Category: SMUG

CDC Connects

Kay Sessions Golan (PDF file), Director of Employee Communicaitons for the Centers for Disease Control & Prevention (CDC), presented her case study on CDC Connects, the CDC’s On-Line Newspaper and Intranet Portal.

Note: one of the downsides of internal communications is it’s usually hard to benchmark against other organizations. You can’t see their intranets. So Kay showed screen shots from the CDC Connects project.

CDC started its internal blog after having attended a conference like this one. It took about 9 months to get started. They’re using WordPress installed on their servers. It’s “real” blogging software.

Why a blog?

  • These conversation are happening anyway.
  • It allows for respectful, open conversations vs. the water cooler talk
  • It demonstrates trust in employees, and they expect it can lead to problem-solving across the organization.

If you think you’re “controlling” the message now, without a blog, you’re deluded. A blog let you introduce the subject and engage the conversation, instead of having it happen without you.

CDC’s intranet blog is a moderated blog that allows anonymous comments. They did have some trust issues, so they wanted to encourage honest feedback. They were concerned they would get just the “suck ups” – the virtual Eddie Haskells – if they required people to give their names.

This is a little bit risky. Michael Rudnick, our conference chairperson, says the CDC policy is the exception, more than the rule. If employees know that IT can trace comments back to the source, it may diminish trust.

CDC has developed and refined its blog rules over a few months. One of the rules is that the comments need to be “on topic.” They engage in conversations with the negative commenters, asking them to provide specific suggestions for improvement.

They do one new post a week. Categories have included: Business Services, CDC History, CDC Now/Futures, CDC Stays Healthy, Facilities/Scenes, General (the catch-all) and Public Health in Action.

What they’ve learned after 51 posts and 2,400 comments:

  • Most active discussions: on topics that affect daily work life
  • Least active discussions: on scientific or programmatic topics
  • Many managers are reluctant participants
  • Discussions easily wander off topic
  • Appreciated by bloggers
  • Let it evolve and mature.

Kay says they’ve thought about using WordPress for crisis communications. That’s a great idea. I’ve blogged about that previously here. You could do that in WordPress, or in Facebook, or both. If you have WordPress on your intranet already, it takes about 15 minutes to start a new blog to handle this.

Sun Microsystems Embracing Social Media

Sheira Ariel and Carrie Motamedi from Sun Microsystems presented Embracing Social Media: Why, When & How?

Sheira asked whether social media are “just for fun” or also for business.

I actually think social media can make business more fun. And if your goal is more engaged employees, wouldn’t having more fun lead to more productivity?

She gave the example of IBM using instant messaging to put together a proposal for a client really quickly. Likewise, I’ve suggested using Twitter to quickly activate a crisis-response team.

On any given day, half of Sun’s 35,000 employees are working remotely. This makes a stronger case for using the collaborative power of social media.

A year ago they were using traditional communication vehicles: Town Hall meetings, E-mail, Static Web content, Newsletters, Conference Calls. Now they’re adding Global Town Halls, blogs, IM, Facebook, Wikis, Video/Podcasts, WebEx, SecondLife.

The Sun culture supports social media. Then-COO Jonathan Schwartz launched his external blog in 2004. As CEO, he challenged the employee communications group in 2007 to focus on “building communities” instead of just “doing communications.” They renamed their group to include the “communities” element: Global Employee Communications and Communities (GECCO)

Schwartz’s mantra is “Everything always in beta.” This enables them to experiment.

Sheira’s Guiding Principles & Tips:

  • Focus – pick a couple of manageable projects to get some quick wins
  • Start Small
  • Know Your End Goal
  • It’s a Journey

Five Common Social Media Goals

  1. Connect with friends and co-workers quickly
  2. Collaborate
  3. Build communities
  4. Get what you want (not what someone else wants you to have)
  5. Share

Matching Tools to Goals

  1. Wikis for collaboration/knowledge sharing
  2. Blogs to build reputation/share information
  3. Text messaging/IM for quick connections
  4. Forums and message boards to get employee feedback, solve mutual problems
  5. Facebook, MySpace, Ning to build relationships, share

Sun has about 5,000 people on Facebook. Socializing that happens in Facebook builds relationships that help create collaboration. It’s pleasure that leads to better business.

