Socialize Me: facebook

Showing posts with label facebook. Show all posts

Wednesday, October 15, 2014

Hootsuite Now Integrates with IBM Connections Social Cloud

Now, this is HUGE! Today Hootsuite has announced their new capabilities now with added support for IBM Connections Social Cloud. Check out their announcement here.

The IBM Connections app for Hootsuite is now available in the Hootsuite App Directory.

So what can you do? This app enables joint customers of IBM Connections and Hootsuite Enterprise to:

Instantly share social content from Twitter and Facebook to colleagues and communities in IBM Connections (see below for more examples)
Engage with IBM Connections communities and content in Hootsuite alongside social network streams for Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, Google+ and more.
Post new updates and comments to IBM Connections communities, and search for content across all of your communities from within Hootsuite.

There are so many great things about this integration. Let me expand on the first two. First, taking content from consumer social networks and bringing that into Connections. There's a couple of use cases for that:

Customer Support - imagine a customer support agent gets a Tweet and don't know how to resolve. They can take that and share it with their colleagues via Connections to work on an answer.
Marketing Amplification - The marketing team can work in Connections to create awareness around a new product launch, and others use Hootsuite to amplify the message in their social networks
Sales - A sales executive spots a lead in LinkedIn and sends it to his teammate in IBM Connections
Crisis Commnications - if a PR professional spots a crisis in the making in their Hootsuite dashboard, they can instantly engage their team via Connections to respond appropriately
HR Recruitment - an HR professional monitors social media via Hootsuite to identifies leads and understand how the company is perceived by potential candidates
and on, and on...

As you can see, the possibilities are endless. The next capability is being able to use Hootsuite as your IBM Connections dashboard. Users may be participating already in 10-20 communities, and instead of manually keeping track of all these communities (via different browser tabs for example), they can use Hootsuite to bring it all together seamlessly into 1 single place.

"We are very excited about the launch of the Hootsuite integration with IBM," said Sandy Carter, General Manager of IBM Ecosystem Development. "With the general availability of the Hootsuite App for IBM Connections - whether in the cloud or on-premises - our joint customers now have the ability to engage with their IBM Connections streams from within the Hootsuite dashboard. This level of integration and efficiency is unique to our relationship and will allow companies to work more effectively by bringing internal and external social content, thought leadership, and customer voices into a single centralized dashboard -- making it incredibly easy to collaborate and share intelligence within the enterprise and across departmental silos, connecting individuals in every team with the ideas and people that matter."

Want to see this in action? Check out this video:

Want to learn more? Check out this asset created by the Hootsuite team. And also check out this video to learn more about Hootsuite Enterprise:

Wednesday, March 5, 2014

Socialite Integrates Facebook, LinkedIn and Twitter feeds in IBM Connections

View Comments

As we get ready for an upcoming product launch, I wanted to take the opportunity to share about a new add-on available for IBM Connections. As part of the product launch, and I'm sure you do this too, I'm monitoring various social channels -- for example, Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn and my enterprise social network, IBM Connections.

The new Socialite for IBM Connections is designed to integrate public social networking right into the IBM Connections interface. This means that from right inside the Connections interface, users can see an integrated feed of their Facebook, LinkedIn, and Twitter activities.

Check out the 5 minute demo below:

Socialite for Connections lets users see and react to the social activities of their customers as they happen, allowing them to provide better and more immediate customer service, a critical capability because knowing what customers say about your brand and its products on social networks provides a wealth of insight.

Additionally, not only can you monitor these public social networks. The integration also allows users to interact with these social networks directly from within IBM Connections. Socialite provides the right compliance controls to meet your requirements. With compliance removed as a barrier to the integration of public social, organizations can improve adoption of and satisfaction with the use of IBM Connections.

With more people using Connections, and sharing more content on Connections -- both inside and outside the organization -- all in a compliant way, organizations can more quickly realize a return on their investment.

a To learn more, check out Socialite.

Thursday, December 5, 2013

HootSuite Announces New Integration with IBM Connections

View Comments

HootSuite has just announced the private Beta integration with IBM Connections platform. This is an incredible combination of two leaders: HootSuite is the leading social media management system with nearly 7 million users. IBM Connections is the worldwide enterprise social software marketshare leader according to IDC for 4 years running.

