As I learn more and more about the social science behind Social Media I am still baffled by how many experienced individuals there are in this field that still swap and maintain multiple identities online. I’m not talking about those happy go lucky individuals who use Twitter as a fun social tool/game, rather I’m talking about those who use it primarily for serious knowledge management and community engagement or to fulfil their innate passions.

I’ll just for the record define what I mean by; changing your identity, as best I can. I know there are many ways to look at identity and I won’t do it justice in this blog post but hopefully this stimulates the topic. Your user name is an identity as it helps identify you. Your avatar photo is a representation of your identity and both these together define your identity online. If you suddenly stop Tweeting and focus on Re-tweeting or you start to rant a lot more online that is representative of your personality and is less about your identity. The government is serious about you maintaining one identity off-line and that’s the whole reason you have a passport and why it’s a crime to forge another person’s identity by creating another passport with your photo and a different person’s name in it. 

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Scholarly thinking has nearly always preceded the definitions tailored by the software industry. Definition's on terminology are important but will differ depending on what side of the balance sheet the definition now sits. KM is now being defined by the people making money from it and who are being paid to evangelize.

The crux of KM comes down to how the company can be more effective and efficient and pay higher dividends to share holders. Staff attrition costs companies millions and is far more prevalent now than it was 30 years ago. That's a paradigm shift! You lose your people you lose your knowledge and often to your competitor. Companies have to get their heads around this and technology has helped. Corporate knowledge attrition is only one aspect of the KM field but I want to relate this comment to it. By capturing the "deltas" of argument / discussion / creation on a daily weekly monthly basis in systems which relate to the particular "environment" in which they are being captured and then aggregating these, provides a knowledge pool. Web2.0 helps capture the "deltas" as well as creating tools which relate and appeal to the "environment" in which they are used. Systems can then aggregate and provide the ability to search and share experiences to prevent reinventing the wheel and slowing the operations down. The skill will be to present the knowledge pool back to the employees in a way that works for everyone. Dr Martin Porter at Cambridge University helped develop some very interesting Natural Language search algorithms back in the late 90's which disappointingly have still not been incorporated into our favourite search engines.

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 I had been waiting in anticipation for the show since I booked it a month ago. Silly pun and unintended there, as the booked show I'm referring to was an event "The future of the Book" held as part of the Melbourne writers festival this week. Straight off the bat I'll let you know that I'm mildly dyslexic and even though I have always had a massive respect for books I'm not the type to plunder my way through a glorious stack of books in a weekend. My mother used to take me by the hand around the library with a basket which she piled high with her weeks reading so it wasn't for lack of being shown the way that I didn't do the same. I am an Audio book person and Audible.com is my friend. Friend in the way it points out what other books I would probably like if I enjoyed the one I just listened to and friend in the way that it takes me to reviews by other people who share my interests. I know you're all probably laughing, yes at me and not with me, thinking you probably have no real friends. We'll get to that in another Blog post when we discuss what a friend really means to us but here's a little insight by Cameron Marlow about Online Social Media and friends in Facebook http://tinyurl.com/aapjq2

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I felt compelled to write this post in light of the recent Twitter crazed support of the most popular reality show in the history of Australian TV, MasterChef. Something fundamental was uncovered for me and it relates to a change which we are all going to have to face up to. Twitter is crossing boundaries and these are quite serious ones indeed which Media companies such as Channel 10 are going to have to face up to.

The MasterChef final went to air on the East coast of Australia at 7:30pm last night. It was only to be aired two hours later on the west coast of Australia when it would be 7:30pm there, due to the time zone difference. MasterChef, during the series, gained a massive following on Twitter. If you don't believe me do a search in Twitter on #masterchef and see for yourself. The series for many who use Twitter was made that much more special when shared with new and old friends alike on the Twitter Social Media platform. The advertisement breaks for once became useful as Tweets spun between the lounge rooms of viewers. This is entertainment and we will see this concept grow and grow.

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Knowledge Solutions is investigating the Emotional Intelligence aspects of Micro-blogging (MB) tools like Twitter and other Social Media software. We are running courses which help companies profile themselves and their staff to see what if any Social Media will best suit the organisations Culture and that of their staff.

We have heard a number of arguments as to what the initial perception of Twitter is and why some People take to it like a duck to water and why others simply dont. Twitter (MB) can be used well and also really badly depending on how it is introduced to participants. I wont go into how to best introduce it here suffice to say that unless some time is spent in defining the aims of the tool and the derived benefits in context, adoption and successful uptake will be impacted.

There are so many aspects to this simple to use tool which are so useful however still perceived as a waste of time to those who don't understand it. There are also a huge amount of so called experts who bang on and on about the pure marketing benefits. If you had never seen or used Twitter before and someone said to you, Twitter is all about getting your product out there and getting loads of people to follow you so that eventually they will buy that product, would it appeal to you? You may give it a go but participation wouldn't last long with such a blinkered one sided commercially focused view which is bound to fail. However if someone was introduced to the Micro-Blogging world as understanding the relationship building, finger on the pulse, community focused, collaborative, Knowledge Management, Self Service aspects of the tools it would paint a whole different picture.

We need to reduce the clutter and clarify and educate about the protocols around the use of the tools in order to lower resistance.

