Category: Featured Articles

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Enterprise 2.0 Featured Articles

Going to work on an Elgg

About two thirds through a complex social media project using Elgg. The aim of the project is to build a complete social network for some clients in West London. The project originally started off as a Drupal based one but we (West London Web Design) changed course when we realised the following:

1) Using Drupal would have meant a highly bespoke system that would have tied the client into that system

2) Almost all the functionality we were trying to create already existed in Elgg

3) Time – building in Elgg would be quicker and easier, and hence cheaper

Overall the experience has been fruitful but not without headaches. The key obstacle is the intensely entrenched way that Elgg cascades hierarchy in its CSS, via a quite arcane structure. The problem here was working out that what looked extremely complex was in fact reasonable simple once the flow of the CSS cascade was clear. Once that was done it became a lot more easy to manipulate the PHP and numerous div tags that define the layout.

Too early to talk in any detail about the project substance as it’s under an NDA. But very pleased with the functionality as it provides a wide range of rich features:

1) Site wide messaging via a Facebook style wall

2) Nifty integration with Twitter

3) Customised profiles

4) Tagging – the glue that coheres an social network

5) Photo albums – a very important feature and one which stopped us using WordPress Multi User (WPMU) with Buddy Press

6) Groups with the ability for users to create discussion forums and their own albums

7) Various news and ad embeds – both critical for this project

Overall pretty pleased with Elgg. It may lack the user-base of WordPress, but it’s a very well supported platform. Watch this space for the final release

n.b., special thanks to @veruus for some very welcome tech support at the start of this project.

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Enterprise 2.0 Featured Articles

2 Uber Cool OurTube Apps

Some really nice apps for the iPhone / iPod being developed to help Londoners use our Tube – the London Underground train system. The best one, Augmented Reality only works with the iPhone so far, so cheapskates like me who freeload on public WiFi with just an iPod, will need to wait for this one!

1) Tube Exits – find which carriage to get on to to optimise your trip:

With accurate and unique information, Tube Exits gives savvy commuters the inside track on how to get one-step ahead of their fellow commuters and get a speedy exit off the Tube. Travellers can save around 10 minutes on the average journey during peak hour travel.

2) acrosair. Nearest Tube Augmented Reality App for iPhone 3GS from acrossair

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Enterprise 2.0 Featured Articles Intranet

Social Intranets, the Intranets’ Social future

Two interesting mirror discussions on the future of the intranet from the IBF’s Intranet Life blog and over at LinkedIn in the Melcrum group section. Both about the future of the intranet. Melcrum as whether social media will kill the intranet. The IBF about will the Intranet destroy the .com.

All in all I think both sets of discussions point out how much the .com, the intranet and social media, will all be impacted by changes in their own technology and usage and by wider market/political changes.
On the latter, one of the areas I’ve started to ponder about is this – if new more socially enabled intranets or ‘Social Intranet’ allow collaboration across enterprises they will in also allow them between enterprise opening up the way for cross-company collaborations of an unplanned form. As most businesses have a very definite set of their own boundaries, this might either transform (positive) or undermine (negative) this sense of uniformity.
Whither the intranet in this world if collaboration is taking place between 2 separate intranets, connected by social, media? Could this create a tension on the nature of the enterprise itself, a new social mode of production?

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Enterprise 2.0 Featured Articles

Twitter Internal Comms Top 10: NEW!!?

This blog has been a tad quite of late as I’ve been busy building social networks out of raw slabs of php (well OK, out of Elgg and WordPress Multi User + BuddyPress), but it’s now time to kick-start it back into action. And what better way that to relaunch the Twitter Internal Comms Top 10 the 10 people IC professionals should follow on Twitter? It’s probably out of date as interests and focus changes and of course there’s lot more fab IC people on Twitter now compared to 6 months ago or so when I started.

To get it right thtis time, or at least a bit better, I need help, your help. What I’d like feedback on is how to do it… should it be democratic with a poll, Survey Monkey and the like? If so, how, which etc? Or could it be done with raw data – is there a metric I could use to decide and select?