Needless to say, I'm excited to see our eco system continue to grow with market leaders such as HootSuite integrating with IBM's social platform. This is just one of the many solutions we'll be talking about at IBM Connect 2014, so if you haven't registered yet, go do it now and take advantage of the early bird discount!

Hootsuite and IBM Connections users will be able to integrate content from IBM Connections into the HootSuite dashboard so it can be viewed and actioned alongside social media data from Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, and other social networks and applications. This IBM Connections integration is the first of its kind, no other platform brings your corporate social streams within IBM Connections and public social media together as efficiently.

IBM Connections customers will be able to manage their stream and:

Post and interact with status updates
Target status updates to groups, individuals, or make them public
Interact with files
Monitor feeds
Search the stream
Access user's profile information
and more!

Check out how it looks below:

And here's a short demo that shows and describes how this works:

And here's a longer demo that shows and describes how this works:

If you are interested in learning more, check out HootSuite's blog for instructions on how to apply for beta access. This integration is available at no additional cost.

Tuesday, May 7, 2013

SNAPPS Announces SnappLinks for IBM Connections

View Comments

Today, I'm glad to share the news that SNAPPS, a long time IBM partner and whose founder is an IBM Champion, has announced new extensions for the IBM Connections rich text editor.

The rich text editor is part of several IBM products including Connections. The editor in Connections can be extended with additional buttons and features and SNAPPS has taken advantage of this.

With SnappLinks™, you can use your editor -- in your applications with XPages or with the IBM products -- to create and share the public social experience across intranets, on the web with suppliers, and in teams. SnappLinks™ is integrated directly into the editor and lets you connect to these social, public networks: Twitter, Facebook, YouTube, Google Maps, LinkedIn, and Wikipedia. In other words, Get Social Do Business in a way that's natural and easy for your users.

In addition to the helpful social linking features, SnappLinks delivers a rendering engine to IBM Connections to let users view YouTube videos, Google Maps, and Facebook feeds right on the page!

Check out this 3 minute demo to see how it works!

To learn more, go here. Note: SNAPPS is running a promotion where they are offering this at 25% off and 35% off for those attending IamLUG this week. Take advantage of that!

Wednesday, February 27, 2013

iEnterprises Demonstrates Solution to Connect Facebook and Twitter to IBM Connections

View Comments

Let's keep on sharing the IBM Connect 2013 news. Again, one of the things that I was extremely happy to see was the large number of new partners and apps being built for IBM Connections.

This one comes from iEnterprises where they have developed a solution to take status updates from IBM Connections and post them to Facebook, LinkedIn, and Twitter via a control panel. Users can connect their accounts to their favorite social networks and have their status updates cross posted if desired. iEnterprises can also determine if a status update should go through an approval process before being posted externally based on some pre-configured criteria.

The solution takes advantage of OpenSocial and embedded experiences to allow managers to approve and manage this integration directly from email notifications !

Check out the 5 minute demo below:

Very cool!

Thursday, February 21, 2013

Dynamic Signal Helps Amplify Your Brand Using IBM Connections

View Comments

The news from IBM Connect 2013 just keep coming in. As I've shared in the past, one of the highlights of the #IBMConnect conference was the App Dev Throwdown where many new partners got to showcase their integration with IBM Connections.

Dynamic Signal, an employee marketing solution allows you to reward employees for their participation in external social networks like Facebook. Let's say, for example, that your company is launching a new product and you want to get your employees to help you promote it. Dynamic Signal provides an interface to create a campaign and track employee participation in it. Employees can promote company news from IBM Connections directly with Google+, Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, and more!!

This solution is a perfect combination of social business and social media and takes IBM Connections to the next level!

Check out this 4 minute demo:

Very cool!!!! Go check out their solutions today!!

Tuesday, September 18, 2012

Social Streams Help Me Stay Focused and Productive

View Comments

At your job, you have access to a lot of information throughout many systems. That means that you are probably switching between many applications to get your job done: your email client, your intranet portal, your various line of business applications, etc, etc, etc.