Sun has a PR group focused on social media. They also have experimented with events as ways to “slip in” new technologies on a pilot basis.

I created an event on Facebook within Social Media University, Global. I hope everyone who is attending the conference will indicate their attendance at this event by:

  1. Joining Facebook if you’re not there already.
  2. Enrolling in SMUG
  3. Indicating your attendance at the event.
  4. Continuing the conversation and networking, either around the event or by discussing here.

Social Media 103: Intro to Wikis

wikiillustration.jpg

Note:  This course is part of the general education requirements for Social Media University, Global (SMUG).

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A wiki is a great tool that enables groups of contributors to work together to quickly create and edit documents that pool their collective knowledge.

You’ve no doubt heard of Wikipedia, which is (to paraphrase the former Iraqi dictator) “the mother of all wikis.” The richness of this resource, produced entirely by collective voluntary effort, is truly amazing. Check out its entries on the Virginia Tech massacre and the 35W bridge collapse, and you’ll get a sense for the power of wikis to facilitate collaboration.

And these are only two of the more than 2.2 million articles in the English version of Wikipedia. So just how is Encylopaedia Britannica supposed to compete with that?

You’re no doubt already using Wikipedia. In fact, if you Google almost any relatively prominent proper noun, it’s highly like the Wikipedia entry will show up on the first page of results. So that’s one wiki already making your life easier (unless you work for an encyclopedia publisher.)

But how can wikis help you complete your projects?

If you have a work team, you can use a wiki to produce documents much more quickly and easily than you can with a Word document via email.

For example, say you have a 10-member team and you need to produce a two-page document. In the old way (or maybe what you’re doing today), you would produce a first draft and send it as an email attachment to your team members: Ann, Bob, Cindy, Doug, Eunice, Frank, Gail, Hal, Irene and Joe. You play it smart and turn on the track-changes mode, so edits are apparent.

  • Ann adds to the document, hits “reply all” to the email, and sends her revision to the whole group.
  • Bob bounces your original directly back to you with some modifications, but doesn’t copy the rest of the team.
  • Cindy changes Ann’s version and hits reply all.
  • Doug deletes Ann’s additions and inserts his own, and likewise sends to everyone.
  • Eunice edits your original and sends it on to Frank for his thoughts on one particular section.
  • Frank fails to respond, so Eunice’s edits are lost to the team.
  • Gail groans at Cindy’s changes, adds her own ideas, and copies the whole team on her changes.

So at this point in this illustration you have 52 Word files in various team members’ email inboxes, and figuring out which is the latest version is, well…problematic at least. And even if you can track down the various versions, it’s a hassle to compare modifications in separate documents.

Feeling cross-eyed yet?

That’s why wikis are wonderful. Instead of sending an attachment, you send a link to a special Web site. You and your teammates make your edits in one common place, and each version is saved in the document history. So you capture all of the information, and you as the editor can compare the various versions.

Homework Assignments:

1. Watch a Wiki Video. Honorary doctorate candidates Sachi and Lee LeFever again have an honorable contribution, with their Wikis in Plain English video. See it below:

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-dnL00TdmLY]

2. Participate in our Class Wiki Demonstration. Visit the SMUG Curriculum wiki, and add your course ideas. This gives you hands-on experience with a wiki, and it also will help strengthen our curriculum.

3. Set up a wiki for your team or some other group. You have options to get these for free, like everything else in the SMUG curriculum. The one I picked for our class project is wikispaces. Using wiki technology to accomplish a practical project takes your experience to the next level.

4. Discussion: Please share your thoughts or questions about wikis, or what you’ve learned through your experiences with them, in the comments section below.

