So I belong to a number of the mainstream platforms and the ones I really use the most are :
- LinkedIn – primarily used for finding/communicating business based information
- Twitter – to see what the people I am interested in are posting and posting info for them to see – business info.
- FB – I am a member but never do anything in it
- Jive – used to use Jive when I was contracting at Cisco Systems
- Cisco Webex Social – used to use Jive when I was contracting at Cisco Systems
- Zoho – use for keeping in touch with what is happening at HansenKnight.com
- OTHER : things like Google+, Evernote, GoogleDocs…used occasionally – mainly for family/friend sharing type stuff
My preferred tool is Twitter, it is simple and the #tag philosophy is great.
As you can see I have all of these activity streams on top of my email and soon became overwhelmed by it all so I tried to make the system (Web 2.0 philosophy) work for me.
I downloaded the aggregator Hootsuite, which helps put as many as possible of these activity streams on one screen.
This helped a bit but I just had too many messages coming from everywhere.
I then went through and really refined :
- LinkedIn – the groups I was a member of / owned
- Twitter – the number of people I followed (restricted to those that really focused on my areas of interest)
- FB – just ignore
- OTHER : well not that important on a day-to-day basis so just pop into them when needed.
Even after this exercise I still had loads of messages on a continual basis coming from LinkedIn and Twitter.
If we just stick to Twitter I probably get about 60 Tweets a day on stuff that, based upon Web 2.0 principles, I am interested in. Great BUT I do not have time to look at all 60 tweets per day on the off chance that 2 or 3 of them are going to be VERY INTERESTING to me and add some value to what I do in the business world.
I get at least the same amount of messages in LinkedIn – from the groups I belong to.
So at the end of the day what do I do ?
On the one hand I have to scan 120 messages/day to try to see if 5 or 6 of those have any real value to me (or potentially for the people that follow me or the groups I publish to). To scan those 120 messages per day adds a lot of additional time to my work load. So the equation is simply :
If ‘the Value Lost by Time taken to scan 120 messages’ < the ‘value derived from scanning those messages’
THEN
– it is worth it
ELSE
– it is not
END IF
A simple equation, but to even be able to answer this question properly one has to invest a lot of time into learning and using these tools.
Now transport this to the Enterprise and let’s try to get the global sales force, and all the SMEs & central functions, to use these tools. Sales peoples first question is WHAT IS IN IT FOR ME (WIIFM) and unless they can easily use the tool and gain value that affects their commissions, with a minimal amount of ‘lost value’, then they aren’t going to use the tool.
I am an advocate of Web 2.0, but these technologies are still in their early days and deriving real value personally and in the enterprise is a big challenge, looking for a big answer.
Guy R Thackray
10-Sep-2012
@guythackray http://lu.linkedin.com/in/guythackray
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