Written by Richard Lalleman
Richard Lalleman is a guest writer on Mindjumpers blog. Richard holds an MSc in Information and Knowledge Management from the London Metropolitan University. Currently, Richard is working on projects and programmes to enhance innovation by developing organisational learning environments. A crucial part in this work is embedding social media tools at a strategic management level and organising, training and mentoring courses in the use of social media tools, such as social bookmarking
Many of us have played with Lego. By mixing bricks of different shapes and colours, it is possible to build different objects (from cars and houses to space ships). This sounds like an easy thing to do. However, appearances are deceiving! In most cases, people cannot manage without the instructions to make sense of all the different bricks and decide over which brick should connect the other in order to build the particular object.
This small anecdote can also be translated into the issue of social media. Social media is everywhere and is increasingly shaping our daily life as a way to share and create new knowledge. With social media we communicate (by (micro)-blogging and social networking) and collaborate (by using Wikis and social-bookmarking) through different types of multimedia (by photo-sharing with Flickr and video-sharing with YouTube). As a result, all these different tools – social media tools – create a lively environment where people can tell their own stories, connect with other people who are telling their own stories as well and, as a result, engage each other.
In order to create an environment where people engage each other through lively conversations, the trick is to successfully combine social media tools. Businesses should make sense of all these different tools and decide which combinations will best work for them. This means that there are different combinations of social media tools that can add value to your business. That is why it is difficult to only give one instruction (as highlighted in the Lego anecdote) to build a social media environment for the business. Social media expertise is required!
A practical example
The Focuss.Info Initiative is a web portal in the domain of global development cooperation and is remixing different social media tools. The domain of global development cooperation aims at collaborating in local, regional, national and international initiatives, in order to get agreement from the developed and underdeveloped countries on a universally accepted way for the development of a greater quality of life for humans. As a result, many institutes from all over the world are being engaged in researching how we best can create a better world.
The institutes are increasingly using the Internet to globally push and pull that knowledge. Additionally, the Internet, with its social media tools, is also making it possible to communicate and collaborate on a global level. As a result, the Focuss.Info Initiative is asking students, researchers and individual practitioners from all over the world to start using the social media tool Delicious . By using Delicious you can store, share and discover e-resources in their specific domain. By using Delicious, the collections of favourite e-resources are available on the Internet rather than locally on computers. Everybody can access and re-use these collections. As a result, Focuss.Info is indexing the individual collections from peers by another social media tool: the Google CSE search engine.
This search engine is made available for free by Google. Focuss.Info has embedded this search engine in its website and is now only indexing the selected Delicious collections from peers. Consequently, Focuss.Info is showing search results that have been selected by peers from Africa, Asia, Europe and the Americas. This means that peers from more local areas in, for example Senegal can make their domain-specific e-resources better visible to, for example, the big policy and research centers in Europe and North America. This is a big step forward in sharing information and knowledge, because how often do you find valuable websites in global development cooperation from Senegal when searching with Bing, Google or Yahoo?
Conclusion
By only maintaining a personal collection of favourite e-resources on the Internet (through Delicious), is it possible to directly share it with other peers. Furthermore, initiatives like Focuss.Info add value to existing information by re-using and remixing the information based on other social media tools. In this example, the information stored in the individual Delicious collections is combined with the Google CSE search engine . As a result, Focuss.Info is an alternative web portal to information and knowledge in global development cooperation besides the more classical and generic search engines such as Bing, Google and Yahoo.
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