Extra Credit for Honors Students: Read this review of Wikinomics for broader background on the new ways of working made possible by technology like wikis.


SMUG Curriculum

The Board of Regents has given approval to development of the curriculum for Social Media University, Global (SMUG).

In addition to the Core Courses (general education classes), which are required for all students, SMUG lets you choose your Major(s) from a variety of tracks. While the course offerings are subject to change, you can click the links below for the current plan for each Major:

Additional Majors will be coming soon. And although you can choose among various major tracks, the best news is you don’t have to pick just one. You can do them all.

Your second and subsequent majors are included at no additional charge. They’re included in your base tuition.

For more information about SMUG, click here, or go here to enroll.

Facebook Page as White Pages Listing

Note: This is the required reading for Facebook 221, part of the Facebook major track for Social Media University, Global (SMUG). More information about SMUG and the homework assignments for this course are at the bottom of this post.

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I have written previously about Facebook Pages being like a free multi-media Yellow Pages listing.

I got my dead-tree phone directory analogy wrong.

In reality, with some relatively recent changes in how Facebook manages its URLs for Pages and people, and the fact that profiles and pages can now be found by Google searchers who aren’t Facebook members, a Facebook page can be a great White Pages listing.

Before Facebook launched its Pages program for organizations, I had recommended that organizations and businesses and other organizations should develop Facebook Groups. One of the key reasons was because anyone can form a group with any name, and if they mention your business name in their group description, people will find that group when they search for your business in Facebook. By creating a group and getting lots of members, your “official” group would come up highest in the Facebook search results.

But now, with Pages having been established as the way for organizations to have “official” Facebook presence, they are great tools for searching both inside Facebook and in the wider Web via Google. They’re much better than groups.

Here’s why:

  1. Facebook groups cannot be found through Google.
  2. Because of the URL structure, a Facebook page shows up high in the Google rankings when people search for your organization or business name.

A Facebook group has a nondescript URL, as is demonstrated by this group I formed in the pre-Pages days for Aase Wedding Photography and Video, a moonlighting business my brother and I have been exploring. Here’s the URL from that group:

nondescripturl.jpg

Even if Facebook groups were available to be found by Google, their URLs aren’t optimized for search.

In Facebook Pages, on the other hand, the URLs have been search optimized. Here’s the URL for the Facebook Page I developed for our fledgling wedding photo and video business (click the graphic to view at full size):

aaseurl.jpg

But more importantly, look closely at the Google results (and the URLs in green) when you search for Aase wedding video

aaseweddingvideo.jpg

Note that my Facebook page shows up first in the Google results. It doesn’t show up high if you are searching for wedding video or wedding photography. Those categories are a lot more crowded (7.4 and 7.6 million), so it’s much harder to make the first page of Google, and I don’t have many inbound links to that page.

So that’s why I say a Facebook Page can be a great online equivalent of a White Pages listing. Your business or organization’s name is in the URL, which is major cue for Google. And maybe over time a Facebook page could become an effective Yellow Pages listing, if it attracts inbound links and if its content is optimized for relevant keywords.

Homework Assignments:

  1. Go to Facebook and search for Mayo Clinic. Note how many groups you find, but also that the official Mayo Clinic Page shows up at the top of the search results.
  2. Try the same Mayo Clinic search in Google. Note that the Facebook page doesn’t show up anywhere in the first several pages of results. For organizations that already have lots of web presence, a Facebook page will not immediately come up high in the Google rankings. But then again, people will be able to find contact information for those organizations through conventional Google results.
  3. Search in Facebook for your business or organization. You’ll see how many groups have been formed that mention your organization. If an official Page doesn’t come up first, you may want to consider developing a page. And if someone not affiliated with your organization has created a Page for you, you can seek to have it removed. This will be covered in more detail in Facebook 310.

To enroll in Social Media University, Global (SMUG), join this group in Facebook. Read more about SMUG and our Curriculum.