be thoughtful, and take care to get a feel for the community and learn the etiquette of the site. Be helpful.
2. Incorporate the site into your content production. If you’re already blogging and tweeting, participating actively in a Q&A site can feel like a burden. Look for ways to incorporate a little time each day on the Q&A site of your choice so you can be present, pay attention and add value. Over the long haul, you’ll find it easier and easier to make the time to contribute, but don’t get carried away and let it dominate your time unless it is proving to be a fruitful outlet.
3. Add to your content sharing. When you blog, find an appropriate way to share that in your profile or in an answer or as a post or update on a Q&A site. Make sure not to use the Q&A site as nothing more than a gateway or traffic driver to your blog or site, but do think of it as an additional place to archive examples of your work.
4. Go narrow, not broad. You can’t be all things to all people. You can’t be a true “expert” in many, many things. Part of building your reputation is knowing who you are, what you can offer others, and then focusing on providing consistent, valuable information. Sure, you can provide the occasional answer to a random topic (for example, I’ve responded to questions about RVing and parenting on Quora) because this shows you’re human and multidimensional. But when building your reputation and your brand, consistency is key.

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• Connected Consumer Q4: New Platforms and OTT’s Dynamic Duo Dominated
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• What Groupon Can Teach Us About Shopping and the Web

Who said that the advertising models of print and yesteryear would be sustainable online? Everyone just hoped they’d translate, because porting old models onto new platforms didn’t require much innovation or effort. I’d argue that any publisher that has their eggs completely in the ad banner basket is missing the boat and is in for a Titanic-sized rude awakening.

The good news is that I’ve seen inklings of integrated campaigns online from some forward-thinking advertisers who are realizing that the old advertising methods don’t work so well online and that ad banner fatigue hit consumers in about, oh, 1999. Kudos to the companies who may not yet be getting it right, but are fighting the good fight to bust out of the old models and create some new ones.

So what are the new options for advertisers to reach potential customers? I don’t have a magic bullet for you, sorry, but I do have some wild and wacky ideas about advertising (hate it) versus social communications (love it).

• integration — think of how you can integrate your brand appropriate into conversations. Hint: Strategic social media marketing.
• placement — find interesting ways to place your brand into someone’s information stream. Hint: Virtual goods and gifts.
• overlay — develop ways to put your content into new places and spaces. Hint: Augmented reality.
• cross-platform — don’t just think Mac/PC or Firefox/Safari/Chrome. Hint: Hybrid online/offline.

I’ll leave you with these final thoughts and then let you ruminate — or argue with me, if you like. Most people do not want to consume ads. Many just barely tolerate them. A growing number of people completely reject them. If you look at the trends in communications over the last two decades, the patterns are clear. Learn from our past mistakes. Don’t be afraid to be different. Just make sure you have a strategy, some patience, and a flexible plan.

And please…don’t be an ostrich.

What is the future of advertising on the social web?

Photos by stock.xcnhg users flaivoloka and josecarli respectively

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

Dictionary.com does the job in a very straightforward way, as does using a “define: term” search in Google, but I always felt something was missing, and it wasn’t clear what that was until I recently stumbled upon Wordnik. With the simple but boastful tagline “All the words” I was understandably expecting a lot from the new dictionary web application. What more could I really expect from a dictionary, though, and what more could Wordnik possibly deliver?

A Dictionary With Social Features

You don’t have to, but with Wordnik, the option is there to sign up and become a registered member. Doing so allows you access to additional features, ones that resemble the features of social networking sites. You can create and curate word lists, comment on definitions, tag words with relevant terms, record your own pronunciations and track your search history. Also, you can use Facebook Connect to sign in, so you don’t even need to create a new profile.

Registering also allows to you to edit your profile, which you can make publicly visible. So far, there’s not much info you can share via the profile, but it is an interesting way to find out about other users, especially if they actually take the time to curate lists and assign words as favorites.

You can also comment on the profiles of people. It seems like this would be useful for having word-related back and forth conversations, especially since there’s built-in custom code for linking to words and to the comments pages of words.

The People’s Dictionary

Clicking on “Zeitgeist” at the top of the Wordnik interface takes you to a page that tracks the latest activity on the site, and its here that you can see how the app is more than just another dictionary web site. You can tell what terms have been recently added to lists, check out open lists (which can be edited by any user), view comments and check out user-recorded pronunciations, and see some interesting statistics about the past week’s activity.

Of course, as with every site with user-generated content, not everything people add to Wordnik is useful. There’s some spam, some flaming — and some questionable words and definitions. That said, it’s a far more accurate representation of the living language than is Dictionary.com, or other more traditional dictionary web sites.