Now, imagine if you had a single, social stream of updates from all the applications you worked with that enabled you to get your work done quickly and efficiently. Wouldn't that be awesome? Imagine if you could sign off on an expense report or submit your travel request or even get notified when your colleague finished a task all while you browse a single stream of status updates and more.

All of this you can do today with IBM Connections. Using open standards, enterprise applications can be surfaced into a social stream to enable people to work in one single place.

Next week I'm going to be participating in the Virtual Enterprise 2.0 Conference and I would like to invite you to attend. This will be a great opportunity for you to find out what types of processes you can socialize by leveraging the market leading social platform for major productivity gains

As a teaser for the virtual Enterprise 2.0 conference, we have prepared the following video:

To register and view the agenda, click here and you'll be entered to win a Kindle.

See you there!

Tuesday, November 1, 2011

To Like or To Dislike: Is That The Question?

View Comments

A little over two years ago, I blogged about YouTube's decision to abandon their 5-star rating system and instead go for a Thumbs Up/Down approach. Yesterday, I blogged about Tom Raftery's keynote where he highlights IBM's use of binary recommendations in our blog engine. Then I stumbled on yet another article about Facebook prohibiting Dislike on their system from Mashable.

Mashable's Op-Ed highlights that developers were trying to use Facebook's new OpenGraph protocol to convert dislike into one of the possible options for users. However, trying to do that, gives this error to developers:

It seems most social networks today (Google +, Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter, IBM Connections, Instagram, etc) use a binary system: either you like something or you don't. Of the ones that I use frequently, I think only YouTube has kept a system where you can pick one of three choices: do nothing, give a thumbs up, or give a thumbs down.

The Op-Ed makes a case as to why Facebook prevents dislikes in their system: it could hurt the advertising business and could lead to cyber-bullying. To me, this makes total sense, and makes me think it wouldn't be appropriate to have this sort of negativity in an organizations' social platform.

A common concern that I hear from various organizations in terms of privacy and controlling the content in a social platform. They are concerned about employees not using the right tone and perhaps falling into a trap where things might be misconstrued because they might have not been written in the right tone. When this comes up, I usually recommend instituting a set of Social Computing Guidelines and monitoring the conversations to avoid problems. Typically, I get a very positive reaction from a large number of customers who appreciate that there's no way to dislike content within Connections.

Recently, however, I've had a few people ask that we introduce a way to down vote ideas within IBM Connections. Currently, you can only "like" things within Connections (i.e. you can vote up on ideas, you can give blogs/files/wikis a star, etc). In other words, there's no way to express your discontent with something, unless you manually type it in as a comment.

So I'm hoping to hear from you. Is this a good thing? Should you be able to "dislike" a file that someone posts? Or a wiki that someone created? What implications would there be on adoption if negativity where to to become rampant (like it is in some parts of YouTube) within a business' social network? Should the ability to down votes, if introduced, be prohibited for certain users?

Monday, August 1, 2011

Infographic: What Happens In The Web in 1 Minute

View Comments

Earlier this year I blogged about an iPad app to get the latest Social Media statistics. And speaking about the iPad, one of my favorite apps to launch every day and discover content is Zite. Using Zite, I stumbled upon this info graphic (and you know how much I like info graphics!). This particular one captures what happens in the web in 1 minute.

Neville Hobson blogged about it and suggests it might be good to include in a future presentation. I'll certainly try to include it in my next presentation and see what kind of feedback I get.

Here's a quick summary. In 1 minute there are...:

… more than 1,500 blog posts
… more than 600 new videos on YouTube
… more than 98,000 tweets
… more than 695,000 status updates on Facebook
… more than 168,000,000 emails sent

I noticed that Google+ is not there so maybe it's too new. The infographic makes me wonder… are there any stats on what percentage of those 168M emails are generated from social media sites like Facebook.

Thursday, July 28, 2011

Reto 2.0 2011 Awards

View Comments

Last Tuesday was the award ceremony for the Reto 2.0 competition. You may remember that I talked about this competition as well as last year.

The competition is open to all college students and is sponsored by IBM, HP, and Microsoft. The idea is to promote college students to build a web 2.0 application. The team built http://enterar.me which roughly translates to: learn . The goal of the site is to have a single view of news events that are happening around me and being shared by my friends. It pulls data from Twitter and Facebook and even includes sentiment analysis to show whether it's "good news" (e.g. the US government is debt free) or "bad news" (e.g. 9.8 Earthquake Hits Chile).

