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LinkedIn Application Platform: A Major Advance

In a playful, tongue-in-cheek, maybe even SMUG sense, I’ve previously called LinkedIn “social networking without the social.” So the announcement last night of its Applications platform raises its usefulness significantly from my perspective.

I first saw this news in my WordPress dashboard as I was writing a post last night, and went to install the WordPress application, which is supposed to display the most recent posts from my blog. Note: it didn’t work in my Safari browser, but it did in Firefox and IE. Hopefully either the WordPress gang or LinkedIn are listening like Yammer and will figure out and fix the Safari problem.

Here’s what it looks like when you add the WordPress application:

All you do is paste in your URL, and hit “Save”

And the widget (which you can drag toward the top of your LinkedIn profile) looks like what you see above. Another great reason to have a WordPress blog, huh?

I think this is a huge development. My friend Jeremiah thinks it could mean the end of the intranet.

It’s important because by opening the platform as Facebook did, LinkedIn is saying “we don’t have all the smartest programmers in the world, and we sure can’t afford to pay them. So we will provide an opportunity for others to enhance the usefulness of our site, and connect their sites and services to ours.”

Jeremiah’s point is similar: many (if not most) corporate intranets are missing the consumer-grade social networking features users have come to expect on the Internet. (Isn’t it funny that consumer-grade means higher quality on the Internet, while “business” or “professional” grade is clunkier? But that’s a topic for another post.)

Especially in today’s economic climate, corporate IT departments aren’t going to be able to afford hiring enough programmers to recreate that same level of social networking funtionality (or to put it another way, to “reinvent the wheel.”)

Open source (like WordPress) and Software as a Service (Saas – like Yammer or Salesforce.com) solutions will be smart ways for organizations to get world-class user experience for employees at significantly lower costs.

If someone else has already developed and polished a fantastic user experience, and if you can get it for free or at an extremely reasonable cost, why wouldn’t you take advantage of it? Why not deploy your programmers to create the links and safeguards that tie these world-class applications together?

Jeremiah thinks his yet-to-be-born kids won’t have any concept of a corporate intranet. I’m not so sure about that, but I’m casting my vote with him. He’s a Forrester analyst, after all. (You can cast YOUR vote below!)

But certainly there are some data elements and resources that your corporate IT department is currently paying boatloads to store and back up, that you could instead have outside your firewall. My blog, for example, is out on the Internet for all to see anyway. And Flickr photo streams or other resources could be “cloudsourced,” which would have the benefit of creating more links to your corporate or professional sites.

The LinkedIn announcement suggests that it could be the major hub for integrating this information. And as more applications are developed and security is proven (and as the economic climate puts more pressure on corporate IT to deliver more services for less), even more highly confidential data could be integrated in a hub like LinkedIn.

What do you think? Is Jeremiah right? (No, not Jeremiah Wright…that’s again another topic.)

Cast your vote below, and add your thoughts about this topic in the comments!

[polldaddy poll=1055581]

30 Ideas in 30 Minutes: My Ragan Panel Contributions

I’m serving on a panel to close the Ragan conference hosted by SAS in Cary, NC. The goal is to give participants a list of actions they can immediately implement as practical steps when they return home to work.

I was asked to provide six suggestions, and the other four panelists also are responsible for a similar number. We get a minute to describe each idea, so I’m writing this post to provide links to mine. I’ll likely add links with some of the other panelists’ suggestions after I hear them.

I’ve also included more than six ideas because I don’t know what the others will be offering, and if we have duplicates I don’t want to be left without something valuable to recommend. Besides, I can’t limit myself to just a half dozen.

1. Get a Flip video camera. This is the only recommendation of my main six that costs anything. You can get a Flip today at Wal-Mart or Best Buy or some Target stores. The Flip provides miniDV quality video and is completely portable. You copy files to your computer via the built-in USB instead of having to digitize tapes. And you can have video uploaded to YouTube within minutes, as I did with the David Pogue musical parodies. The cost of buying a Flip is less than a quarter of the cost of hiring a professional videographer for a single day, and you can use the video you shoot to pitch stories to journalists. Even better, you can make the video available directly to consumers.

2. Become a SMUGgle. In the Harry Potter books, a muggle is an ordinary mortal without magical powers. A SMUGgle is also an ordinary mortal, but one who wants to accomplish really amazing feats using social media tools. You become a SMUGgle by enrolling in SMUG. This will be a gateway to your learning about lots of other social media tools you can apply to your work.

