DevLearn08 - Day 2 (cont.)

Third and final session of the day: "Maximizing Social Networking to Foster Sustained Employee Collaboration" with Mark Sylvester.

The first thing Mark wants to talk about is why organizations want to implement social networks. He has three reasons: to take advantage of informal learning, to help employees find experts, to help students find study partners, and to help people find mentors. (Wait, that's four reasons.) Organizations may choose to focus on one, some, or all of these.

He is saying that organizations who implement social networks without a plan for what they're going to do with it are much more likely to fail. I've heard this before, and it's a point I am continually driving home because it just makes sense.

Mark has examples of several of the social network sites that his company has put together for their clients. I'm already starting to wonder how useful this will be for me if this is the level his presentation is going to be at, but I'm hopeful that I will still find some value here. On the other hand, it's always useful to see what other organizations are doing.

His software has a really cool feature that helps you locate people with similar interests, areas of expertise, etc. It's very intuitive and visually impressive. And yet, it doesn't look particularly useful for AAA NCNU because we need so much more.

Wow. A lot of people have gotten up and walked out of this session. Not something I have seen at any previous session. I suspect that has a lot to do with the fact that he has basically spent the entire presentation marketing his tool. If he wanted to demonstrate some of the basic key features of a social networking tool, he probably should have used somebody else's tool.

Ah, here we go. Back on his original topic again. He wants to talk about design goals for your community, and making sure that you design the community in such a way that your users want to use it.

Boy, he uses a lot of cocktail party analogies.

He just suggested reading the book Groundswell, making him the third speaker to recommend it in the last two days. I also heard about it from a speaker at a webinar about a month ago. Guess I should read it, eh?

Now it's time to find something to do for the evening.