I think the portal has tremendous potential so I hope the students keep building on it and can eventually monetize it. For those of you who know Spanish, the URL is awesome!

Here's the newspaper clipping:

Reto20-2011

The winning team got a copy of Rational Team Concert ( the software development platform that is social) and a bunch of IBM goodies.

Thursday, June 9, 2011

How to add Facebook Like, Twitter, and Google +1 Buttons to IBM Connections

View Comments

Last week I shared instructions on how to add the Google +1 button to Blogger. When I tweeted about it, I noticed that I had never shared instructions on how to add the Facebook Like, Twitter and Google +1 buttons to IBM Connections.

Once you follow the instructions below, you'll see the Twitter, Google, and Facebook buttons show up in the header as shown below. Of course, there are other places to put it in; this is just where I placed them. And once you do this, the users will have a very easy way to share a blog, wiki, discussion topic, etc with their favorite social network.

Here are the instructions on how to get started:

If you haven't yet, copy footer.jsp to the customization directory. For example, copy <WAS_PROFILE_ROOT>/installedApps</cellName>/Activities.ear/oawebui.war/nav/templates/footer.jsp to <IC_INSTALL_ROOT>/data/shared/customization/common/nav/templates
If you haven't yet, copy header.jsp to the customization directory. For example, copy <WAS_PROFILE_ROOT>/installedApps</cellName>/Activities.ear/oawebui.war/nav/templates/header.jsp to <IC_INSTALL_ROOT>/data/shared/customization/common/nav/templates
Switch to the <IC_INSTALL_ROOT>/data/shared/customization/common/nav/templates directory
Open header.jsp with your favorite text editor

At the very end of the file, look for the last </div>. Just before that, add the following code:

<div style="float: right;">
 <div style="float: left; clear: none; padding: 5px; padding-left: 5.5px; padding-right: 5.5px;">
  <a href="http://twitter.com/share" class="twitter-share-button" data-count="horizontal" data-via="lbenitez">Tweet</a>
 </div>
 <div style="float: left; clear: none; padding: 5px; padding-left: 5.5px; padding-right: 5.5px;">
  <g:plusone></g:plusone>
 </div>
 <div style="float: left; clear: none; padding: 5px; padding-left: 5.5px; padding-right: 5.5px;">
  <iframe src="http://www.facebook.com/plugins/like.php?app_id=166725596724792&amp;href=
<%=request.getRequestURL()%>&amp;send=false&amp;layout=button_count&amp;width=75
&amp;show_faces=false&amp;action=like&amp;colorscheme=light&amp;font&amp;height=21"
 scrolling="no" frameborder="0" style="border:none; overflow:hidden; width:75px; height:21px;" allowTransparency="true"></iframe>
 </div>
</div>

Save and close the file
Open footer.jsp with your favorite text editor (Note: this is the same place where you would add the Google Analytics code or Coremetrics or any other web analytics tool you are using)

Scroll to the very bottom of the file and add the following lines:

<script type="text/javascript" src="http://apis.google.com/js/plusone.js"></script>
<script type="text/javascript" src="http://platform.twitter.com/widgets.js"></script>

Save and close the file

Enjoy!

Note: The Twitter button doesn't work over when using SSL (https) as mentioned in Twitter's FAQ. Therefore, if you have configured Connections to work over SSL you may want to get rid of the Twitter code and just leave the Facebook and Google buttons.

Note 2: The Facebook and Google buttons require that the URL that's being shared is accessible externally. Therefore, this code won't work in an internal version of Connections; only for those accessible externally.

Wednesday, June 1, 2011

How To Add Google +1 Button to Blogger

View Comments

I just caught the news about Google making available the new +1 Button.

If you want to understand the value of the Google +1 button, here's a quick video that Google put together:

As an end user, I'm still not sure about the value, but as a content publisher it might help my search rankings and make my content more discoverable so I figure I would add it to Connections and my Blogger blogs. (more on Connections in a follow-up post).