3. Try Yammer. Yammer is Twitter for the enterprise. It offers a way to take advantage of the functionality of Twitter, but to limit the participants to employees of your company. The big value is trying before buying, so you can see whether you get user adoption before you sink a lot of money into a tool that people may not use. It seems to have potential for powerful collaboration, allowing coworkers to opt-in for e-mails about subjects they find interesting, and also can serve as a massive General Reference database of facts, links and other information employees have found helpful. I did a Yammer 101 course and expect to be doing more on SMUG.

4. Start a WordPress.com blog. It’s free and you can do it in 5 minutes or less, as my Dad did. If you’re a coward, you can make it a private blog invisible to anyone except users you invite. Then just invite your communications colleagues to have access. Getting this hands-on experience will show you how easy it is to publish content to the world. You also could use WordPress.com to publish your Web site, having it serve as your content management system. The SMUG blogging curriculum will help you learn.

5. Create your own free personal podcast. The SMUG Podcasting curriculum takes you from the very basics to having a podcast listed in iTunes. When you’re familiar with the process, you will have complete confidence to recommend doing podcasts for your organization with higher production values, better microphones, etc. The mystery will be eliminated.

6. Join a Social Network such as Facebook or LinkedIn. Or both. It’s essential for professional communicators to understand how social networking sites work.

Bonus Items

Build your own on-line newsroom. See our Mayo Clinic News Blog for an example.
Get a YouTube account. If you’ve only watched YouTube videos, you haven’t understood full potential. And if you work for a nonprofit, starting a branded YouTube channel is a no-brainer – it’s free. A Flip camera makes it easy for you to produce and upload videos
Get an iPhone. This is another one that’s not free, but professional communicators need to understand potential of phones and applications.
Try Dropbox. Its main purpose to sync files across multiple computers, letting you store your precious documents and files “in the cloud” so you have safe backup. The neat feature, though, is that it is a way for you to have the equivalent of an FTP site without the annoying hassle of log ins and passwords. You get two GB of storage free, and the paid option is something like $50 a year for 50 GB.
Read a good book. Here are three must-read books that will change the way you work and live, and you could perhaps read one by the end of the weekend.

Rules to Break and Laws to Follow – Don Peppers and Martha Rogers. I haven’t reviewed this yet, but plan to do so soon. I have been listening to it through Audible.com. It’s an excellent book about how a focus on short-term results can’t be the only measure of business success, because you may be draining or harvesting customer equity, and therefore actually reducing the value of your business.

Getting Things Done – David Allen. I have several related posts about the GTD subject matter.

The Reason for God – Tim Keller

Updated: My fellow panelists are

John Mims, Altyris
Becky Graebe, SAS
Bruce Johnson, Davis Wright Tremaine, LLP
Mark Ragan, Ragan Communications. CEO@ragan.com

Here are some of their ideas:

Becky – Embrace individual customization on the intranet. Let employees upload and display their own photos instead of the staff photos.
Bruce – Look for Alliances. AP came from this concept. Use a similar approach to find like-minded sites with which you can share.
John – Have interns start a blog. “Outsiders’ view from the inside.”
Mark – use LInkedIn journalistically. Send out requests for quotes or sources.
Becky – Don’t overlook interns. They understand these technologies naturally and can give you insights. SAS has a student intern site.
Bruce – Anonymity is dead. Make identity work for you on the internet.
Customize your name. There are 266 John Mims in the U.S. The guy to my left uses his middle initial to identify himself. Good thing Lee Aase is relatively rare.
Mark – Sign up for Google Alerts on your name or your company.
Becky – Google your stuff to see if it shows up. If not, use titles and tags to optimize your content.
Bruce – Get blog aggregator/RSS reader.
John says you should have your posts published on days when people are reading. Write on the weekends, but set them to post on the weekdays. Here’s how.
Becky – Use blogs to come together during difficult times. UNC Chapel Hill with student body president being killed. Created a blog to share special memories. Print all the comments and share with the family.
Bruce – Create a wiki approach to document creation. Bruce had a colleague create a wiki certiori petition in the 9th Circuit.
John – Comment on other people’s blogs. Make meaningful comments which will get people to visit your blog.
Mark – Try Blog Jamming. Spend 48 hours in intense blogging about a particular issue. Then have the blog go away.
Becky -Hand over the reins for Web 2.0 video. SAS hands employees Flip cams. Let them duct tape to handlebars during bike to work day.
Mark – Search for Bloggingheads on NY Times.
Use RSS feeds for internal news, just as you do for external.
Mark – Check out everyblock.com. Everything that has happened on your block. It’s in beta now in 6 cities. News at the block level.
Bruce – Beware the privacy trolls that may require encryption through legislation that is being adopted in various states. This will slow down all of your on-line transactions on your Web site. So what can we do about it?
Mark – If you’re an editor, use Bullfighter or mystery matador.

