A Journey In Social Media

Building Your Blogging Corps

Most of these posts have been around how we're rolling out the platform, getting communities to form, justifying, and so on.

And, as I was thinking about things the other day, I realized I hadn't exposed all of you to another major theme of what we've been working on -- building a corps of proficient, outside-the-firewall bloggers doing so on behalf of the corporation.

And, once again, I think we've hit upon a pretty good approach -- one that I don't see being employed too much by other companies.

So -- let me share.

A Cross Post From My Other Blog

I actually got started on this blogging thing by writing about the company I work for: EMC.

As corporate blogs go, it's generally well-regarded.  I get the freedom to write about just about anything I find interesting (within certain common sense boundaries), and -- as a result -- I am told it is one of the more influential blogs in our little corner of the industry.

A lot of you are interested in this "E2.0" topic because, well, you're interested.

But mainline IT organizations are starting to get really interested about this stuff as well.

And, if you' d like to see it through their eyes, check out this.

Taking The Next Big Step

Well, I've decided that we're at a bit of an inflection point here.

We've exceeded all of our initial expectations. 

We've created far more value than we had any right to expect.

And now, I think it's time to step back, and think a bit around "where do we go from here?"

Getting The Mindset Right

Found this great post over at Infovark that captures the essence of what makes these social media proficiency projects so hard.

Now, if you're a classical-type person, how would you react to the chart at the bottom?

Worth a quick read ...

Requests From The Community

So, along the way, I've gotten on some email distros of people who are trying to do pretty much the same thing we're doing here.

I thought I'd share the recent traffic -- if you're interested ...

Taxonomies Again -- What Behavior Do We Want?

So, if you're following the recent posts, you'll realize we're cruising through another round of the taxonomy debate.

Our team came up with a clever proposal.  Our community didn't exactly take to it as we thought.

Which, of course, resulted in an interesting discussion around "what problem are we trying to solve here?" that was perhaps the most interesting learning from the whole experience.

So Much For Taxonomies

Well, in the last post I was optimistic that we had finally cracked the code here.

We were wrong.

And, in the process of watching what happened, we learned a few things that are probably worth sharing here.

A Breakthrough In Taxonomy?

Sorry, I haven't posted in a while.  Not only have I been busy on other stuff, there hasn't been that much new and exciting to report on our internal initiatives.

User count continues to grow, new communites spring up, new sources of business value are identified and celebrated -- it's all good, there's just nothing really "new" to talk about.

Until now.