And the big question – who do you think should be in the Top 10 in your judgement? My original criteria was based on interesting to follow, relevant points, known in the field etc., I’ve had some feedback that we need more vim and rigour here – so here’s your chance!

You can let me know either via the blog feedback on on Twitter (and if you want to send in private and I’m not following you, send me a note and I’ll follow you).

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Enterprise 2.0 Featured Articles

Drupal vs WPMU + BuddyPress + bbpress

2 great projects underway at my web design and social network company West London Web. One is for a client to build a social network site using Drupal, which as it’s under NDA is all I can say at the moment. The 2nd is more a personal project to get WordPress Multi-User (WPMU) with BuddyPress and bbpress installed. I have an aim in mind for this but that too is a little under wraps at present, though those that know me might guess what it is 😉

What I’m interested in doing is really comparing the 2 platforms/apps. Drupal is to my mind the more industrial of the two and certainly the only one that offers the sort of robust customisation we need for Project One. WordPress is the one I’m most familiar with though and the one I’m most fond of.

Getting all the integration with WPMU is proving a headache. I can get WPMU working with BuddyPress, but getting the forum powered by bbpress working is a ‘mare. Diligently following the instructions at bbpress forums and it all goes well until the last synch up with the WPMU bbpress plug-in. I add the code and all the accounts get mangled. Time for install number 391 to see if I can get over that final hurdle…

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Featured Articles General

Ubik

Interesting to compare images of the cover for Philip K Dick’s novel Ubik:

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Enterprise 2.0 Featured Articles Intranet

Islands of Enterprise Social Media

Last night I dreamed I went to Megacorp again, and as dreams are, this one combined such experiences with work I’ve been doing of late on open source wares and of being in a J G Ballard novel (my nearish neighbour sadly having passing away last week).

The dream was of a company as so. Imagine if you will a global panoply of very well-known brands of FMCG, forming a multi-billion dollar business with healthy profits; a sophisticated distribution network to consumers and wholesalers and other purveyors of the products; multiple business units producing their own independent goods and branding and the whole matrix working together to bring joy to households across the globe; but ultimately disunited by an intranet that beggars belief.

Some more details are as follows. The employees (and especially the Exec Admins of the more senior peeps) spend an inordinate amount of time ringing ‘offworld’ to get basic connectivity back, IT having out-sourced this aspect some years back. The employees do however have Smartphones, either Blackberries or such and these they like. Some use of social media by marketing but little or none inside the firewall.

How on earth might one introduce such an entity to the benefits of enterprise social media?

My thoughts are on something ad hoc. Pulling up the intranet and starting again, whilst a nice thing to do would be out of scope, remit and even possibility.

So an ad hoc enterprise social network (ESN) of nodal social media would have to be the only route. Dropping boxes into the network, no matter how robust or sophisticated wouldn’t work as the network would let them down. They would have to connect into an ESN  in the cloud of disaggregated social functionalities. Tagging and such meta data would pull them together.

Which software might do it? A series of Nings, but how to connect? Has to be mobile friendly, very mobile friendly. One of the social vendors doing a SAAS maybe, but would that apply a false unity on their flattened and distributed matrices? Perhaps nodes of open source social media would be fun. One here one there. Islands of socially mediated brands connecting via their own media.

Time to sketch how this might all fit together…any suggestions / ideas /inputs most welcome!

[n.b. I awoke early after 2 days of feeling very unwell and more sleep than is healthy, to the welcome of a bright London morning and drinking freshly ground Blue Mountain coffee as supplied by the most excellent Has Bean coffee co. – brilliant start to the day! Promo over – just a happy punter btw]

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Case Study Enterprise 2.0 Featured Articles

Social Media Case Study 4 + 2 Tools

Added to the Social Media Case Study ‘The Hot List’ – 4 new Social Media Case Studies and 2 new tool/app case studies that I found interesting

Bacardi – using Facebook to reach Irish punters and get them drinking Bacardi via a compo. n.b, integration with Facebook API re tagging & photos.

National Express & Silverpop – e-mail marketing in conjunction with social networks – National Express cited (but what about the major TV ad campaign?)

Embarq – conservative telecoms company overcomes the hurdles and battles with negative customer feedback via social media – esp videos (links don’t work – I think the slideshare is to this Slideshare).

