Confessions of an eBiz Junkie

Twitter in the Enterprise

Me - "Hi. My name is Len and I have a problem.

The Crowd (in unison) - "Hi Len..."

I think I might be on the road to becoming a Twitterholic.

I have to admit, when I first signed up to Tweet, I saw it as a bit of a novelty. My first impression, and many early Tweets supported the thinking, was centered around point in time activity (I'm having eggs for breakfast or Man do I hate shiny things..." ). Not sure if I just didn't see it then or if the Twitter crowd has helped evolve the overall behavior of the community.

It's since become a critical part of my day-to-day activity. I use it to gather business intelligence, ask questions to a wide variety of subject matter experts and expand my overall network.

IMO, the opportunities afforded by Twitter to the enterprise are huge.

EMC World Bloggers Unite!

It looks like I'll be attending EMC World this year - along with fellow EMC bloggers Mark Twomey, Barry Burke, Bill Petro and Steve Todd.

I thought we'd try something a bit different this time... I'd like to round up all of the attendees who will be blogging, Twittering, Flickr'ing, Utter'ing or (insert your favorite trendy tool here) their way through the event...

I want to gauge interest from the community and will work out logistics based on how many folks sign up... If two of you sign up, Storagezilla and I will be hanging out in the parking lot of the Manadalay Bay with a six-pack of Schlitz for a meet & greet and a game of kick-the-can. Any more than that and we'll find a formal venue where we can get together and have some fun...

I've put together a Wiki for sign-ups. If you'll be @ World and want to get together for a blogger meet & greet - please sign up here (The password to update is community). We'll use this Wiki as main point of information sharing as we try to pull something together.

There's also the EMC World community for attendees. If you haven't already signed up - check it out. There's a cool 'people finder' like app that let you find peers with similar interests and get together for a chat. Discussion forums are also available to help you interact with the minds behind the event and other attendees to help shape the breakouts and talk about what you'd like to see @ the event.

Looking forward to seeing you there!

Edit - One more thing, Twiiter users, be sure to follow Twitter.com/EMCWorld for real time news & info during the conference...

A Community of Advocates

Our journey in Social Media has been a fascinating learning experience. We'd taken an inside-out approach, starting inside the firewall - learning about SM in the enterprise - and are now in the midst of deploying a myriad of external offerings.

By now, you're likely familiar with our internal community offering - EMC ONE. Launched in September'ish, we'd opted to let adoption happen in a viral fashion. No widespread communications, no campaigns to drive users to the community... rather - build it and see if they come.

They did... In droves.

The Candidates and the Community

I received a LinkedIn request today and followed the link to accept... And there he was, Senator John McCain asking me "What is the biggest challenge America faces?".

I've been impressed with the way the candidates have embraced Social Media to connect with the voters...

MVP for a Day

I'm realizing more and more that physical internal events can really help build awareness around the opportunities afforded through Social Media. There's certainly no shortage of passion and interest - so the trick becomes providing the right level of information such that the energy is channeled in a productive way. We've been doing this through our Lunch n' Learn events - But took it to another level this week.

On Monday, we were fortunate to serve as host for Microsoft community executive and CEO/Founder of CGT Consulting, Sean O'Driscoll. I've been following Sean for quite some time, and consider him among the top thought-leaders in this space.

We'd posted an open invite to the event on our internal community platform - and it filled almost immediately. Based on strong interest from our global audience, we extended to a LiveMeeting and had healthy international representation.

I'd say the event was a huge success...

More EMC'ers enter the Sphere

I'm happy to see two new EMC'ers in the blogsphere...

Over the weekend, I came across Polly Pearson's blog. Polly is the VP of Employment Brand and Strategy Engagement at EMC... Among her responsibilities - showing the world what a cool place EMC is to build a career.

Also, long time friend and fellow ex-DG'r Peter Quirk has established his little piece o' real-estate in blog land. A technologist with an HR hat on - Peter is an innovator with a passion for technology. He's been doing a lot with virtual worlds of late, (recruiting events and such) and will be sharing his experiences with you through his blog.

Polly & Peter - Welcome to the conversation!

Tranforming a culture with sandwiches

Regular readers of this blog know that, among other things on the docket, we're in the midst of deploying Social Media across the enterprise. EMC has some 36k employees. Like email 20 years ago, introducing invasive technology requires some level of cultural change.

With such a large employee base, awareness of all things social ranges from extreme power users to those who really aren't sure what Web 2.0, Social Media, Social networking, E2.0, etc - is.

We've gone back to basics to help get the word out - and it's working...

A bit of web nostalgia

Ahhhh - the good old days. Life was simple back then - no transactional systems, I could count the websites in my company on one hand and still have a few fingers left over, Ma and Pa used to take us down to the corner store in our horseless carriage for some gumdrops and sarsaparilla...

Celebrating the ten year anniversary of the Mozilla Project, a couple of the sites from the old days have been brought back online. A more comprehensive guide with links to some classic antique browsers is available from JWZ. If you're looking for some excitement this Friday night, you can download a copy of Mosaic Alpha 7 to relive the thrill of your first animated image.

Browsing these pages brought back some memories and made me curious. What first turned YOU on to the web? Here's my story...

Now Playing - YouTube Analytics

Noticed this morning that Team YouTube has launched a new tool allowing contributors to get deep insight into video consumption metrics. YouTube'rs can now get visibility into geographic trends (where is my content popular), life-cycle information (when is my stuff being viewed, when did it peak, etc) and the ability to compare popularity to content with similar tags. There's been buzz around richer metrics on YouTube for some time - Thanks for listening to the community, folks.

On a related note, I was unaware until recently that there is an EMC Channel on YouTube. Equally as interesting was how I'd found out about it. I started receiving complaints that there was much demand for the content - but many companies are still blocking YouTube at the firewall. The unsolicited feedback really helps demonstrate just how powerful and relevant rich media is.

It's unfortunate. While there's always risk of abuse, I just don't see it practical to block *everything* that poses risk. There's certainly no shortage of YouTube like players (MSN Soapbox, Vimeo, vsocial, etc;)... It's just as likely that I'm abusing my email priveledges as I am spending countless hours on YouTube watching psychotic cats. To be honest, YouTube was blocked for us for sometime... But is now available. I think the corporate world in the midst of a significant mind-shift towards a much more open and trusted environment. A critical trend if Social Media is to truly become a pivotal component of how we conduct business.

Caffeine + Sugar Snacks = Big Ideas

Thanks to Sean for pointing this out... Starbucks has a new community offering - My Starbucks Idea. Much like Dell's IdeaStorm, it's a vehicle that encourages users to share ideas around improvements for Starbucks while the community at large has the opportunity to vote on the different ideas.

While there's some debate as to whether or not this is the most appropriate way for Starbucks to stick a biscotti in the Social Media pond, I applaud the move. Having sifted through the different posts, there's clearly consumer demand for such a channel. Some of the suggestions are top notch. The trick now, and I think at the center of the debate, is a) Was Starbucks ready for the this much feedback and b) How do they respond.

Will be interesting to watch.