Wednesday Aug 06, 2008
Last week on Thursday I presented to the GSS Customer Operations team on Social Media, what it is, how powerful it is, and also gave 4 examples on how the members of the team can be part of the Groundswell, and more importantly, can benefit from the Groundswell. If you are not sure what the Groundswell is, here is a link to the blog.
As the first part of the presentation is a story demonstrating how the community acts in the age of Web 2.0 I decided to record a video of this presentation, so you get the narrative behind the slides.
The video can be viewed here:
As the links are not available from the video, I have also uploaded the PDF version of the presentation:
You will need a Sun Online account to view both presentations on Sun's Learning eXchange.
The "live" presentation had a lot of interaction and Q&A, and I am sorry this was not captured. But I do want to offer you the chance to ask questions, post your comments. Foremost, I am looking for your feedback: what did you like, what did you think can be improved for future presentations.
Do let me know by leaving your comment(s) here! Looking forward to the interaction!
Tuesday Apr 15, 2008
The amount of press, and especially space on the social media blogs, that is currently allocated to Twitter gives a strong indication of its popularity and its user base, which is still continuing to grow. The blog article here asks the question whether Twitter has tipped. For those of you that are not familiar with the term "tipped", read the excellent Malcolm Gladwell book "The Tipping Point".
Since I started twittering myself, I have found it not only fun to connect with other people at Sun, but I have also become convinced of the business use, especially since the story I read about the Comcast Executive getting in touch with a disgruntled user as a result of a Twitter post. In the various blogs that I follow on social media, a number of Twitter apps get reviewed on a regular (let's face it, daily) basis, and one of them caught my interest. The service offered by Tweetburner is as such:
- allows you to shorten a url, which given the limit of 140 characters for Twitter posts is extremely valuable
- but it also allows you to track the number of hits for each url that you post
- and finally, on the Tweetburner homepage you can follow the urls that receive the most clicks at any given moment
- posting a new url can also be done by installing the Twurl this! button on your toolbar, very efficient and quick
Once this blog post is done, I will obviously add this to my Twitter account, and follow how many hits the post gets! My recommendation is to try it out, and have fun with it!
Monday Apr 07, 2008
As I am currently looking at various ways to use social media and Web 2.0 tools and practices in Sun's sales teams, I am getting questions from a lot of people around what specific benefit such tools could bring to the users. Valid questions, as it is not always obvious what the direct business benefit is for Facebook, Second Life, Twitter and others.
This example does give a really good example where an executive from Comcast contacted a disgruntled user who complained about Comcast on Twitter. I don't know whether the Comcast user was still upset after the call, or whether the executive offered an acceptable solution, but it was a pretty powerful way of using social media to the benefit of an organisation.
The blog posts the question whether your (our) business is monitoring Twitter to check what is said, and I think the answer for Sun is yes, given the number of Sun users on Twitter.
Any other examples that you could share on how social media can benefit the business world?
