Is Meeting in Second Life Necessary?

Fav Five Friday: 5 Tips on Social Media Tools for Virtual Meetings

Do you remember all the hype about virtual meetings in Second Life?  Second Life is a free online virtual world.  There still seems to be a little buzz about using Second Life for virtual meetings.  I don’t see massive benefits of using this space.  Seems like others are over the hype.

• The Reuters Second Life bureau is now closed
• The Second Life Hype Has Fizzled Is Twitter Next?
• The End of Second Life

How Presenters Can Take Advantage of Social Media Tools

Connecting Attendees With Your Presentation By Using Twitter

Twitter is a micro-blogging tool more attendees are using these days during meetings to post tweets, small messages.  There are plenty of twitter tools and applications for mobile devices too.  The presenter at the meeting can announce the hash tag for twitter users.  A hash tag is a method of connecting tweets to your presentation by adding # (the pound symbol) to a key word. Attendees of Web 2.0 Expo used #w2e. The hash tag can also be used on other social media web sites to connect images, videos, slides, & conversations on Google’s YouTube, Yahoo’s Flkr, SlideShare, & Blogs.

Presenters can stay connected with their colleagues and get instant assistance for those difficult questions.

Presenters can harness the power of Collective Intelligence by capturing input, questions, answers, & comments with Twitter.

There is plenty of information available on the web on how presenters can take advantage of Twitter.

• How to Present While People are Twittering

Blogging During Meetings

Presenters should be aware that more attendees are using social media tools like blogs to capture meeting information.  Presenters can also harness the power of social media by using their own blog to connect with people and share information.

Presenters should remember to include links in their presentations.  Bloggers could include links to your presentation, LinkedIn profile, Facebook profile, Twitter account, blog, web site, and more.  If the presentation is available online, then give that link early to give bloggers and other attendees enough time to access it so they can follow along.  Twitter users love to tweet links too.

Some attendees are required to submit a report about attending your meeting.  It’s easier and the report is more detailed when it can be created closer to real time.  A blog seems to be the social media tool of choice for this task.  Blogging about a presentation or during a meeting also creates a collaborative space for other to share relative information.  Blogging has many more benefits than writing up some email or word document that may be read once or twice before it’s filled in the black hole.  Presenters, please be kind to your bloggers and give them space, power, and connections to get online.

• How Conference Organizers Can Use Blogs

Sharing Your Presentation on SlideShare

Upload and share your PowerPoint presentations and Word documents on SlideShare. Share publicly or privately. Add audio to make a webinar.  SlideShrare also has a simple API to allow users to embed presentations into Facebook, Blogs, and web sites. Learn more at SlideShare.

Running an Effective Teleconference or Virtual Meeting

Virtual teams are becoming commonplace, but the old rules for running a meeting don’t necessarily apply. Managers need to learn new skills to keep people engaged and to use the time (and technology) effectively. These tips will make your next remote meeting a success. Learn more here.

Using Bar Camp Event and Content Management System

Barcamp Event and Content Management System: This is a web-based-wordpress-powered system aimed at helping people running unconferences manage their event’s content in a more organized manner. Learn more here.

• What Social Media Tools do you use during meeting?
• What is your favorite Video Conference Service?

Fav Five Friday: Happy Friday, first day of Spring!

Social Media Platforms For Enterprise 2.0 Solutions

Have A Plan For your Social Media

You can spend a lot of time and money building the wrong thing or building the right thing wrong.  Invest time with the stakeholders and users before thinking about technology.  What are your objectives?  What are YOUR benefits to using social media in your enterprise 2.0 solution?  Who is your target audience?  Your target audience will resist participating, if they can not see any benefits.  Your benefits include the benefits of users, managers, and your organization as a whole.  What does your organization hope to accomplish with Enterprise 2.0 or Social Media?

