Social Media - What persona is appropriate where?

In a recent blog in TalentedApps, Amy Wilson explored how communication methods used at work vary from communication with friends, even when the people you are communicating with are the same people.

The selection of which social networking tool to use when and how, as well as what persona you display in each network, affects how people put together a picture of you. Some people will be connected through only one network but many may be connected across multiple networks and they get a broader picture of your life.

How does this access to our multiple personae impact our relationships? This is something each of us needs to come to terms with for ourselves. There are many organisations spreading warnings about the security of social networks and how much information a person who wants to exploit that material may find on the web. It is up to each of us to be informed and make our decision as to how much of our lives we wish to share with our networks, which networks should be kept internal to an organisations, which to expand into the realm of global access and which of your networks intersect and how. I am just starting my journey down this path and exploring my use of tools like facebook, twitter, linkedin, plaxo, blogger so I will keep you posted on my findings.

Visualisation and Mash-ups with Social Media - Where could this take us?

This post has the theme of decision making in today's world of social media. What is the impact of social networks and data mash-ups and visualisations of their content on decision making?

The post on Talented Apps looks at the role of humans in the network the concept of balancing the size of the network (the number of the participants) and the voice of the individual.

A recent post Harvard Business Review: Four Ways of looking at Twitter demonstrates how trends can be pulled from social networks. Another post Tech Crunch: Five Ways to Mix, Rip and Mash your Data. provides an overview of tools that can be used to build agents to bring together information from RSS feeds and other sources giving people more tool sets to gauge information flow.

But what does popularity in tweets or RSS Feeds mean?

I find myself tossing between two quotes:

"If you have an apple and I have an apple and we exchange these apples then you and I will still each have one apple. But if you have an idea and I have an idea and we exchange these ideas, then each of us will have two ideas."
- George Bernard Shaw

and

"There's a whiff of the lynch mob or the lemming migration about any overlarge concentration of like-thinking individuals, no matter how virtuous their cause." - P.J. O'Rourke

Working with Silos

I came across a video from Burton Group with Lyn Robison discussing how silos are here to stay and looking at approaches to bridging the silos as opposed to trying to break-down the silos.




Although this video looked at silos from a technology standpoint. You could look at business silos where you could apply Service-Oriented concepts to bridge business processes gaps as well as knowledge silos where you could apply social networking concepts and solutions to assist with exposing "tribal knowledge", bringing together people with shared interests as well as mining for subject matter experts that may previously have been buried within a business unit and lost to the overall enterprise.

IT has spawned many methodologies/approaches/modelling techniques for analysing business needs from an IT-perspective, organisations have implemented/developed multiple business process improvement methodologies and each industry vertical or function may lend itself to different methodologies. The challenge for us now is to embrace the variety and bridge these methodology silos. Any ideas?

Looking ahead.... technology trends in 2010 and beyond

Here's some predictions for the future of technology that caught my interest:

What will be hot in 2010? - Blog predicting top 5 technology topics for 2010

Top 10 ERP predictions for 2010 - A look at where ERP was at the start of the decade and where it may be going

Cloudy IT Landscape - A look not only at the future of cloud computing but the IT market players and the types of services they may offer

Predictions: Business Applications (with a focus on HCM) for 2020 - A look back to 1989 and then snapshots for each 10 year period with a look forward to where things might be in 10 years.

What may happen to Social Media in 2010 that governments should be aware of - Comments on the article 13 surprises to hit social media in 2010

These are interesting looks into the future. I'm not sure what the new year will bring except the absolute given - change.

Happy New Year