I found the following snippets so interesting I had to republish them. You can find more on the http://searchcrm.techtarget.com/ site. It all points towards the uptake in the Relationship Economy and the future of the New Web with its Interactive technology. 

1. Web 2.0 technology takes center stage at Gartner CRM Summit: According to expert Paul Greenberg, the customer experience is now the key differentiator in the business ecosystem. Web 2.0 technologies like blogs, wikis and social networking sites are changing the way companies interact with their customers and putting the customer experience center stage. Gartner recommends companies looking to improve the customer experience get started with Web 2.0 as soon as possible.

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However important it is stated as being, as a fundamental part of nearly all project management methodologies; project reviews are seldom carried out or taken seriously.  How often are projects actually reviewed and notes taken to analyse why they succeeded or failed in certain respects. If reviews are documented how often is this knowledge ever stored in a system which is searchable? Are the results ever revisited so that similar pitfalls don't reoccur in future projects?

Time is money and consultants are after diverted to the next project, if not physically at least mentally before their existing project is actually brought to a firm conclusion. More often than not they will leave the premises directly after project completion. They may stay around for a farewell beer but even that is often unlikely. I recall one Intranet project development where one meeting was set aside following a 12 month project to note what the project offered as a learning experience. I'm not sure what happened to the notes which were taken.

I'm not going to deliver a finite solution to this problem but here are a few noteworthy points. In a more iterative project with fixed and firm milestones these review meetings could be held more often. This would need to be driven from the top and the client partner would review it as part course and the Project Management Practice Manager (if such a position existed) would meet to discuss the overall project outcomes with the Project Management team as part of a mentoring exercise after a project completed. A good Knowledge Management solution would need to be in place to easily reference the information in the future.

[video:http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Je5gnqkE_AE 400x400]

Physical conference events are becoming more and more sophisticated and I remember realizing this when I attended one situated in the gardens of the Palace of Versailles which was impressive for a start. I had intended during the first coffee break of the day to meet with the information manager of Pfizer Europe. As I exited into the break rooms of which there were many I was greeted by a representative in a black suite who was part of the conference coordination team. He asked me who I would like to meet. He had a headset on and as I let him know, he was immediately relayed information as to which table the Information Manager of Pfizer  was taking a biscuit off at that precise moment and took me across and introduced me to him. This to me was the height of coordination and service.

Now let's step into the virtual world for a little while should we. I was privileged enough to attend a evening seminar (Knowledge Management Leadership Forum in Melbourne) this week where the speaker (Helen Mitchell from CPA Australia) had Project Managed the development of and coordinated a conference session on Second Life. Now for those of you who are new to the virtual world, Second Life is a whole "other world, " which exists in Cyberspace. It's a world portrayed much like our own where you are represented as an Avatar which can walk and talk(though your headset) and interacts with other avatars, who are real people sitting at computers, pulling the strings with their keyboards. A seminar in Second Life has chairs and stage along with all the wonderful other things we take for granted when we attend such an event, all taken care of by the Event Coordinator and a vast behind the scenes team. These things we take for granted are plants, seating setup the colour of the carpet and the room, backdrop and much much more. In Second Life this all has to be built from scratch after you hire the land to build it on or you could hire the venue at a lesser cost. There is a massive amount of detail to consider if you were to build it yourself so once again there are software development companies who do it for you on specification.

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With all the current talk about job losses and redundancies I'm reminded of a situation I was in back in 1996. I had recently moved to the UK at the time and had a great job working for a modern international software company. The position was that of a support specialist in a particular niche database technology. The company was right (or wrong) sizing and they had decided to relocate their International support operation to the HQ in the States and disband the UK international support group. When I had joined the company only 6 months prior I had been introduced to the HR company lawyer in my induction with the words, "if you ever get called into a meeting with your boss and this man happens to be also sitting there, then it is probably your last day in the company."

It was 10am and I was called into a meeting only to find that yes, you know who was there. I was given four weeks notice and I felt very alone until I walked out into the open plan office and found that all 9 others in the international group had also had the same meeting. It was little consolation as I had not been expecting to lose my job at all. Now that I've set the scene I'll focus on the point I want to get across. There was only one other expert in the UK who supported the same database I supported and he was one of the 9 who was let go along with me. We had a thriving local (UK) operation that needed technical support on this product and the only two experts on the product had been let go within the same hour. At 5pm I was reluctantly called back into my boss's office and offered my job back supporting the same product. The managers had not thought about the Intellectual capital which they were losing until they had lost it. In actual fact it really was too late as I had already been on the phone that afternoon to the States and had arranged an interview asking to relocate to HQ on the International team once again. The other expert who had been let go lived in a city in the north of the country. His office was being closed entirely and he didn't want to relocate to London, which is where I had been. I turned down the offer to take my job back. The London (UK) office was now stuck with the situation of desperately needing to employ and train from scratch to support their local client base, which was a costly affair. There is definitely a lesson in effective planning to be learned here.

I did end up immigrating to the US and my career was escalated through the opportunity offered to me as a result of being made redundant. Each cloud has a silver lining.

On Friday the 11th of July we held our first Workshop in Cairns :

Multimedia Communication / Networking and Collaborative technology

We covered a multitude of topics from Web 2.0 and the new Enterprise to how they Y Generation is perceived and how best to work with them.

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