Statistics, tags, examples, constantly updated Twitter and Flickr streams, and an ongoing, on-site conversation about words, their usage and their meaning provide not only a comprehensive look at how we define things, but about how fluid that definition is. Whether you’re a copy editor or a linguistics student, there’s something on Wordnik for you.

A Better Word

If you’re trying to find la mot juste, you can depend on your old paper sources, or the online versions of those traditional tomes. On the other hand, Wordnik is an interesting alternative that not only provides you with up-to-the minute definitions and usages, but also makes you complicit in language making in a very real and immediate sense.

While the social aspect may not lead to the most efficient work process, it is a welcome and truly useful distraction. Language is not created in a vacuum, nor does it exist in one, and Wordnik is the first dictionary site I’ve see that not only acknowledges but embraces that. There’s still more potential in web technologies regarding dictionaries, but for now, if words are important to your work, you should make a habit of frequenting this site.

What other features would you like to see on a dictionary site?

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BzzScapes is a new venture from marketing company BzzAgent that groups user-submitted content according to brand, so that you can stay up to date on the company or product of your choice via a variety of different types of web sites and media, with each brand having its own BzzScape. Compared to Alltop, there are two main differences. First, anyone can add any content they want (which means it may or may not actually relate to the brand in question), and second, anyone can vote and comment on things added, which should, in theory, mean that the best sources rise to the top organically.
I find it useful because part of my job involves making sure I keep abreast of what’s going on with Apple at all times. Staying current is easy enough, but knowing the slightly more obscure news and whisperings is what gets you ahead in my field, and that’s where BzzScapes steps in. Books, blogs, images, stories, video and more are being added all the time to the Apple BzzScape, which I can navigate either in grid, list or landscape view.

Aside from contributing to BzzScapes for companies that probably don’t really need the press anyway, you can also create your own BzzScape, which is another reason web workers should take note. Creating your own BzzScape for your own personal business or that of a client is another way to monitor and improve your presence online and in social media. Even if at first, you and coworkers are the only ones stocking it with content, the hope is that with time and exposure, others will begin to join in as well, and eventually you’ll have a nice supplement to your existing accounts on Facebook and Twitter with a little more to offer interested visitors.

One caveat before you sign up, should you choose to. The registration process itself is incredibly tedious. That’s because you’re actually registering for BzzAgent, which is a marketing research web site that wants to mine members for customer data in exchange for giveaways and promotions. So they ask a lot of questions. Including, oddly, whether or not I smoked, which appeared on its own page after three pages of other, much more standard questions.

If you can tough out the sign-up process, I think you’ll find that BzzScapes is worth it. It provides an interesting way to find new content that you might otherwise not have come across, and it could potentially become a valuable marketing tool for your own work.  Registration is also free, so it won’t cost you anything to try it out.

What tools do you use for tracking brands online?

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Photo by Scott Kveton

Many of us are social beings who enjoy interacting with other people, and until you leave an office environment, you probably don’t realize how much contact you have with other human beings throughout the day. In an office, you run into people in the hallways, in the lunchroom, and at meetings. It can be easier to have social conversations or even to bounce ideas off of someone when you run into them unexpectedly. When you work remotely, whether you are a telecommuter or a freelancer, it is possible to go the entire day without ever seeing or speaking to anyone. However there are also plenty of ways to replace those interactions with new ones.

Use technology to have conversations with other people. Instant messaging, Twitter, Facebook, and other social networking sites are the primary ways that I talk to people online throughout the day. I regularly chat with clients, friends, and peers in my industry using several of these tools. I’ll admit to not being much of a phone person, since I prefer to talk to people online or in person, but giving people a quick call to chat about work or anything else can help provide some additional contact with other people.

Have lunch with old friends, peers, clients or other web workers. I spend too many lunches dropping crumbs onto my keyboard because it is just too easy to work through lunch when you work remotely. I make myself schedule a couple of lunches a week. It gets me out of the house, and I always end up having interesting conversations with people.

Join or start a group exercise program. This could be as simple as planning a walk several days a week with someone you know in the neighborhood or joining an exercise class at the gym. Combine physical activity to get your butt out of the chair and social interactions!

Take your work out of the house. I like to spend some time working in coffee shops with other people to break up the time working in my home office. I usually save up some work that can easily be done with some distractions (email, administrative tasks, etc.) while saving the client work that requires focused concentration for my home office.

Attend local industry meetups. Find a couple of groups of people working in your industry and attend a few regular events. As Pamela noted, it’s a great way to meet new people with common work interests. You can also use these events to bounce ideas off of people or get feedback on some of your ideas.