Adding the Google +1 button to Blogger is pretty easy. Once you follow these instructions, it'll show up on your page similar to this:

Here's how you get it done:

Go to Blogger.com
Log in with your account if you haven't yet
On your Dashboard, click the Design link for your blog you want to modify
Near the top of the page click on Edit HTML
Now on top of the text box, click the Expand Widget Templates checkbox
Find the line that contains </body>

Just before that tag, add the following code:

<script src='http://apis.google.com/js/plusone.js' type='text/javascript'/>

Now search for post-body and you should find something like this:
<div class='post-body entry-content'>

Immediately after that line, add the following code:

<div class='post_share social-media'>

<div class='wdt_button'>

<g:plusone expr:href='data:post.url'/>

</div>

</div>

Now look for .footer-outer { and you should find something like this:

.footer-outer {

color:$(footer.text.color);

background: $(footer.background);

...

Just before that line add the following:

/* Social share styles

----------------------------------------------- */

.social-media {

width: 90px;

}

.post_share {

float:left;

}

.post_share .wdt_button {

clear:left;

margin:0;

}

.wdt_button {

padding:5px;

}

Click Save Template and that should do it.

To see how to add the Twitter and Facebook Like buttons to your Blogger blog, see this post.

Enjoy!

Monday, March 21, 2011

How To Build a Status Update application for Facebook, Twitter and Connections using Portlet Factory

View Comments

Because I've shared so many Connections coding tips and how-to's, I'm often asked to help provide some guidance on how to create an application from scratch that integrates Connections with product X.

This video came to my attention last week and it's pretty cool. It starts with a demo of what the application is (a portlet that can simultaneously update your status in Connections, Twitter and Facebook, if enabled by the end user).

There are several things that really stand out in this demo. First, I really liked how the video shows that you can use the standard Java library provided by Twitter. Second, the demo shows how this same application looks like from an iPhone (or any mobile device) with no additional coding. The only thing that had to happen was to add the 'mobile theme' in portlet factory and voilá.

Enjoy!

Friday, January 21, 2011

How To Add Twitter and Facebook Like Buttons to Blogger

View Comments

Over the weekend, I was asked how I was able to add the Twitter and Facebook buttons to my blog on Blogger. I realized that this took me a while to figure out and I never shared how to do it. Though I did share how to do it for those of you running blogs on Domino. Therefore, here's the step-by-step on how to add the Twitter and Facebook Like buttons to your blog on Blogger:

Update 21/Jan/2011 @ 2:40PM: Make sure you get an account with http://bit.ly first. I recommend getting a Pro account (which is FREE) which would allow you to use your own shortening domain. For example, if your blog is http://www.IDontLikeWar.com, a free Pro bit.ly account will allow you to shorten URLs to http://IDontLikeW.ar )

1) Go to http://Blogger.com -> Pick Your blog -> click on Design tab -> then Edit HTML

2) Click on Expand Widget Templates

3) Search for post-body and you should find something like this:

<div class='post-body entry-content'>

4) Immediately after that line, add the following code:

<div class='post_share social-media'>

<div class='wdt_button'>

<script type='text/javascript'>

tweetmeme_url = &#39;<data:post.url/>&#39;;

tweetmeme_source = &#39;twitter_user_id&#39;;

tweetmeme_service = &#39;bit.ly&#39;

tweetmeme_service_api = &#39;twitter_user_id:your_bit_ly_API_key&#39;;

</script>

<script src='http://tweetmeme.com/i/scripts/button.js' type='text/javascript'/>

</div>

<div class='wdt_button'>

<iframe allowTransparency='true' expr:src='&quot;http://www.facebook.com/plugins/like.php?href=&quot; + data:post.url + &quot;&amp;layout=button_count&amp;show_faces=false&amp;width=75&amp;action=like&amp;font=verdana&amp;colorscheme=light&quot;' frameborder='0' scrolling='no' style='border:none; overflow:hidden; width:75px; height:30px;'/>

</div>

</div>

Note that you should change the values for tweetmeme_source, tweetmeme_service and tweetmeme_service_api to your respective values.

5) Now look for .footer-outer { and you should find something like this:

.footer-outer {

color:$(footer.text.color);

background: $(footer.background);

...