Radvision & PixelPoint Press – Corporate blogs, Communities and Twitter (Slideshare)

Publius Project is an effort of Harvard University’s Berkman Center for Internet & Society – uses Drupal for new portal, replacing WordPress.

Corvu “Control and Community: A Case Study of Enterprise Wiki Usage”. Differentiating between public, team and enterprise Wikis, looks and governance and use of Wiki as KM.

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Enterprise 2.0 Featured Articles Theory

What is Cultural Capital?

Every now and again I like to wonder about social search and the semantic web. I have a secret question, which I shall share, my own personal Turing Test to see if the machine is paying attention. I ask it this – “What is Cultural Capital?” The results vary as the algorithms shift, sometimes the results are reasonably close to the actual meaning, other-times far off, way out.

In my most recent foray into this remarkably unscientific experiment, Google did OK, bringing in a Wikipedia result which, correctly as I understand it explains that the concept originated with Bourdieu:

For Bourdieu, capital acts as a social relation within a system of exchange, and the term is extended ‘to all the goods material and symbolic, without distinction, that present themselves as rare and worthy of being sought after in a particular social formation (cited in Harker, 1990:13) and cultural capital acts as a social relation within a system of exchange that includes the accumulated cultural knowledge that confers power AND status. (my emphasis – source)

Down the list in Google I get a similar, worthy list of definitions. I then shift the question by asking this – “What is your cultural capital?” Google of course can”t answer this – nothing equates to an answer, no one has made a cultural capital calculator which might get thrown up in such a search. I also it should be noted get all sorts of stuff I don’t want, such as Barnsley is the cultural capital of the North and such.

As a comparison, I then asked Twitter search the question:

twittercapital1

I like these answers, of course they’re generated by people, but a machine found them for me. But to answer the question, in any other form than a list (to which Google is currently limited) there has to be cultural capital. I like the concept of cultural capital as bricolage. That enriches my own cultural capital. We are all bricoleurs in the knowledge economy.

Can a machine have cultural capital?

This makes me wonder if when I get to ask Wolfram Alpha the same question next month, whether I’ll get closer to a real answer. Will Wolfram Alpha have cultural capital?

A web tool that “could be as important as Google”, according to some experts, has been shown off to the public. Wolfram Alpha is the brainchild of British-born physicist Stephen Wolfram. (BBC)

Next blog or so (I may do one next on Pocket God) I’m going to look at Social Capital. This was inspired by the forthcoming Somesso conference where they’re flagging it as about: “Benefiting from Social Capital and the Relationship Economy as the recession bites”. As cultural capital is to the bricoleur, so I’ll argue social capital is to the flaneur. One assembles meaning via accumulating disparate knowledge, the latter creates meanings via the network of associations and wandering.

The big question though is this – can we measure social capital in a non-reductive way?

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Case Study Featured Articles

7 Social Media Case Studies Updates + Staff Guidelines!

Some brand spanking new social media case studies added to the Social Media Case Study Hot List and a link to a blog with 40 Social Media Staff Guidelines!

BBC and Blogs – Reportr.net How they are central to what the BBC does. Full report needs subscription at: iFirst, but article interesting.

Urbane Apartments – using social media to reach ‘millenials’. No one cared about Urbane so they went for it with Facebook, MySpace, blogs, Flickr, Twitter etc and it worked.

FT.com – not really social media but worthwhile study on increasing subscriptions by mix of free and paid for (yes do keep the free stuff pleeze!)

Paganum Farmer’s Market – showing how a very traditional sector, UK farming can use social media to increase sales with Twitter, Facebook and blogs

1:10 Protect the Human – Amnesty International’s social media awareness and action campaign for International Women’s Day to stop violence against women. Blogs, Flickr, YouTube, Bebo, Twitter, Facebook, MySpace.

Freemium and Corey Smith – short but sweet on how Mr Smith gives away his music on his site and sales go up as a result on iTunes

Guidelines and Governance

40 Social Media Staff Guidelines – Laurel Papworth has compiled a mega list of staff guidelines on social media. 40 ways to avoid HR-Hot water!