We have an interesting activity happening next week at Oracle where our E2.0 Technology Director Rachel will be conducting a Twinterview with Graeme Stoker from BT Retail. The Twinterview will take place on 15th April 2010 at 3pm (BST) in Twitter.
To check out the stream follow Rachel Phillips from Oracle at http://twitter.com/Phillips_R and Graeme Stoker at http://twitter.com/Graeme_ncl
Hashtags: #e20eyao, #BTCare
Find out how Graeme Stoker from BT Retail is using Twitter and live chat to improve customer service.
Been a busy few weeks including a day trip to Madrid last week plus lots of other bits and pieces. So this has meant a lack of blog entries and tweets. So what does this mean in terms of time, well its been tough fitting everything in and I think it will evolve over time. The real milestone recently was LCJ’s second birthday last Tuesday. He got some great pressies and had a fab afternoon party on Sunday.
We have managed to find at quite short notice a cottage in Cornwall for a week away in the summer so really looking forward to that. Next week it is Amsterdam for a couple of days and may be Munich.
What makes a network social? I suppose the first part is people, the second is interaction and third is collaboration. If I take a look at my various networks all are social in some shape or form, so doesn’t that mean all people networks are social. Point open for discussion no doubt and I think I wanted to puts some comments down on some of my experiences over the years with my various networks.
If I look today I have a number of electronic tools that help me connect to my networks, theses include internal works only sites and external public sites. So what do I use, lets take a look:
Work Intranet – We have components of the intranet that have now been productised (is there such a word) into Lotus Connections and with more to come as the product evolves. Basically I have a number of different sites within IBM that allow me to build networks and connections between colleagues regardless of where they are. Today I can use Lotus Connections, Bluepages+1 and Project Beehive (Internal Project not to be confused with Oracle Beehive).
Another tool is Lotus Connections.
What these two tool allow me to do is build my internal networks, neither is externalised so only IBMers in these networks, which works well in a lot of circumstances, but in the real world I need that mix of both internal and external, which I can get via the Lotus Greenhouse project (greenhouse.lotus.com), but this means having my details populated in another place, so that would be 4 in total with Beehive, Connections, Fringe and Greenhouse. This is just pushing the boundary to far in terms of maintenance. Basically with any social networking tool the ability to use and maintain is key so having multiple tools we need to have update once write multiple times.
Thats internal covered what about external, well to be honest I have three tools that I use regularly. They are Facebook, LinkedIn and Twitter. All of these have the notion of networks and the ability to be friends with people. With the concept of Twitter we have a different spin to that of Facebook and Linked as I can easily follow someone without the person necessarily knowing me. What this does mean is I can get information from maybe influential or for interest perspective. With the other two sites it is a notion of a friend on Facebook or colleague on LinkedIn. There is the need for someone to accept your friendship unlike twitter which you would need to block people to stop unwanted people following you.
So what do I use these sites for? Facebook is a way to interact with both friends and colleagues but more on a social level rather than professional level and I have friend and family as well as colleagues on the site from all walks of life and age ranges.
With LinkedIn I only use this for professional contacts with fewer updates. I have used on a number of occasions recently when ensuring I have links to some of my colleagues in the US who may be moving on. I will write more on my experiences of LinkedIn in the next week or two.
So I have babbled on for a while about networking and have decided that all of these tools are social in some shape or form and that each has its uses. The one thing I love and also hate is the fact I link my twitter updates (tweets) to Facebook , but sometime the tweets are lost on a lot of my facebook friends, really need a method to tell twitter not to always update facebook.
Well I will write more on this subject as time passes..
Now been about 3 months since I joined twitter and the other half has stated that you’re addicted which I not sure I agree, but hey ho. So in those three months here are some stats:
- Following: 78
- Followers: 95
- Updates: 774
Good to see grader has me ranked as 91 and that most popular word in my tag cloud is 
which is not strictly a word
It seems that twitter in general has increased a huge amount over the last six months and that includes me. I decided to switch to using twitter as a mechanism to communicate my activities after using Facebook for some time with its status updates. Having got use to FB I didn’t want to dump it as I use it for a number of things from general communications through to posting photos and arranging outings etc.
With the ability to update both TW & FB using one post is great and allows me to reach a wider audience than just my circle of friends in FB. The one thing I have noticed is sometimes the context of tweets are more business related and look very shall we say geeky on FB, but I think that most people have me listed as a geek so hey hoy….
One of my use cases is to use TW as a cross between IM and Email, by interacting with my tweeps I have IM like messaging but sometime with the latency of email. I must say this does work well although the context can be lost sometime with a lot of updates.
My stats are looking good so far from Grader
118,355 OVERALL RANK, OUT OF 952,761
- 47 FOLLOWERS
- 49 FOLLOWING
- 294 UPDATES
My tweet cloud:
my macbook say now @lewisturek doesn’t then thats @cali am time little on, quality way@spradders going can’t
See previous post for link grader stats
a href=http://twitter.grader.com/index.phpDaveScouller | Twitter Grader /abr /br /Posted using a href=http://sharethis.comShareThis/a