Just before that line add the following:

/* Social share styles

----------------------------------------------- */

.social-media {

width: 90px;

}

.post_share {

float:left;

}

.post_share .wdt_button {

clear:left;

margin:0;

}

.wdt_button {

padding:5px;

}

6) Click Save Template and that should do it.

Enjoy!

Wednesday, October 27, 2010

How To Add Twitter and Facebook Like Buttons to a Domino Blog

View Comments

I recently helped a colleague add the Twitter buttons and the Facebook Like buttons to their Domino blog. I'm sharing the instructions here so other people can leverage it.

With your Notes client, open your blog database (e.g. edbrill.nsf)
Go to Advanced
Go to HTML Templates -> Item Templates -> Default Item

Look for

<div class="entrybody">

<p><$DXItemContent$></p>

In between those lines add the following code ( make sure you update the two URLs ):

<div style="float: right; width: 60px;">
 <div style="margin: 0;" >
  <a href="http://twitter.com/share"

class="twitter-share-button"

data-url="http://www.edbrill.com/ebrill/edbrill.nsf/dx/<$DXDocumentLink$>"

data-text="<$DXSubject$>"

data-count="vertical"

data-via="edbrill"

data-related="marybethraven">Tweet</a>

<script type="text/javascript" src="http://platform.twitter.com/widgets.js"></script>
</div>
 <div style="padding: 3px;">
 <iframe frameborder="0" scrolling="no"

src="http://www.facebook.com/plugins/like.php?href=http%3A%2F%2Fedbrill.com%2Febrill%2Fedbrill.nsf%2Fdx%2F<$DXDocumentLink$>&amp;layout=box_count&amp;show_faces=true&amp;width=60&amp;action=like&amp;font=arial&amp;colorscheme=light&amp;height=65"

style="border: medium none;

overflow: hidden;

width: 60px;

height: 65px;"

allowtransparency="true"></iframe>
 </div>
</div>

Save
Go to HTML Templates - Page Templates - Document

Again, look for:

<div class="entrybody">

<p><$DXItemContent$></p>

In between those lines add the following code (this is to make buttons appear on individual pages and again make sure to update the URL's below) :

<div style="float: right; width: 60px;">
 <div style="margin: 0;" >
  <a href="http://twitter.com/share"

class="twitter-share-button"

data-url="http://www.edbrill.com/ebrill/edbrill.nsf/dx/<$DXDocumentLink$>"

data-text="<$DXSubject$>"

data-count="vertical"

data-via="edbrill"

data-related="marybethraven">Tweet</a>

<script type="text/javascript" src="http://platform.twitter.com/widgets.js"></script>
</div>
 <div style="padding: 3px;">
 <iframe frameborder="0" scrolling="no"

src="http://www.facebook.com/plugins/like.php?href=http%3A%2F%2Fedbrill.com%2Febrill%2Fedbrill.nsf%2Fdx%2F<$DXDocumentLink$>&amp;layout=box_count&amp;show_faces=true&amp;width=60&amp;action=like&amp;font=arial&amp;colorscheme=light&amp;height=65"

style="border: medium none;

overflow: hidden;

width: 60px;

height: 65px;"

allowtransparency="true"></iframe>
 </div>
</div>

Save
Go to HTML Templates - Block Templates - HTMLTop
Look for this line:
<title><$DXTitle$></title>
Replace it with this line (this is so that when you use the FB like button it display better.. It also helps with Google Search Engine Optimization):
<title><$DXTitle$> - <$DXSubject$></title>
In that same file, look for <body>

Immediately, after that line, add this:

<script language="javascript">
var toCompare = "<$DXTitle$> - ";
toCompare += "<";
toCompare += "$";
toCompare += "D";
toCompare += "X";
toCompare += "S";
toCompare += "u";
toCompare += "b";
toCompare += "j";
toCompare += "e";
toCompare += "c";
toCompare += "t";
toCompare += "$";
toCompare += ">";

   if (document.title == toCompare) {
   document.title = "<$DXTitle$>";
}
</script>

Save

Enjoy!

Monday, October 4, 2010

It's Podcast Season!

View Comments

Two weeks ago I told you about a podcast I'd recorded with my colleague Sacha Chua. This time I got to participate in the This Week In Lotus podcast. As you may remember, I talked about this podcast several weeks ago because they were discussing the IDC report where IBM is named the Market Leader in Enterprise 2.0 Platforms.

