Community Forum – Social Networking Tools

Resource Type
Survey (Community Forum)
Author
Innovation Research Interchange
Topics
Alliances and Collaborations, Trends
Associated Event
Publication

Do you use social networking tools for technology development projects?

We are currently making plans to organize and set up global communities for technology capabilities.  The goal is to connect people to share their knowledge, problems, findings and to implement best and better practices.  There are a variety of tools available for social networking, communities of practice, and virtual teams, and we are interested to understand what tools are being used and why.  Also, we are interested in learning what processes are needed as well as the structures and roles necessary to sustain the communities. – Fred Knepshield, IT Manager, Alcoa Technical Center

Community Responses

Nanako Mura, Associate Director Open Innovation and Knowledge Management. Kraft Foods
E2.0 technologies exist to facilitate collaboration. LinkedIn is a familiar social networking tool to reach out externally. Internally, Microsoft Sharepoint is a common platform that supports communities through document storage, wiki and blog capabilities. They also have an application called NewsGator that supports collaboration, social networking and document storage. While I’m less familiar, another product called Yakabox also has similar capabilities. Communispace is another company that provides services to companies to build and help facilitate private online communities. Like traditional communities of practice, success requires a strong leader or facilitator. Adoption of these tools requires a significant behavior change and depending on the purpose, a shift from emails and so change management initiatives must be implemented accordingly.

Ora Smith, IRI Emeritus
I have had one consulting client who used Yahoo workgroups and another who attempted Linkedin. The Yahoo experience, which was focused on a specific project, worked well, but the Linkedin attempt failed, I think because of lack of leadership and vagueness of purpose. It is much easier to generate information and post it than to read it and understand it. Posters tend not to be concise, and the turnaround times can be long. Also, some of the platforms are cumbersome to use. These kinds of things can easily become more trouble than they are worth to the users. Here are my initial suggestions in order of priority, based on my experience:

  1. Focus the efforts on well defined issues; taking care to define clearly and succinctly what you are trying to accomplish is the most important step, IMHO.
  2. Pick a platform that is easy to use.
  3. Provide some training, even if minimal, not just in how to use the platform, but in how best to communicate (brevity, etc.). Ideally, the training effort should include a demonstration of situations in which benefit results.
  4. Have someone available as “support” – not just tech support, but to monitor and help steer.
  5. I am not familiar with some of the tools Nanako Mura references, but I agree with his comments otherwise, too.

Tom Haser, Director, Social Media Solutions, Lockheed Martin IS&GS
We recently launched Eureka Streams™ enterprise social networking as an open source project. See www.eurekastreams.org for details. We now have over 36,000 employees with access to Eureka Streams in our own enterprise. If you think of social media as “Content and Conversation”, Eureka Streams is focused on “Conversation”. That is, Eureka Streams empowers employees to make informed decisions by finding relevant collegues and groups, following their streams of activity, and engaging in conversation. Eureka Streams complements content management systems such as SharePoint that provide capabilities like shared documents, blog, and wikis. You might consider having your team download and evaluate the Eureka Streams open source software.

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