Social media resources for intranet & communication professionals (part 2 of 2)

In part 1 of this post, I talked about the need for intranet and communication professionals to take the lead within their organisations and set the example for how to use social media tools to help the business. The following are some useful resources to help you connect with other intranet and communication professionals.

LinkedIn

LinkedIn has been described as 'Facebook for adults'. It allows you to post details about your career and connect with over 55 million people (and growing quickly). Once you have joined LinkedIn, you can join up to 50 interest groups. Groups allow you to participate in discussions, read and post relevant news items, look for relevant events and jobs, create voting polls, and generally connect with people who have the same interests as you.

For Intranet and Communication Professionals, if you haven't already, I'd sign up ASAP. This is the business you are in - communicating and sharing information. It will be easier to recommend and promote the benefits of interactive communication and social media if you are active practitioner yourself!

Then I'd suggest joining the following groups:

• Worldwide Intranet Challenge- helps organisations build business critical intranets through the sharing of best practice intranet techniques.
• Intranet Professionals- provides a simple way for intranet professionals to network with peers regarding technology, usability, and best practices. Nearly 1500 members.
• Internal Communications- for people who manage company publications, internal announcements, employee communications, or manage the intranet.
• NetJMC & Co- a peer-to-peer network to exchange ideas and information among intranet practitioners. (No vendors, no agencies).
• Knowledge Management Group - for people interested in knowledge management.
• Employee Communications and Engagement - dedicated to the art and practice of employee communications and engagement. Over 3000 members.
• CMS User Group- links up professionals in the CMS Community - a worldwide network of web designers, developers and entrepreneurs, sharing information and empowering each others' success. Over 2000 members.
• Content Management Professionals - a collaborative community of practice advancing the field of content management
• The Content Wrangler Community - content management, content quality, content standards, content reuse, user-generated content, rich media, Web 2.0, social networking, writing, translation and localization. Over 4000 members.
• Intranet Benchmarking Forum - an exclusive, confidential intranet and portal benchmarking group of more than 70 major organisations worldwide (not open to vendors/ consultants)

There are thousands of other groups that you may find relevant as well. Just use a keyword to search for the type of group you are looking for.

Twitter

Twitter allows people to post messages of less than 140 characters (Tweets). Messages can include links to interesting articles or websites. Using Tweetdeck(or a similar tool) and relevant search terms, you are able to easily keep up to date with the latest news in your industry. In just 10 or 15 minutes each day, you can read the latest tweets - it's like having your own personalised newspage. If you haven't already, join Twitter and become an active participant now.

For intranets, I'd suggest at least using the search terms 'intranet', 'intranets', 'portal' - and maybe the software that your intranet uses (eg. SharePoint). It's also worthwhile following key Twitterers. Below is a list of people I follow who talk regularly about intranets. 

rachellai83 collabguy intranet2 Hitwise_US TonyByrne intranet intranetdesign Intranets20 intranet_portal IntranetExperts tobyward

adenin s2d_jamesr jboye nadine_mcmahon seanrnicholson intranetlife StepTwoDesigns frankx ShvetsovaNata andyjankowski netjmc

mdoll EphraimJF ChristySeason Peter_Richards markmorrell carolyndouglas IntraTeam Alex_Manchester sammarshall nancyatibforum ibf

Facebook

Facebook is the largest social networking site in the world with over 300 million members. Surprisingly to some people, it is possible to not only use Facebook to keep in touch with your family and friends, but to use it in a similar way to LinkedIn (eg. by joining groups that have similar interests). Some groups you may want to consider include:

• Worldwide Intranet Challenge- provides case studies and ideas for how to make your intranet business critical
• Intranet Global Forum- An online community dedicated to intranet best practices, knowledge sharing and collaboration between intranet professionals. Set up by Toby Ward who writes the Intranet Blog. Over 600 members.
• Content Management Professionals - CM Pros is the worldwide organization for people who want to learn more about content management from other professionals
• SharePoint Community Special Interest Group- for anyone with an interest in improving and growing the worldwide SharePoint community.

I have found that some people prefer to keep their professional and personal lives separate, so they will used LinkedIn for business and Facebook for family and friends.

Xing

Xing is kind of like the European version of LinkedIn. With over 8 million connections and growing quickly, it is another great resource to connect with intranet professionals. Groups relevant to intranet professionals include:

• Content Management- German and English. Content refers to printed content, media asset, and othe unstructured and stzructured data in intranet, extranets and the internet
• Corporate Communications - German.
• Information and Documument Management - In German, English, Spanish, French - Document, Information, Content, Records, Process & Knowledge Management
• SharePoint 2010- In German and English. Articles about SharePoint.
• Интранет Клуб- Intranet Club for Russia organised by Natalia Shvetsova (WIC Partner)

Other helpful tools

Other tools that I have found useful include Delicious ('the tastiest bookmarks on the Web') and Digg.

Delicous is like having a portable web toolbar. You can save your favourite web pages to Delicious and then access these again from anywhere you have internet access (of course a good intranet that is place-independent will also allow you to do the same thing!). In addition to saving bookmarks, Delicious also allows you to build a network of like minded contacts. You are able to view other people who have bookmarked the same pages as you, and then see what other pages they may have bookmarked. You can also recommend bookmarks to your contacts.

Digg is a way for the most popular content on the web as 'dug' by the end users to be identified. A popular blog post for example, may get submitted to Digg many times which will cause it to climb the ladder of popularity. Read more about Digg.

What social media tools do you use?

In what other ways do you use the above tools? Are there any other social media tools that you have found helpful for your business?

Comments

[tandriamirado]

Thank you for this interesting post, especially for the groups and users lists.

Another useful Social Media is StumbleUpon, http://www.stumbleupon.com : it let you discover (and 'like') infos and resources that other professionals recommend. You can subscribe to other users, quickly like & recommend web pages and sites etc.. actually, this good Social Media can be a branding tool, depending of how you use it. FYI, mine is at http://www.stumbleupon.com/stumbler/Raben5150/

[Chieftech]

Another good starting point for a vendor neutral group is the 2.0 Adoption Council http://www.20adoptioncouncil.com/ - you can also find them on Twitter and Facebook. Its also worth considering that if you are interested in using social media as part of your intranet, then you might need to look beyond people talking about just 'intranets'... but also collaboration, Enterprise 2.0, intranet 2.0 etc.

[Martin Amm]

Thanks for including @adenin and for the list of intranet people in Twitter. I follow most, but discovered a few good ones thanks to you.

[Ria Breuer]

This is a very useful list, Tony. What I miss in it is Yammer, the Twitter application for internal communication. In my company we started using Yammer with 3 people and at the moment there are more than 600 colleagues participating. For more info have a look at http://billives.typepad.com/portals_and_km/2009/08/implementing-enterprise-micromessaging-with-yammer-at-Oc%C3%A9.html

[Elizabeth Marsh]

Hi Andrew, it looks like you've missed @ibf on Twitter and Intranet Benchmarking Forum on LinkedIn (also not open to vendors/ consultants): http://www.linkedin.com/groups?gid=1774885&trk=hb_side_g
Best wishes, Elizabeth

[Mark Tilbury]

I agree with Yammer - it must be included. It's so simply to use (normaly a major barrier to collaboration) and adoption rates for us have been impressive

[Andrew]

thanks Elizabeth - I have updated the post with this information