Bill LaPorte talked about CDI’s entry into social media in his last blog post.  I have used the statistics he cited in presentations and with clients.  It is really amazing to think about how technology has enabled a message to reach users in such a short time period.

I’ve been studying Enterprise 2.0/Web 2.0/Social Media (or whatever term you want to use) for a few years now.  I believe it is the manner in which corporations are going to be working in order to increase collaboration among their workforce, with their partners and customers.

We started experimenting with these new collaborative tools at my employer for the last 18 months or so.  We first started a blog a little over a year ago.  We saw blogging as a way to show ourselves as thought leaders and to engage with others in the Information Management space.  We also use it to advertise events or webinars that our company is hosting or sponsoring.  We’ve had some good success with it.

We also began experimenting with microblogging within the company.  If you are familiar with Twitter, the difference is this is inside our organization only.  We use a product called Yammer to host our microblogging platform.  It is restricted to people in the organization by only allowing those with a valid email address from the domain of the organization to login to the account.  Yammer has recently added the ability for setting up groups that cross organizational boundaries, but I haven’t experimented with that capability yet.

We find Yammer very useful in sharing items that may have been previously sent via email.  We use it a lot for sharing links to other blog posts we’ve read or to other items we find on the web.  It allows for threaded discussions as well.  It has cut down on the amount of email that goes through the organization.

We have also experimented with a wiki as a central repository for our internal methods.  We used this collaboration platform to jointly author this material.

These new technologies can change the way an organization collaborates and shares information.  There are some potential impacts to records management programs through there usage, so you need to ensure that your Records and Information Management program staff is aware of how they are being used.

How about your organization?  Are you using these new collaboration tools?  Are you finding them useful?

When I first discussed delving into the world of social media with our CEO, I have to admit that I was pretty skeptical. It wasn’t so much that I am against SM venues, but that I failed to see that there was any business benefit in spending the time and effort to develop a COMPU-DATA International presence there. Persistent and persuasive as always, Juan asked me to help bring the company into this ‘new’ world and so, off I went to research and write and organize. What I found was pretty incredible. Statistically, Social Media Venues are rapidly becoming THE place to go for information. Here are some interesting anecdotes that I gleaned from my research…

1. The number of years it took to reach 50 million users:

a. Radio (38 Years)

b. TV (13 Years)

c. Internet (4 Years)

d. iPod (3 Years)

e. Face book added 100 million users in less than 9 months…

f. iPhone applications hit 1 billion in 9 months.

2. If Face book were a country it would be the world’s 4th largest between the United States and Indonesia.

3. The percentage of companies using LinkedIn as a primary tool to find employees….80%.

1. Successful companies in social media act more like Dale Carnegie and less like David Ogilvy: listening first, selling second

5. Successful companies in social media act more like party planners, aggregators, and content providers than traditional advertisers. And my personal favorite:

6. Ashton Kutcher and Ellen Degeneres (combined) have more Twitter followers than the  population of Ireland, Norway, or Panama.

Wow! I began thinking that social media venues dovetail very nicely into what the corporate philosophy is; namely to avoid the ‘hard sell’ and educate folks about the industry, promote who we are at a more personal level and become more involved in the community-at-large. What a cool medium to pass on our experience and knowledge to the folks that need it most! So, we started with our BLOG and created personal and CDI Facebook pages. We are also now live on YouTube and AuthorStream, and anyone can follow our CEO, Juan Celaya on Twitter. We at CDI hope that you will join us on this journey and we promise to make our content helpful, relevant, current and fun. See you out there.

Bill

Since we decided to begin this journey into cyberspace with our BLOG, I had been mulling over what I would write about.  My head was filled with topics on content and data capture, ECM, Content and Data Integration (CADI) and I became excited about what I could contribute and how that could help folks weed through some very complicated topics perhaps making their lives a bit easier, their business processes more successful.  But as this weekend approached; my heart becomes a bit heavy as it does every year for me, I begin to think of Memorial Day and its meaning.  Being a patriot (my wife calls me a Republican, but we won’t even go there) and a veteran, I tend to focus a bit more on our military personnel and the conflicts we engage in.  Much of the work I’ve done over the last 30 or so years has been designing or improving systems and processes for DoD, the military services, the intelligence community and law enforcement. 

I enlisted in the Air Force little more than a year after we pulled out of Viet Nam so while I didn’t see action there, I did see the impact of the death of over 58,000 of our personnel on the men and women continuing to serve our country in the years following ‘the conflict’. 

(A much younger) Bill working on an F-4 Phantom

My wife, after retiring from 30 years in the Commonwealth of Virginia school system, is a Program Manager for Headquarters Marine Corps, supporting 9800 Marine family members who have disabilities and other medical needs.  She sees each day now the toll taken on our troops.

We as a nation (and not just us) tend to forget our origins, our raison d’être (reason to be), our struggles and losses.  We see it at Christmas that has become so commercial as to bleed over in the market place beginning around Halloween.  And many of our holidays become more about a day off to celebrate than to reflect.  We as a nation cannot forget!  It is important that our children know Memorial Day’s true and complete meaning.  Please take a couple of minutes to honor the memory of our war dead this weekend.  The young Army Captain Kyle Comfort (photographed as a LT) below was 27 and left behind his wife and a 6-month old baby girl.  He was killed with an IED three weeks ago in Afghanistan. Below is a note from General Casey about this and references an entry in his blog from two years ago that describes who Kyle was in life and his thoughts on sacrifice.  Read on, as Captain Comfort’s entry is far more eloquent on the subject than I could ever be.

Bill LaPorte

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