As I count it, that makes for 34 ideas including my two extra books, which means we exceeded our quota by 13.3 percent. And I know I didn’t get all of my fellow panelists’ ideas recorded. I hope you see some things here you can apply immediately in your work.

I’m happy to have participated in this event, and would love to connect with others who are interested in these issues. You can get in touch with me on Facebook, Twitter or LinkedIn.

I’d also welcome any comments you have, or other ideas you’d like to share.

Putting You to Shame

If you are a SMUGgle and haven’t started your own blog yet, that’s the purpose of this post.

If my Dad, who is 77 years old, and my son, who is 9, can start their own blogs using WordPress.com, what exactly is your excuse?

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

I also wanted use this video to introduce you to one of SMUG’s major benefactors, for whom our SMUG North Annex — the Lewis J. and LaVonne A. Aase Motor Fleet and Retreat Center — is named. Here’s a photo of Dad and Mom in front of the facility that bears their name:

Lewis and LaVonne Aase (a.k.a. Dad and Mom) — Lewis and LaVonne Aase

And here’s the “retreat center” portion of the facility:

If you’d like to see more campus photos, check out the SMUG Facebook group.

Dad and his cohort will be taking blogging classes in the Retreat Center next Saturday. As I help them get started, I’ll also use that process as a teaching/learning opportunity for SMUGgles, showing their step-by-step progress.

Meanwhile, you can click here to get started on your own blogging journey.

Facebook 303: Career Fairs and Recruitment

Today I had the pleasure of participating in a Mayo Clinic Health Care Career Festival, as part of our Public Affairs/Media Support Services booth.

We had about 700 high school students from across southern Minnesota attending the day-long event, where they got to participate in some classes and also meet people who work for Mayo Clinic in various capacities.

This is a great application for a Facebook group. In our booth, we had eight laptops connected to the Web and with the Mayo Clinic Health Care Career Festival Alumni group set as a “Favorite.” Students could log in to their Facebook and join the group, so they can go back and see the photos and videos we’ve uploaded, including photos of them. (Note: we obtained parent permission and had release forms signed for students to participate.)

Here’s one of those photos that shows our booth:

We’ve uploaded photos and videos from the day to the group, and the students will be able to go back to it and tag themselves, or otherwise interact with each other and with Mayo staff. It also will provide our Human Resources and Education colleagues an opportunity to share updates on internships or course offerings with students who have expressed interest by attending.

As of this writing we have 335 members in the group. Some of them are Mayo staff, but most are students. We also have 7 videos and 136 photos.

If you have any kind of event that involves primarily high school or college students, you definitely could use a group like this to engage participants and to stay in contact with them.

Key Elements for Success

Choose a platform participants are already using. For high school students, Facebook is it. If you have to get people to join the networking site and then join your group, you’ve created a two-step process that’s too complicated. At our event today it took less than a minute for students to join the group.

Have a way for participants to sign up while they’re in your booth. Having the laptops with Internet access right there, so all they had to do was sign in to Facebook and join the group, made it easy. I guarantee that if we would have given them a flyer with the URL we wouldn’t have had 10 percent join the group. As it was, we had about 300 sign up in the first few hours.

Give them a reason to return. For today, having the photos and videos of them (and links to some of our Mayo Clinic social media sites like our Mayo Clinic YouTube Channel, News Blog and Facebook Fan Page was novelty enough. Hopefully they’ll go back to the group when they’re at home, and will tag themselves in photos and videos and will invite friends to join the group. It will be up to our HR team that sponsored the event to continue to make the group interesting and relevant to the students in the longer term.