Virtual Collaboration in the Workplace

Americans Expect Companies to Have a Presence in Social Media

From Ars Technica and ReadWriteWeb:

Most Americans feel that companies should have a presence on social media sites, and many feel that they should actively interact with customers through those sites. Those are just some of the findings of the 2008 Cone Business in Social Media Study, which said that 93 percent of Americans expect to see companies online where the users are—on social networking and other media sites.

This isn't exactly what we are focused on in the class - this is more about having a presence for marketing and support purposes, but is tightly enough coupled that it is worth the read.

Practicing what we preach

I thought I'd put this out here as a blog post rather than sending you all an Nth Monday email.

It is amazing how slight issues with user interface can make huge differences in how groupware performs (I think I said something like this in class last week)  :-)   To wit: today I've run into interesting surprises with both new tools I've tried: DimDim and SurveyMonkey.

Reading blogs at work: is that what you are doing right now?

Read/Write Web had a post yesterday about the value of reading blogs at work. Marshall Kirkpatrick wrote:

Yesterday we wrote about a new Pew study that found that only 11% of people in the US who use the internet at work are using it to read blogs. We've seen other studies that put this number much higher, but Pew's is probably the most objective.

This hit home with me as someone told me the other day IT eliminated her ability to Google at work. IT in this office was locking down access to sites not clearly tied to work activities. But eliminating Google seemed like it was going a bit too far. [I imagine a creative person could find a way around the lock, but that is beside the point of this post.)

Marshall is suggesting the opposite. He is suggesting people should be encouraged to read blogs, and builds a case for his point of view. What do you think?

Using Facebook to create social awareness on Virtual Teams

Betsy Carroll has an interesting blog post where she points out a value for using social networks (like Facebook) on a virtual team: it can promote social awareness.

We have been aware for a long time how important trust is in team work. Drama troupes and sports teams work to build trust. I remember trying to code "trust" groupware back in about 1991. But trust is a hard concept to get one's hands around.

In virtual teams we have talked about using resumes, and pictures, and personalization to convey individual information to one another. The use of social networking seems like not only a logical extension of this soft of thing, but a significant enhancement to it.

One downside: the public social networks (like MySpace and Facebook) do not do a good job of letting you set up separate work and friends personae; everything gets mixed together. And business social networks (like LinkedIn) do not give you much bandwidth for social personalization (plus, you might want to shop for another job out there.)

What Betsy doesn't discuss at all are the implication of using social networks with cross cultural virtual teams. How might sharing social information on work teams vary among national cultures?

Cloud Avenue

There are several blogs I read to keep me up to date on material for this course.  My favorite of them is Michael Sampson's blog (for which I link the feed in the right column - called Enterprise Collaboration here).

A new blog started yesterday called CloudAve that I think might turn out to be important.  Take a look at it (you can even start with it's first post) to see what you think.  CloudAve is about business applications that exist in the Internet cloud.

Huddle Up: my experience using Huddle in real life II

See my first post at: Huddle Up: my experience using Huddle in real life.

I have been using Huddle less than I anticipated.  I have some feature (or lack thereof) gripes, but haven't found an effective channel to communicate this.  The guy at Huddle who sold me the account initially was great to work with, but I don't want to keep hitting him with this stuff -- and I don't know where he is in their hierarchy.  They have a blog, but they don't seem to be looking for much product feedback from their blog.