Last Tuesday, I attempted to give an overview of the last year’s social media activities in ten minutes to some of our major stakeholders.  Overly ambitious!  Still, I stand by the images I used to illustrate how an organisation makes decisions and manages processes pre- and post- Web 2.0/social media etc etc…

Here’s organizational behaviour old-style:

(photo by oobrien on Flickr)

And here’s a very famous traffic junction which to me suggests all the excitement and risk involved in running your company in quite another way.  I’m not saying we’re there yet but, believe it or not, it’s something I aspire to.

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/v/sgRtrbG9dzw&hl=en

• Blip - twitter like music sharing
  Do I realy need another twitter? And a noisy one at that? Possibly.
  (tags: music socialnetworking online twitter Fuzz)

• Delish, a Del.icio.us Client for Mac OS X by Pine Point Software LLC
  This looks intriguing
  (tags: Mac Software Apple del.icio.us)

• On Managing A Community | chrisbrogan.com
  If only Chris had written this a few weeks ago, I could have saved myself the task of writing a new job description for a post we’re recruiting for.
  (tags: community Jobs socialnetworking socialmedia strategy)
• Gin, Television, and Social Surplus - Here Comes Everybody
  “…[S]he stuck her head out from behind the screen and said, “Looking for the mouse.” Here’s something four-year-olds know: A screen that ships without a mouse ships broken.”
  (tags: media culture society television social interaction)

A series of posts on Nancy White’s blog set me thinking about the role we’re introducing to help deal with the mushrooming quantities of social media related activities around our organization. Nancy writes about the tension between the idea of having a community manager whose job it is to facilitate open-ended discussions and happy accidents (I’m very, very loosely paraphrasing here - in fact, that’s probably nothing like what she originally wrote. So go read the original). Her other posts in this series look at the job description and skill set for such a role in more detail - all stuff I wish I’d had two months ago

It’s something that I’ve been worried about in recruiting for a vacant information role. It was originally a library based role but we’ve re-tooled the job to focus at least 50% of the time around our social media interactions, inside and outside. In fact, a lot of the components and competencies on the job description mirror those on Chris Brogan’s post of a couple of days ago. Their main internal job will be to train everyone to represent us in a social media context - to facilitate everyone else’s (micro-)community building efforts. I really don’t see social media as a technical issue, in terms of embedding it into the organisation as an everyday state of affairs but as one of attitude. The technical side of it (apart from the need to be able to type) can be learned but the core of it is quite literally a different style of life, an inner change of some kind. We make no attempt to regulate interactions with students offline (though the default nature of those interactions is another issue altogether) beyond an expected level of professionalism so why even contemplate regulating online conversations to any greater extent?

Anyway, borderline metaphysics aside, what do I hope for? At a guess, we have fifty or sixty ongoing activities at a time, all potentially overlapping and interrelating. Pull those activities and their owners into a social media context and you’ve got a chance of turning those potential synergies into something actual, meaningful and unpredictable. It’s probably a recipe for complete chaos, though I rather like chaos. Either way, the first step is to make everyone a potential community manager, provided its understood that “manager” operates precisely after Lao Tzu - by not interfering one iota and letting the ten thousand things run where they will.

Meanwhile, Chris’s post has bought a whole load more of “community manager” recruitment activity out of the woodwork, most of which seems to suggest that we’re more or less on the right track.

• Carbonite - unlimited Online Backup
  Via Bill Ives and Portals and KM. No Mac version yet but at $50 a year for unlimited storage, it’s an interesting deal.
  (tags: storage backup Enterprise2.0)

• A social media marketing campaign deconstructed | Internet Marketing News and Blog | E-consultancy.com
  This whole area continues to fascinate me, especially since we’re spending measurable amounts of money on an admittedly (at times) tenuous proposition (though we do have some empirical research that suggests our efforts are worthwhile).
  (tags: campaign marketing socialmedia ROI)
• Is writing this blog killing me? | Newsblog | Guardian Unlimited
  Gulp. Courtesy Yang-May Ooi at http://www.zenguide.co.uk/
  (tags: addiction blogging health)

• Beth’s Blog: How Nonprofits Can Use Social Media: Social Media ROI Case Study Slam Panel at 08NTC: Carie Lewis, Human Society
  There’s a lot we can learn from this.
  (tags: socialmedia YouTube marketing)

Reading that Pagesflakes had been bought set me thinking as to why I don’t seem to be using my Netvibes page anymore.  Seems to come down to tabbed browsing and the wonders of the Ctrl-PgDn/PgUp shortcut to navigate them on Firefox.  If Gmail/Remember the Milk, Reader, Facebook and WordPress are all a key-stroke away, do I really want to mess around with summaries?  Especially with Reader?

• Museum 2.0: How Much Time Does Web 2.0 Take?
  An issue I’m constantly pestered about.
  (tags: blog internet museums cost moderating)