Water Cooler 2.0
The social web has been described as nothing more than an ever-elaborating series of iterations on the telegraph. Back in the day, there were even weddings performed along the wires as people who had never actually met developed relationships as they tippety-tapped back and forth. Now, we “meet” each other at a distance all the time. This is the social web, the reason Facebook is (ostensibly) worth a kajillion dollars, the global gnosis of everyone and everything at once.
Many people have articulated reasons why this is important. Simply looking locally, Silicon Florist Rick Turoczy credits Twitter for the success of the first Lunch 2.0 here in Portland. Read Write Web blogger and Good Man Marshall Kirkpatrick thinks that Twitter brings home the bacon. But all of this is (or ought to be) preaching to the choir. Those of us who seek to engage these platforms already know they’re cool.
The average workplace, on the other hand, seems to be having some trouble adapting. The social web looks and feels a lot like “goofing off” to managers or IT departments. Moreover, all the various social network widgets, apps, and feed aggregators would give a typical sysadmin palpitations…install WHAT on your desktop? And you might well question the workplace relevance of an application that lets me know that Pine State Biscuits is finally establishing a storefront. The point is that the same person who posted the heads up (via Twitter) also posted the following in the past:
- Microsoft’s press release regarding their new online advertising ROI metrics.
- A five-part series on becoming a Yahoo! Pipes power user.
- Several detailed and insightful posts on the business rationales for blogging, how to get started, and what to focus on externally and internally.
So, like all things, you take the trivial with the not-at-all trivial. What I want to emphasize is that this is ultimately no different than your average water cooler conversation. This is the stuff that used to happen when a friend called another friend to arrange lunch, or when couples coordinated grocery shopping/dinner arrangements via email. Of course some of it is goofing off, and one needs to be concerned if an employee is looking up recipes all day, but overall I don’t think that it impacts productivity so much as it keeps people thinking.
That’s ignoring the productivity boost you can see when you actually use social networking tools for work. Things that could be immediately relevant to businesses include:
Twitter, for myriad reasons. Project teams stretched across the org chart, nation, or globe can provide status updates and benchmarks to the whole team via one post. Time-sensitive information can be conveyed to a large group at faster-than-email speeds. Small companies can also leverage Twitter’s ability to generate news as they release products, promote thought leaders, and so on. Portland’s digital denizens are Twitter maniacs, so there’s a geographically-relevant reason to hook in if you’re a northwest company.
Agile Agenda, an application designed for Adobe’s AIR environment, has been generating positive buzz since its release. This is a robust scheduling and project management tool that can develop critical path-style schedules, which then integrate into ongoing entries from the project manager about progress, milestones, and changing circumstances surrounding the project. While not free (currently licenses are on pre-order for $59.99), it’s a useful and potent tool.
Shared Folders are not new, but they remain an essential way to track updates and modify documents from a central hub. This avoids the confusion that a proliferation of versions can create, provides the means to work from anywhere, and generally makes life a lot easier for today’s workforce. Available via Google, MSN Messenger, and many other sources. Without Live Messenger Shared Folders, EASCI would simply not get any work done. Ever.
In a world where the workplace is everywhere, all the time, companies would do well to leverage the power of the social web.
