Toluu : A Journey In Social Media

A Journey In Social Media

A journal about my personal thoughts regarding evolving a comprehensive social media strategy at a large company.

I love blogging. Your sweat and you write and you post -- and every so often you get the chance to have a detailed conversation with someone you'd never ordinarily engage with.

Such is the case today -- I came to work and found myself scrolling through a multi-page thoughtful comment from John Tropea.

Rather than responding with another multi-page comment, I decided to put the discussion in a post, and respond (hopefully) conversationally.

John writes:

Hi Chuck, I have posted about top-down CoP creation, which seems to be in contrast to your bottom-up creation???...

Yes, that's true, we've strived to create an incubation environment where people (with a bit of effort and support) can create their own communities. We took this approach for a couple of reasons, (1) we've got a sprawlingly diverse organization, so any top-down initiative would struggle, (2) we believe that the ability for motivated individuals to form communities is a key social media proficiency skill, and (3) we like any approach that doesn't require an inordinate amount of work on our part :-)

I'm gathering at EMC|ONE that people can create their own communities (I'm refering to page 21 of your paper) But I'm not so sure, as I recall an earlier blog post of yours referring to a community request form (actually we based our form on this)...is this still the case? (as this would make it top-down creation)

Yep, it's sti

When Your Corporate Social Platform Becomes Mission CriticalDecember 17 2008

Life is full of learning experiences, and we had one yesterday.

A minor patch to our environment exposed underlying database corruption, which resulted in our internal social platform being unavailable for almost a full business day.

The backups? They were corrupt as well.

Thanks to the exceptional effort of everyone involved, nothing significant was really lost.

Sure, there are lessons to be learned on proper support practices for important applications (and our social platform is now one of those), but there are other lessons to be learned as well.

First, A Bit Of Perspective

I've been selling to mission-critical IT environments for most of my adult career.

I understand what can happen, how it happens, and what should be done about it. I am probably not as expert as someone who actually *runs* a mission-critical IT shop, but I'm close enough.

And, believe me, in terms of "bad IT days", data corruption is one of the biggies. Especially if your backups have the same problem. Usually -- unless superhero efforts are applied -- this means that you're gonna lose some data. Thankfully, we didn't lose too much.

So, what lessons did we learn?

#1 -- The Impact Was Stunning

Len wrote a great post on "The Air That I Breathe", and I think that's a great analogy.

All day long, it was hard for many of

A Big UpgradeDecember 9 2008

At the end of last week, we upgraded to Clearspace 2.5x. Wow!

We have a plethora of cool new features, and a spiffy new skinning as well. I wanted to share a screen shot with you, simply because it came out so gorgeous.

Congrats to Jamie, Len and the rest of the team who sweated all the gory details (not to be shared here!), and gave us such a wonderful social platform to use!

(click for expanded view)

Giving Back, And A Request For HelpDecember 9 2008

Hi everyone!

We've been asked over and over again for some sort of white paper overview on our whole social media proficiency experience.

Well, I've finally taken the time to write one.

It's not perfect, but maybe you could help to make it better?

CAVEATS

Every document needs a use case. Here's the one I have in mind.

Typically, I'm talking to an IT group about various technology topics. I touch on what we're doing here with social media proficiency, and they really want to talk about it. It'd be nice to send them some sort of writeup or guidebook as to what we did and how we did it.

Some things to keep in mind?

First, it's a DRAFT. There are no pictures, graphs, footnotes, references, etc. I bet there are some typos as well.

Second, if you just want to download this and put it to use, feel free. I'd appreciate a note in the comments from you with any general reactions and/or uses you plan to put it to.

Third, if you REALLY want to help, please dissect it. Imagine you're working for a large organization, you want to do this whole social media proficiency thing, and you're reading this white paper. What would you add? What would you delete? What would you change or improve?

Finally, I'd appreciate it if everyone would respect EMC's copyright here. Linking to this post and/or document is AOK, but please don't redistribute without permission.

Those Who Talk vs. Those Who DoNovember 19 2008

Sorry, I need to get something off my chest.

And I may alienate a portion of the community in doing so.

But -- well -- something needs to be said.

There Are A Lot Of Experts Out There

Like any hot topic, there are many people out there offering expertise on the whole 2.0 thing: social media, social networking, social computing, whatever.

And, occasionally, I go surfing the chatter-sphere to see what people are talking about. Like most surfing, you find a few bits are interesting, with a whole lotta "meh".

I do appreciate those brave souls who have hung out their consulting shingle and tried to make a living on helping companies make the transition.

I think that those of you who follow this blog and this journey realize we've rolled up our sleeves, and made an amazing amount of progress in a very short time -- due to a combination of some very talented and passionate people, and a corporate culture that can evolve much faster than most people realize.

But -- really -- to take our approach to task and say "we don't get it" or "we're missing it" or "what we really don't understand" or "we did it all wrong" and otherwise lambaste us for what we're doing?

I would favorably compare our practical organizational knowledge and methodologies on what we've learned to many of the "experts" out there -- especially those who haven't had the privilege of actually doing this sort of corporate transformation on