Recently in Social Networking Category

Thought this was very interesting. Shel Holtz being interviewed by Ron Shewchuk

Question #2: Which company do you think does internal communications best, and why?

Shel: I'm reluctant to pick "the best," because there are a lot of companies whose internal communication programs I haven't seen. That said, I've always been impressed with the communications at Best Buy. It's open and candid. It promotes business literacy. It uses multiple channels. And they're always open to new ideas. Not too long ago, for instance, they introduced the Blue Shirt Nation, a social network for retail workers accessible over the World Wide Web. It has become a force of nature. Twenty percent of retail workers have created profiles. Turnover in the retail workforce is about 75%, but among those with BSN profiles, it has dropped to 8%. These are engaged employees with a solid network of colleagues they would have to abandon if they left.#

via For your Approval

That sounds pretty conclusive, but it's possible that it's only the employees that are engaged and motivated anyway who are joining Blue Shirt Nation. It would be great to identify a control group that share similar engaged characteristics to see what the difference in turnover is.

Thinking about this some more (what - you expect me to think *before* I post ??), maybe it doesn't matter. We *know* that engaged employees are less likely to leave, and if we can provide more places for them to communicate and network, thus deepening and broadening their engagement with the organisation, and, more importantly, their peers, then we're doing a good thing - regardless of whether the place is virtual or real.

I'm in San Antonio for the next few days, attending the IABC Leadership Institute Conference, thanks to the IABC UK. As the new IABC UK webmaster I'm mainly here to meet with the IABC web team and discuss some exciting work they've been carrying out to provide some templates to chapter sites to create up to date websites based on Wordpress. Looking forward to seeing what they've done, and also to revamping the existing IABC UK site.

I've also been roped in (obligatory cattle and cowboys reference, seeing that I'm Texas) to a panel this afternoon organised by the San Antonio chapter, talking about International Communications Trends. Needless to say, I'm going to spend my bits talking about social media!

Looking forward to an interesting few days, as well as seeing a bit of San Antonio, a town I visited for the first and only time 20 years ago.

I started this post over a year and a half ago, and it's languished as a draft in 3 different pieces of software (LiveWriter, WordPress and Movable Type), but today feels like a very good day to dust off the cobwebs and unleash it onto the world. (Although, actually, I only got one line into it before saving it as a draft...). Anyway, without further ado, the post - such as it was !

JP Ragaswami points to Tara Hunt talking about aggregating her bits and pieces strewn over the web.

So - why post now ? Well - in the last year and a half, many personal aggregation / lifestreaming services have sprung up, but today (and the reason I've finally gotten round to doing something with this post), SixApart released Action Streams - a quite excellent personal aggregation plugin for Movable Type 4. Byrne Reese also blogged about it over on majordojo.

Installing the plugin adds a simple interface for adding your activity from other sites, with prebuilt support for the most popular. It's a relatively straightforward process, although the template changes might put off people with no experience of MT, but 10 minutes of template changes was all it took for me to get my lifestream on this site - check it out here. You do need to be able to run a scheduled task to get it to update - but that shouldn't be an issue for any decent host.

Pretty simple, and plays nicely with the Universal Template Set. There's some good stuff coming out of  SixApart right now, and it feels like MT is on a bit of a roll.

Just thought I'd post up the fact that we've launched the MotorAddicts site - I'm looking after it while one of my colleagues is on holiday - and am enjoying the process - I'd almost forgotten what it was like to be working on a true public facing site (after the last 5 years of working on a lot of internally focused applications). So - it's a social networking site for car nuts, or even people who just have a passing inclination for cars. It's still a baby - this is version 1.0 - we're now starting to look at what we need to do to make it even better, and will embark on a fairly frequent release cycle (that's the plan anyway !). So - if you're into cars, head on over and sign up - there's some good content starting to be posted or linked to, as well as some outrageous cars ! [tags]motoraddicts, socialnetwork, headshift[/tags]

Facebook is now available for anyone to join - if your school, college, or organisation isn't recognised you can join as a geographic member. In the latter case, you only have access to a network in your particular geography - ie the other networks are closed off to you. However this does give us (where us = people who aren't at school and who don't have a college email address) a chance to see what all the fuss is about, and also play with the APIs. [Update - profile created: Facebook me!] [tags]facebook, socialnetwork[/tags]

I played around with Mog yesterday - a music based social network that tracks what you play etc, lets you connect with people, blogs - all the usual kind of stuff. Some of the coverage:c|net, zdnet, Red Herring.

Underwhelming. As a reasonably long-term last.fm subscriber, I'm not sure what mog has that would make me want to move. Let's see:

• Track what I'm playing ? Got that.
• Blogs, yup;
• forums - covered;
• tagging, likewise;
• networks - whether explicit or emergent - also there.

Actually, mog doesn't do emergent networking (creating neighbours based on similarity) - or at least I don't think it does. I would check but I seem to have become un unmogger - the site won't let me log in, won't mail me my password as it doesn't recognise my email address, and won't let me sign up again with that email. Humph. Once feature that last.fm doesn't have is that you can upload your entire music collection, but you'll need to be patient...I left it running this morning having processed about 70 songs in an hour, and I have no idea what it's going to do with the information.

Anyway - not a chance I'll move away from last.fm to mog. Tom Coates sums it up aptly:

"It's got some attention because it was linked to from BoingBoing, but I have to be honest, at first glance it looks a lot like a crappy last.fm - a site that they completely haven't acknowledged in most of their press"

[tags]last.fm, music, collaborative, mog, audioscrobbler[/tags]