So, last week Stuart McIntyre, one of the show's hosts, invited me to join the podcast. That meant that last Friday I had to be up and ready by 7am. That was pretty easy, however, given I have a 2.5 year old and a 2 month old who are ready to go and have fun by 5am.

In this episode, we get a chance to talk about:

the article from FAST company re: Why IBM could be bigger than Facebook in Social Media
my new job
Jon Mell returning back to IBM from Headshift
and other great stuff for a fun filled hour

Make sure you catch the tips section, I think there's a couple of things there you'll like.

To listen to this episode, click here or subscribe via iTunes.

Friday, September 17, 2010

How Microblogging Drives Business Value To Organizations

View Comments

For the past year, I've really enjoyed microblogging inside the firewall. Novel concept, huh? While many people may microblog outside of the firewall using Twitter and Facebook's status updates, I really like doing it inside the firewall.

Let me quickly define microblogging, or better yet, offer Wikipedia's current definition:

Microblogging is a passive broadcast medium in the form of blogging. A microblog differs from a traditional blog in that its content is typically much smaller, in both actual size and aggregate file size. A microblog entry could consist of nothing but a short sentence fragment, an image or embedded video.

Twitter does microblogging very well. In fact, I would say it's all it does. Facebook also allows for some sort of microblogging through its status update feature where users can share what they are doing, and get responses from their friends.

If you have used any of these systems, you probably have seen a bit part of its value: instantly reaching out to your network and getting recommendations for everything from nannies, barbershops, restaurants, wines, parks, schools, things to do with your children, etc.

Now take that power and apply it to the business. Imagine if you could instantly get your answer to any question you have in order to get your job done. That's what happened to me yesterday. I was collaborating with a customer and was asked who manages Lotus Connections on ibm.com. I didn't know so I reached out:

That's right! ONE MINUTE to get my answer! An answer that I didn't have an idea who had or where even to begin looking for it. One minute was all it took. And not only did I get an answer from a colleague, I got an answer form an IBM VP. A Vice President who I've never worked with and had no idea she would know the answer! How long would this have taken me otherwise? Who knows! Maybe 1/2 day? A whole day? 2-3 days? Nope! ONE MINUTE.

You have to admit, that's pretty amazing!

I'm grateful that we have these tools available internally. Don't have microblogging yet inside your organization? What are you waiting for, start today!

Monday, September 7, 2009

How to use Facebook & Twitter to stalk your college-aged kids

View Comments

I just found this video hillarious...

Facebook, Twitter Revolutionizing How Parents Stalk Their College-Aged Kids

Monday, August 10, 2009

Another Facebook Plugin for Lotus Connections

View Comments

A while ago, two developers took on the task of creating a new plugin for Lotus Connections for Facebook. I've heard a lot of interest of simplifying the process of getting and staying up-to-date with all social network updates. You may remember that a while ago I blogged on how to integrate Lotus Connections and Facebook in less than 25 seconds. That's a pretty nifty integration point for the Lotus Connections Homepage.

Others wanted to see more integration with someone's profile.To that end, Ansgar Schmidt and Thomas Fankhauser got together and created an amazing plugin that brings Facebook data directly into Lotus Connections Profiles.

Perhaps you are now asking yourself how this looks in the system. I figured I would include a couple of screenshots. As you can see, the Facebook profile is brought directly into the Lotus Connections profile which makes extremely easy to manage multiple social profiles from one site. Additionally, you can consume status updates from both Facebook and Lotus Connections from one site.

So how do you get it? I believe it only works with Lotus Connections 2.5 and above. Therefore, if you don't have 2.5 right now, you can use it with the Lotus Greenhouse which has been recently upgraded to 2.5 Beta 2. Then, follow these steps:

Install Greasemonkey on your Firefox browser.
Restart Firefox
Click here for the Facebook Stream plugin
Click here for the Profile plugin
Enjoy!

Note: If you are outside of IBM, you'll need to modify the URL's for your Connections server. To do this, go to Firefox -> Tools -> Greasemonkey -> Manage User Scripts... -> select the script -> click on Edit under Included Pages