Thanks for visiting ME2: Monday Enterprise 2.0…my weekly foray into exploring professional and personal topics on the tip of my mind.

From the desk of @TheBrycesWrite:

Practice Safe Social – Another Enterprise 2.0 Benefit

One consistent theme from my work interactions last week was with a few different teams beginning to research the use of external social media to conduct their respective business affairs. The other consistent element, from my own informal observation, is that most of the individuals on those teams have limited experience in social media beyond Facebook interactions within their personal inner circle.

This is the reason why anytime a team / person approaches me about utilization of external social media for business purposes, I encourage them to first experiment as a team with our internal social collaboration community (of course my hidden agenda is driving further adoption by intelligent individuals in the organization!). Emerge yourself and/or your team in the style of communication, the syntax of the tools and the etiquette of the community…because much of that environment internal to organizations is rooted in behaviors adopted from and technology emulating the recent and rampant success of Web 2.0. Taking the time to learn those behaviors in what should be a more forgiving environment, particularly if your role is representing a large corporation in a public forum, is valuable experience. Plus there are likely individuals participating that have some Web 2.0 proficiency that can help shape those external engagement efforts.

So if you are building a business case for expanding the Enterprise 2.0 footprint within your organization AND if you know that your organization is still maturing its external social media presence (who isn’t, really?)…then add this to your bullet list of benefits.

Getting Real with E2.0 – My best example from the week of people using E2.0 to generate value in the work environment:

I am as guilty of this as anyone…but if I am walking somewhere and I see someone confused, I am not the type to stop regularly and help unless they look to be in severe distress. I am always amazed within “social collaboration environment”, however, how willing and anxious people are to help others with a question or experiencing confusion in that environment. The percentage of “help provided to those in need of help” to me seems higher than real life. Has that been studied yet?

Serving as an example the last two weeks, we have had a bit of a bump in members within our micro-blogging environment. Most are not only new to the environment, but to communicating using social tools period. And as those folks have jumped in, it has been nice to see so many positive examples of people sharing links to best practices or help guides, answering questions AND gently pointing out corrections to syntax (ie proper use of “@” or “#” in a post) for those trying to target their communications. For any decision-makers concerned about social media tools being a gateway to abusive conversation…there are 900x more examples of the community encouraging one another and probably being more helpful to one another in a social collaboration environment than they are in person (if they are anything like me!).

Top Reads/Tweets of the Week:

1. @dhinchcliffe: “Q&A: Enterprise 2.0 changing the way we work http://bit.ly/avixCx New interview with @amcafee” – Great interview and succinct answers from Andrew McAfee about Enterprise 2.0.
2. Jacob Morgan: The Impact of Collaboration on Enterprise Business Performance – Nice write-up by Jacob and a great resource to review for practitioners advocating Enterprise 2.0 methods.
3. @ITSinsider: “blogged Enterprise 2.0: The Next Narrative http://is.gd/aI5oR” – As I said when I retweeted, “Get your popcorn ready!”  Should be good stuff.

From the golf bag of @GolfinBP:

Sports Minute:

So as is my tradition for at least 8 years, I take some vacation time on Thursday and/or Friday on opening weekend of the NCAA tournaments to enjoy two of the best sports days of the year. But this year it was combined with an extremely busy work week that took every minute to keep up with my commitments. So when I arose Saturday morning and took a quick inventory of what I had missed…I had 150+ unread emails, 800+ unread articles on Google Reader, ~20 internal blog posts I wanted to check out, MIA from Facebook and close to zero time in work or personal micro-blogging world. The nice thing about all of that?  I felt obligated to check and understand nearly all of those emails…but the social sources were voluntary consumption for my own interest/benefit that I could consume and filter I as I saw fit.

BTW…Villanova and Kansas losing are probably the best things that could have happened to my bracket. Granted I missed those picks, but downstream it really works in my favor. I am now a huge fair weather fan of Kentucky, Kansas State, Ohio State and anyone that will beat Baylor really soon.

TV Minute (re-purposed):

This really has nothing to do with TV, but I thought this story was better than anything I saw on TV this week. Another unique story about why I like using Twitter as a news source these days.

Last week my Aunt, Uncle and Cousin were vacationing in Hilton Head, South Carolina at the Palmetto Dunes beach. I usually am dense to the whereabouts of people other than myself (and sometimes I struggle with that too), but for some reason the fact they were there stuck with me. On Monday after watching 24 and heading to bed, I decided to check Twitter real quick for the latest. “Breaking News: Airplane crashes on beach in Hilton Head, SC…killing male jogger http://……..”

Whoa. Sinking feeling. “Hilton Head’s a big place. But weird this was posted and weird I decided to check instead of going to bed (it was almost midnight and I had to work the next day.) I’m sure it is somewhere else on the island.”

Click on link. “Plane crashes on Palmetto Dunes beach.” Double whoa. Time to make some phone calls. 15 minutes later I had confirmation that my family was fine.

Ends up my family members were okay, but the plane crashed on the beach right outside the place they were staying, and they had been in that area on the beach only 60-90 minutes before the plane crashed. Later in the week during a presentation I was giving someone from the audience asked me why I regularly look to Twitter for my current news instead of other more traditional sources (Google search, CNN, newspaper, etc.) and I immediately recalled this example from just 3 days earlier. Real-time news travels fast.