How do you connect with other people while working remotely?

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Any professional who uses writing in any capacity can benefit from getting another set of eyes on their work, and from looking critically at the work of others in similar fields.

BookGlutton can simplify that process by bringing it to the web. It seems primarily designed to cater to people wanting to set up an online book club, but as users can upload their own original works for shared reading, there’s nothing stopping us from using it as a collaborative work tool as well.

The built-in library at BookGlutton leans strongly towards public domain titles for which the copyright has expired, for obvious reasons. Reading and commenting on these works with a group of peers will probably help to improve your writing skills, but I’ll concentrate on its use for gathering feedback on your own work for the purposes of this overview. As is always the case when it comes to sharing work with other professionals, there’s always the worry of revealing valuable IP, but I still recommend a peer review process whenever possible.

The only formats BookGlutton’s upload function supports currently are ePub, HTML, and HTML+ZIP (Zipped HTML files). That means to get my work on the site, I had to use Word’s “Save As Web Page” command to get my .doc file ready for editing. Once uploaded, you can edit the work’s title, author, and description, and decide who to share it with.

My file had that aggravating problem of putting little question mark icons where quotes and apostrophes were, but otherwise the formatting translated well. Once you’re in reading mode, you can highlight text and “Mark” it, leaving comments that others can see and reply to, depending on who you chose to share them with.

The ability to see threaded discussions about any given passage is where BookGlutton shows its real potential as a tool for collaborative editing. You can’t do inline text changes, but for broad, big picture editorial work, this kind of commenting works much better than, say, track changes in a word processing program.

You can also chat in real-time if more than one user who has access to the work is logged in at once. The “Talk” window on the book’s left-hand side allows you to do this, and updates automatically when each user changes pages and/or highlights a new paragraph. This could be very useful if you’re lucky enough to be able to schedule live editing sessions.

Whether you’re a writer working online, or an online worker looking to improve your writing through feedback, BookGlutton is a web app with a lot to offer. It’s also been updated within the last couple of days, so even if you had a look before and weren’t too impressed, it might be worth a second glance.

I can’t wait to upload my endless volumes of memoirs and force my friends and family to read it with me and shower me with praise. And it better be praise.

Have you used BookGlutton, or a similar app, to get feedback on your writing? Share your thoughts in the comments.

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“Someone told me that ‘social’ is so over,” he said, lamenting that his company name may already be dated.

Is “Social” already over? That’s news to me. Those immersed in web work may be sick of the (over)use of the word “social,” particularly if, like me, they’ve been working in the social media space back before anyone called it “social.”

Back in 1995, we called it “community” and “communication.” Heck, we all became social online when we first realized we could communicate with others via our computers on traditional phone lines. Out on the speaking circuit, I talked about how the Internet was all about “connection – not just connecting us to information but also connecting us to people, to one another.”  Sure, we didn’t have the powerful sharing tools that we have today and social networks weren’t even a glimmer on the horizon. Does anyone remember Andrew Weinreich’s “failed” online community SixDegrees.com that paved the way for LinkedIn and the like? That was a social media before it was called social media.

So is “Social” just 2008′s buzzword and on its way out?

For anyone with a company that has “Social” in their name, rest assured, I don’t think that it is over yet. And for anyone out there searching for any available combination of social with another word that might make a good name for a social media business, don’t worry. “Social” is not over yet.

In fact, the general consumer out there is still struggling to understand what a blog is much less a microblog. The term “social media” isn’t even on many people’s radars. The nice thing about “social” is that any non-techie does get what “social” means. But then try to explain to them that “social” now refers to Web 2.0 tools that facilitate collaboration and sharing, and their eyes glaze over. At least many people have now heard the word “social” used in combination with the word “network” often enough in the media, but many of them still think social networks like MySpace are dangerous. Lesson? Let us not forget the learning curve that every new technology and new terminology must go through before mass adoption.

Socialtext, Socialminder, Socialthing? These aren’t household names yet and might not ever be. I’m not knocking any of those companies but for every Socialtext there is a Yammer. For every Socialthing there is aFriendFeed. For ever Socialminder, there’s another contact or CRM management tool.

Think about who these “social” companies are targeting at this time. Not really Mom or Pop. Nor John or Jane Q. Public. Their current customers or members or subscribers tend to be industry types, the iindy Web workers who “get it” or a small pool of IT guys in corporations who also get it.

“Social” as a buzz word simply has not hit the masses.

What do you think of the term “Social?” In your opinion, is it grossly overused or still a useful and viable buzzword that hasn’t even peaked yet?

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• The Future of Work Platforms: An Overview