Last one…maybe…probably not…

Well this has been a pretty cool journey!  Only a while ago I was definitely in the ‘I don’t think so!’ camp regarding Social Media – and especially Social Media for Business.  But now my eyes have been opened and frankly, I’m hooked.  As I have said in a previous post work (New Zealand Defence Force) hasn’t had a huge amount of success with Social Media INTERNALLY, although they seem to be doing alright with external Social Media – check out our website if you want, it has links to all sorts of NZ Military stuff, including Youtube, Facebook, Twitter, etc. (not sure if they’ve maybe gone overboard).  You can even look at job prospects if you want…

The gist of this assignment has been to explore Social Media and in particular, the 4C’s from Cook’s book.  This has been particularly enlightening reading and has been in such an easy read way it has made sense in light of what a lot of others have been writing in their blogs.  It has been very interesting to hear that a lot of others were Social Media ‘noobs’ just like me.  I think we have done very well for ourselves and I’d like to keep my blog going for at least the rest of the paper – see how much it (me!) grows with further learning.

I’ll definitely be looking at continuing a blog in some fashion once the paper is over – it’s just too much fun and you find out so much!  Many thanks to those who contributed to my blog and best wishes,

Pete

Hopefully this works out…

Hi All.  Getting towards the end of the assignment, and yet only starting on a new found interest in the whole Social Media thing.  Has been very enlightening and interesting.

For quite a few years at work I have mused over the possibility of having some kind of a Blog, Forum, Discussion group for the Corporate computer system at work – mainly in the Engineering Technical area where I am from.  The users of the system were always (well it seemed like it anyway!) treated a bit like mushrooms – kept in the dark and fed on ‘manure’.  The IT system in charge of the whole shooting match only ever seemed to give us what they wanted us to have and then it was almost a ‘See what We have given you – it is amazing – bow down before us!’ attitude, which quite frankly really began to ‘upset’ a lot of us who knew we should be able to do so much more.

Over the years we had a few hard-won wins to have little enhancements added that made a huge difference to how the system worked for us – but often people moved on before anything eventuated and so it often just died a natural death.  Recently there had been a resurgence in getting the system back on track and helping users out with extra training and knowledge in what the system could do for them.

Already with the basic abilities to put files into a general area, extra people to sit down with the users and offer assistance, and just the fact that training and developing the system is all we do has helped immensely and we now have users coming to us and asking what they can do next, can we do this with the system.  What seemed to be missing was a common place for users to put all these ideas and requests down so someone could try ding something about it.

Enter this paper!  I have just recently approached the ‘powers that be’ with the aim of starting up a Blog for our users to put thoughts to, for the head-shed to put their information out there, and just a collaborative area for information and thoughts to be shared.  It will be very interesting to see how this pans out as already one of the bosses mentioned that ‘Oh, that would be good for a Directorate blog!’.  ‘Good idea Boss’ I smiled whilst inwardly going ‘there goes the notion of getting the Users to make contributions…’. But we’ll wait and see – already I can see a blog with maybe separate pages blogging on the respective topics – not sure how that side of things works – if anyone has any info on how multiple pages on one blog work please let me know – and maybe others are interested as well.

So that is one very positive result from this paper – the desire and the knowledge to push ahead with an idea that I wasn’t quite sure of due to a bit of hesitation to look at Social Media, but now being able to go ahead and have a very good idea of what to do in order to encourage our users towards a better Communication, Connection, Cooperation and Collaboration (good old 4C’s – but very true!) orientated workplace and system.  Already different people – Users and the Bosses – are looking forward to seeing how it goes.

Is there anything to watch out for?…

There have been plenty of the success story’s, but even so, everyone seems to also have a BAD story as well – some really bad!  But surely, it can’t be that hard to be successful using social media – most of the world’s population seems to be doing it.  So a quick search on Google of ‘pitfalls of social media for business’ uncovered a lot of results.

A couple of interesting ones were;

http://www.reuters.com/article/2013/03/25/us-wealth-socialmedia-idUSBRE92O0WJ20130325

http://www.conversationagent.com/2012/05/business-pitfalls-impact-social-media-strategy.html

I’ve even mentioned in another post how the bosses at work got it a bit wrong at first.  It’s good to see that now that there have been a few guidelines put in place the blog seems to be working well now – there are still some quite spirited discussions, but they don’t seem to get out of hand.  What I’d like to know is how badly anyone else’s employers got it and what they had to do to try and right it – and is Social Media still working for them?

I think that judging from what people have been writing in their blogs, there are some horror story’s out there, but hopefully they could be used – with NO NAMES – to perhaps give us ‘wannabe’ Social Media legends a bit of a heads up.

Would be good to get a couple of ‘pointers’ before we all do the big ‘glad that’s over!!’,

Cheers, Pete

 

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One of the corporate systems we use within NZDF is SAP and whilst perusing the SAP sites (of which there are an awful lot) for info on how a large business looks at Social Media I found this link that was written by their CIO about Social Media

http://scn.sap.com/blogs/oliverbussmann/2013/01/25/4-powerful-social-media-shortcuts-that-will-surprise-you

Thoughts?  Does anyone else’s company actually have Social Media presence?  And how is it going?

Pete

Don’t think the military is quite ready for Blogs just yet…

Well here goes number two.

Been thinking about this for a while now.  Coming from a military background, we almost have a phobia about Social Media in all it’s different guises, so you can imagine my surprise one day when I realised that some of our hierarchy had jumped on-board the Social Media wagon in order to ‘relate’ to their young troops by starting up a blog or two.  I remember just thinking to myself ‘the way things work around here, this isn’t going to end well…’.

The original idea was a good one – it would let the boss tell the troops what he had been up to.  But I don’t think they quite realised just how this blogging thing works – or can work…  Before you knew it, there amongst the ‘This is what I did today – went down and saw what the boys were up to on exercise – had a good talk with all’ type blogs was the first one about someone up in arms about standards of housing in certain areas.  Well before you knew it, more had joined the ‘discussion’ which you could see was getting a bit heated and, for the military, a bit out of control.

They seemed to have forgotten one of the main aspects of a blog – pretty much anyone can have their say, and sometimes it isn’t going to be positive!  Well needless to say it did take quite a while before some good old military rules and procedures got laid out for the blog with the ‘gentle’ reminder that ‘Hey, you’re in the military, so watch what you say about the command chain or there could be problems…’.

What started off with all the best intentions of getting the boss’s thoughts and things he had been up to out there to all and sundry and have them respond in kind sort of took off in the wrong direction.  It seems to have quietened down a bit now, but I don’t know, it just doesn’t seem to fit the idea of what a blog would/should be.

I don’t know, has anyone else had similar experiences – NO NAMES! – as even reading the initial readings we have, it seems that a lot of business seems to forget that blogs are very much a two-way-street.

All things have to start somewhere…

Never been a huge fan of Social Media until this course.  Now I seem to be thinking how it could be applied to just about everything!  Not too sure how this is going to transpire, but then a step forward is a step forward whichever way you look at it – as long as it’s not off a cliff!  Really looking forward to this paper and just starting with the readings has made the old knowledge tree sprout new shoots.