Social Network Tools and their Business Application

Experts claim that blogs, podcasts, RSS, instant messaging and other social network technologies are the next wave in office productivity, and that they will transform the way we do business by encouraging new types of collaboration. With today’s shortage of time and attention, combined with focus on increased productivity, anything that enables employees to improve their working practices is to be welcomed.

Understanding the impact of Blogs, Podcasting, Instant Messaging, RSS and Wikis is essential in today’s rapidly evolving business landscape making this conference a must for any organisation that doesn’t want to fall behind their competitors.

This conference looks at the new technologies in a business setting, with overview presentations and case studies. Both the internal use – often in the form of instant messaging and wikis – and external use, usually via blogs, rss feeds and podcasts – will be covered. There will also be presentations on Web 2.0 and beyond - According to BBC Radio 4’s programme “In Business”, “[Web 2.0]… is leaching power away from the old information providers in the press and broadcasting and handing it to a new democracy of bloggers and communicators now numbered in millions.”

There will be a strong emphasis on the practical aspects. You will find out the different applications of each technology and their relative merits and drawbacks, and how to choose between increasing numbers of new offerings, depending on your business need.

The conference is chaired by David Gurteen, founder of the Gurteen Knowledge Community and himself knowledgeable in these technologies.

Target audience

All those concerned with improving corporate communications, in particular Senior Managers from the following industry sectors

· Corporate
· Public sector
· Education
· Professional services

Job Functions:

· Information strategists
· Corporate communications, PR and marketing professionals
· Senior information management professionals
· Senior managers
· Knowledge managers
· Publishers


Benefits of attending

The successful businesses of the future will be complex, adaptive, agile, proactive, and creative. The aim of this conference is to assist staff at all levels to exploit the new technologies for business benefit. In particular:-

· Learn how Blogs and WIKIs change the traditional models of managing knowledge and how they can support purposeful social networks

· Hear about the practices of those who are achieving real business success using social network tools

· Find out the role of podcasting and RSS feeds to target customers with clearly defined interests

· Explore the benefits and downside of business use of Instant Messaging

Programme to date:

Informal Knowledge Sharing with Social Networking
Lee Bryant, Headshift
· How to get increased take-up and participation in knowledge sharing using social software
· How to make the most of the paid pace of innovation in social tools without spending the earth
· How to bring existing corporate tools to life by adding a social software collaboration layer
· What will be the impact of social software on enterprise IT and software in general?
· Towards a new ‘grown-up’ relationship with knowledge workers

· The reputation, credibility and ultimate success of products and brands are increasingly in the hands of the customer or audience – and this is certainly true of the BBC.
· How should a brand and content owner like the BBC respond to this “democratisation” of the internet? Is it an opportunity or a threat? What tools and tactics are at our disposal?
· Hear the latest from the BBC on pods, blogs and the growing importance of social networks.

· Premium Podcasting versus Adfunded Podcasting: a commercial overview.
· The value of the user in creating engaging promotions for advertisers.
· Engaging audiences to generate improved value for advertisers and improved loyalty from listeners.

The Influence of Social Network Technologies: Who’s Influencing Whom?
Duncan Brown, Influencer50
· Influencer Marketing is the fastest growing marketing strategy, and threatens to displace traditional marketing techniques.
· Within Influencer Marketing, the use of social network technologies is emerging, but is uncontrolled and badly understood.
· This presentation identifies how to assess the influence of blogs, wikis and other social network technologies, so you can monitor, target and influence those that matter to your organisation.

What is IBM doing with Web 2.0 tools, Concepts and Mash-Ups and Why?
Ian McNairn, Program Director Web, Technology & Innovation, Global e-business Transformation, IBM SWG
· Wikis, blogs, social bookmarking, IM, RSS and podcasting: are they the tools of freedom, or anarchy ?
· Web 2.0, is it a fad, a name or a mind-set …. and does it matter?
· Case studies on how IBM is using these tools to change the playing field internally.
· Why does innovation matter within your company …. and what price do you put on Innovation?

Creating an In-House (Social) Media Empire
Lloyd Davis, Director, Perfect Path Consulting Ltd
· Bringing blogs, podcasts and videoblogging together to solve classic knowledge management problems
· Consultation exercises that don't bore you to death
· Creating richer records of meetings, seminars and conferences


Combining Wikis & the Semantic Web: towards Web3.0?
John Davies, BT
· Informal and formal approaches to shared web spaces
· Semantic Wikis
· Knowledge Sharing on the Semantic Web


Social Bookmarking Inside the Organisation: connecting people to people and to information
James Lappin, Advisor, TFPL
· Social bookmarking tools such as del.cio.us have been popular and successful on the world wide web. They allow you to:
o ‘bookmark’ links to information resources so that you can acess them later
o ‘tag’ your own links with words that you want to remember them by
o navigate through a ‘folksonomy’ of other peoples’ tags to find resources of interest to you
· Social bookmarking tools have the potential to bring huge knowledge management benefits into an organisation, at an extremely low cost. The deployment and widespread take-up of such tools would:
o alert people to the existence of colleagues with similar interests to themselves
o alert people to the existence of information resources that those colleagues with similar interests to themselves have found useful.
· In this talk we will explore:
o The issues faced by organisations employing social bookmarking tools
o The impact the arrival of tagging and folksonomies could have on the use of classification and controlled vocabularies in an organisation

· Sharing knowledge through blogging needs to be a core competence
· We are all publishers and writers, and there are good reasons to become exceptional at those skills.
· You don’t have to spend enormous sums of money or time to get the visibility you need
· How can you beat the global brands to get the number one spot on Google for the right things, without buying your way there?
· Consistency is key in all things.

· How employers can use mobile technology to recruit from diverse communities and cut costs at the same time
· How mobile technology can help organisations meet the e-government agenda for 'bridging the digital divide'

Supported by

ASLIB
Best Practice Club
Gurteen Knowledge Network

WIN A COPY OF MELCRUM’S REPORT “Top 10 New Technologies for Internal Communicators”

Flickr Slideshow: Talk at Universiti Teknologi MARA in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia in August 2007

Photo slideshow of talk at Universiti Teknologi MARA in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia in August 2007.

Media Information:

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