Introduction & Keynote Speech Summary: Corporate Social Networking Forum Conference (CSNF)

The challenges…

Being at the Corporate Social Networking Forum Conference (CSNF) was certainly a new experience for me. There was alot of presentations and panel sessions running throughout the day to keep myself busy! It was a challenging day though. First my laptop ran out of battery and a power source available was no where in sight. Then Twitter told me that I had reached the maximum number of tweets for the hour! Golly, that has never happened before. I must’ve been on fire!!! 😉

If you want to catch all the twitter action, download this excel spreadsheet to view all the interesting tweets!

Opening remarks – James Garner (ComputerWeekly.com)

The day started interestingly enough with opening remarks from ComputerWeekly.com‘s Web Editor, James Garner (@jamesga) saying social networks is about creating happy workers. I managed to find a snipet of an article talking about “Do Social Networking Sites Change the Way We Work?” and this is what it had to say about how social networks affect work.

Whether employers approve or not, employees will sneak personal time on work computers (unless, of course, there’s an official policy against it, and even them some will try). In many ways social networking sites can be quite addictive, logging on every few minutes to see what your friends might be doing, how they’ve updated their status, and some people do access them from their desks several times a day. That cuts into work time, but with so many people doing it, often employers have had to reach a compromise.

Giving employees time when they can access the Internet for personal reasons can actually make them more productive. If they don’t feel they have to sneak around when doing it, but are given an allowance of time each day, then they will work harder the rest of the time. It works to everyone’s advantage, and happy employees will work harder.

James also goes on to mention to Twitter revolution (of course!) being the social phenomenon for 2009. Well if we look at the stats…

….latest numbers from Nielsen Online indicate that Twitter grew 1,382% year-over-year in February, registering a total of just more than 7 million unique visitors in the US for the month” according to Adam Ostrow (Twitter Now Growing at a Staggering 1,382 Percent) on Mashable.

Quote published on March 16th 2009

Other social networks….

Not to forget other social networks such as:-

1. Yammer – Just like Twitter but for internal communications in organizations. You can only register for an account with your organizations Yammer’s account if you have a valid company email account.
2. Blogger – Speaks for itself…. though I love WordPress 🙂
3. Wikipedia – Is there anyone who still doesn’t know what wikipedia is?? Well why won’t you look it up… ON WIKIPEDIA! ;-P
4. Internal Wikis – According to an article in InformationWeek on “How to use Wikis for Business”, you should consider to implement wikis if:-

• You want to establish a company intranet quickly and cheaply without sacrificing functionality, security, or durability.
• You want to publish a range of corporate documents in one universally accessible location and let employees manage those documents with a minimum of effort, lag, and risk of redundancy.
• You want to manage and organize meeting notes, team agendas, and company calendars.
• You need a project management tool that is cheap (if not free), extensible, and accessible through any Web browser.
• You need a central location where shared documents can be viewed and revised by a large and/or dispersed team.

David Ferris (President and Senior Analyst at Ferris Research) actually wrote an interesting short article about “Internal Wikis going mainstream by 2010”. Check it out!

Opening Keynote Speech by Suraj Kika from Jadu

Twitter in the enterprise 2.0 – making social media work for brand and business

Check out my interview with Suraj here

Keynote Speech Presenter: Suraj Kika from Jadu at the Corporate Social Networking Event from Liz Azyan on Vimeo.

I had the pleasure of meeting and listening to Suraj Kika from Jadu giving his keynote speech about Twitter * my favourite social media topic! 😉 * for brands and businesses.  I’ve heard about Jadu through their many Local Authority (LA) clients I have interviewed over the past few months.  And all their clients had only had high praises the share about Jadu and their staff, so it was such a pleasure to sit in Suraj’s keynote speech. Jadu LA clients are already using Web 2.0 tools to communicate with citizens and manage their content using Jadu’s Content Management Systems.

Suraj even managed to tweet a picture of the attendees before he begun his speech which you can see here. 🙂

You can download Suraj’s slides here.

I like what Suraj had to say on one of his slides…

Huge shift from mass media to personal media

This couldn’t be more true! And what’s even more funny, this is exactly what Robin Good wrote about… 5 years ago! I think this is the second time I’ve quoted Robin Good on a theory or opinion he mentioned years ago! You can check out this article titled “Personal Media Soon To Replace Mass Media“.  So I’d say, if you wanna be on top of your game, follow this guy… He certainly knows his stuff!!!

The #Amazonfail tale….

Suraj also talked about what happens when a large organization such as Amazon chose to ignore communicating to their customers through Twitter. I wrote about this incident here when it occurred. It was such a hot topic in a matter of hours that it was just too tempting to not write about it. It also coincided with the Moldova protest, which was also organized on Twitter!

So if you still have no idea on how huge an impact Twitter can make, make sure you read that article… you’ll understand just how huge the magnitude of NOT using Twitter can be!

Twitter followers turning into customers?

The truth is Twitter can in fact generate revenue or companies. Yes, it is great for marketing and managing your brand, but wouldn’t it be even more awesome if those tweets can lead to profits or potential leads?

Just see the example made by Suraj, he followed Joel’s tweets and blog… and now they use FogBugz to manage tasks!

So it is true!

Followers do in fact turn into customers on Twitter.

Old story in internet marketing realms…

The funny thing is… this isn’t new! This method has been used by internet marketers selling ebooks or e-courses online even before Twitter went mainstream. It really is about having the knowledge and skills to harness this golden opportunity and take it to greater heights. Though I would have to add that, in order to turn leads to customers, it must be about personalization.  You’ve got to put in the time to monitor and spot an opportunity fast.  So your most valuable resource here is time.  Dedicate enough time and human resource to it, personalization can be applied almost instantaneously.

Tweeting for Customers anyone??

I found this cool article about “Tweeting for Customers: A Twitter Primer for CRM” by Rick Cook on 4th June 2009 (still very fresh!).

In this MUST READ article, Rick touches on all those important aspects of “Tweeting for Customers”.

• Direct Marketing
• Indirect Marketing
• Internal Communication
• Inbound Signalling
• Setting up your account
• Joining the conversation
• Followers and Following
• The TAO of Twitter

During the presentation, Suraj also showed Stuart Harrison talking about Jadu’s CMS Client for Twitter for Lichfield District Council. Check it out!

Jadu CMS Twitter Client: Lichfield District Council’s Stuart Harrison at Internet World 2009 from Jadu on Vimeo.

The Jadu CMS Social Media module allows users to tweet from within the Jadu CMS, whilst also incorporating search, re-tweet and saved drafts, workflow and email capabilities. API calls are also cached and requests are monitored. Importantly, tweets can be stored to ensure accountability and enable councils, in particular, to respond to FOI requests and customer comments. Brand management potential is enhanced through an ‘attitudes’ filter to allow users to easily watch happy or unhappy tweets.

Strategic Approach to using Twitter???

A couple of months ago I wrote an article about a strategic way of using twitter for government. Here is the slide that accompanied it.

I hope all this is useful!

Liz