tweet

0tweets

HomeAboutCasesContactJobsVideo

Feed onPostsComments

« Liverpool FC First to Reach a Million Fans on FacebookThink Social – Social Media for a Greater Good »

Getting Started With Social Media

Oct 28th, 2009 by mindjumpers

Written by Richard Lalleman

Richard Lalleman is a guest writer on Mindjumpers blog. Richard holds an MSc in Information andKnowledge Management from the London Metropolitan University. Currently, Richard is working onprojects and programmes to enhance innovation by developing organisational learningenvironments. A crucial part in this work is embedding social media tools at a strategicmanagement 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 mostcases, people cannot manage without the instructions to make sense of all the different bricks and decide over which brickshould 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 increasinglyshaping our daily life as a way to share and create new knowledge. With social media we communicate (by (micro)-bloggingand social networking) and collaborate (by using Wikis and social-bookmarking) through different types of multimedia (byphoto-sharing with Flickr and video-sharing with YouTube). As a result, all these different tools – social media tools – createa lively environment where people can tell their own stories, connect with other people who are telling their own stories aswell 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 successfullycombine social media tools. Businesses should make sense of all these different tools and decide which combinations willbest work for them. This means that there are different combinations of social media tools that can add value to yourbusiness. That is why it is difficult to only give one instruction (as highlighted in the Lego anecdote) to build a social mediaenvironment 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 socialmedia tools. The domain of global development cooperation aims at collaborating in local, regional, national andinternational initiatives, in order to get agreement from the developed and underdeveloped countries on a universallyaccepted way for the development of a greater quality of life for humans. As a result, many institutes from all over the world

Mindjumpers » Blog Archive » Getting Started With Social Media http://www.mindjumpers.com/blog/2009/10/getting-started/

1 of 4 17-11-2009 10:26

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 itssocial media tools, is also making it possible to communicate and collaborate on a global level. As a result, the Focuss.InfoInitiative is asking students, researchers and individual practitioners from all over the world to start using the social mediatool Delicious . By using Delicious you can store, share and discover e-resources in their specific domain. By usingDelicious, the collections of favourite e-resources are available on the Internet rather than locally on computers. Everybodycan access and re-use these collections. As a result, Focuss.Info is indexing the individual collections from peers by anothersocial 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 isnow only indexing the selected Delicious collections from peers. Consequently, Focuss.Info is showing search results thathave been selected by peers from Africa, Asia, Europe and the Americas. This means that peers from more local areas in, forexample Senegal can make their domain-specific e-resources better visible to, for example, the big policy and researchcenters in Europe and North America. This is a big step forward in sharing information and knowledge, because how oftendo 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 todirectly share it with other peers. Furthermore, initiatives like Focuss.Info add value to existing information by re-using andremixing the information based on other social media tools. In this example, the information stored in the individualDelicious collections is combined with the Google CSE search engine . As a result, Focuss.Info is an alternative web portal toinformation and knowledge in global development cooperation besides the more classical and generic search engines such asBing, Google and Yahoo.

Tweet This Share on Facebook

Tags: Focuss.info, Sharing, Sharing knowledge

Posted in 2.0 Collaboration, Innovation, Social media, Social network

Leave a Reply

Name (required)

Mail (will not be published) (required)

Website

Submit

Follow Mindjumpers

Mindjumpers » Blog Archive » Getting Started With Social Media http://www.mindjumpers.com/blog/2009/10/getting-started/

2 of 4 17-11-2009 10:26

Get the blog sent to your inbox by entering your email address:

Delivered by FeedBurner

Our Cloud

Books Uncategorized Social Responsibility 2.0 Collaboration Humor Good Cause Branded Content Branding Web film Social Good Tech

Innovation Viral Film Viral marketing Social network Social media

Recent Posts

Foursquare Vs. GowallaBrilliant Self Esteem Campaign from DoveTwitter and LinkedIn announce partnershipMindjumpers in YouTube BattleCharity Song Crowdsourced through YouTubeTwitter Times – Your Own Personal News Paper20% of all Tweets are About Products and BrandsNew MindjumperCan Facebook Help Make Peace in the World?Think Social – Social Media for a Greater Good

Archives

I collect with vodpod

Minjumpers Video Cloud

see all 25 videos >

Dancing Flash Mob

2 views

15 Nov 09

2 views

14 Nov 09

11 views

01 Oct 09

6 views

05 Nov 09

12 views

30 Oct 09

Mindjumpers » Blog Archive » Getting Started With Social Media http://www.mindjumpers.com/blog/2009/10/getting-started/

3 of 4 17-11-2009 10:26

November 2009October 2009September 2009August 2009July 2009June 2009May 2009April 2009March 2009February 2009January 2009

Most visited posts

AboutContactCases

Mindjumpers © 2009 All Rights Reserved.

Free WordPress Themes | Fresh WordPress Themes

Mindjumpers » Blog Archive » Getting Started With Social Media http://www.mindjumpers.com/blog/2009/10/getting-started/

4 of 4 17-11-2009 10:26