I have discovered many possible social media platforms for my enterprise 2.0 solution.  The choices are almost overwhelming.  Building an enterprise 2.0 solution requires an understanding of the needs and current work-flows.  I don’t believe there is a “One-Size-Fits-All” solution.  You may be familiar with the phrase “No need to re-invent the wheel”.  There are a lot of MySpace, Facebook, Twitter, and YouTube type of scripts out there that would give you the ability to emulate these web sites in your enterprise 2.0 platform.  You may need to ask yourself about the benefits and examine your objectives.  These sites are great at what they are and may be meeting their owner’s objectives.  How important is it for you to know your colleagues’ favorite movies or music?  Do you have a need for instant web/mobile communications?  A Twitter type of tool is good if your needs require and one or more of your objectives can be met with a micro-blogging solution.  You can piece different blogging, bookmarking, forum, media packages together or work with one of the social media platform bundles below.  You may even want to create a hybrid.

Social Media Platform Software and Services

Elgg: powerful, professional social networking

Elgg empowers individuals, groups and institutions to create their own fully-featured social network.

http://elgg.org/

PHPizabi: Human Networking has a cutting edge, too!

PHPizabi is one of the most powerful social networking platforms on the planet. With literally thousands of websites powered by PHPizabi including everything from simple friends sites to the most complex networking super sites out there. Easy to install, use, and raising the bar on what it is to provide a reliable, fast, social networking package to raise your business to the next level.

http://www.phpizabi.net

Wordpress Multi-User Blogging Software

WordPress takes blogging to the next level by creating powerful self-hosted software that anyone could install and have a blog within minutes.

Now with MU wordpress is making it as easy to create a thousand blogs as it was to create a single blog with WordPress 3 years ago. By building on the base of WordPress and syncing development, we get the benefit of the huge ecosystem in plugins and themes that has developed around the project.

http://mu.wordpress.org Also check out http://bbpress.org/ and roll them up into a custom platform http://buddypress.org/.

Mambo Content Management System

Mambo is one of the most powerful Open Source Content Management Systems on the planet. It is used all over the world for everything from simple websites to complex corporate applications.

http://mambo-foundation.org/

Joomla Content Management System

Joomla is an award-winning content management system (CMS), which enables you to build Web sites and powerful online applications. Many aspects, including its ease-of-use and extensibility, have made Joomla the most popular Web site software available. Best of all, Joomla is an open source solution that is freely available to everyone.

http://www.joomla.org Also check http://www.joomlapolis.com

Open Source Content Management Systems for Social Media

opensourceCMS.com was created to give you the opportunity to “try out” some of the best free and open source software systems in the world. Each system listed here provides for a user demo so you can make an informed decision regarding which system best suits your needs without having to go through the tedious process of installing multiple systems only to find they don’t do what you require.

http://www.opensourcecms.com

Bonus Social Media Software Choice

Pluck SiteLife Social Media Platform

Pluck’s SiteLife social media platform allows leading publishers, retailers and brands to integrate community directly into their core site experiences.

http://www.pluck.com

Post your comments about Social Media Software here!

Happy Fav Five Friday!

President Obama Tag Cloud created at http://wordle.net

A few days ago I was listening to President Obama Address to Joint Session of Congress.  He said some amazing things and delivered a vision of hope during these trying times.  I was very interested in one part, “a cure for cancer in our time”.  Did I hear that right?  A CURE FOR CANCER!  Imagine this, how incredible would that be, if this did not sound amazing?  What if we could talk about it like “cancer?, Oh yeah that was a disease that used to kill people.”  Can you imagine talking about cancer like it was an old 8 track tape player?  Children would barely know it even was?  Imagine all the other things the medical community could do after they are free from cancer.

I might be a little sensitive to this topic, because I am a cancer survivor.  I was dianogsed with cancer when I was 17 (more than 25 years ago).  I survived a year of chemotherapy and extensive out patient treatments.  Only by the grace of God, I am here today!  I have seen this terrible disease take the lives of brillant, beautiful people and my prayers go out to their family and friends.  I am willing to do what ever I can to help eliminate cancer.  I believe there are a few other people out there that are willing to make a difference and want to change the world.  Will you help?

Can Social Media Cure Cancer?

Do you remember the “Stand Up” campaign?  It’s still going strong and you can get involved.  This is a great example of how social media is making a difference.  This is an example of combining forces & resources into a synergy that is changing the world.

What Can You Do With Social Media?

Many of our readers here are expecting a fav five list.  I know this because I read my web logs, web analytics is a powerful thing and I recommend you take a peek at my tweets at twitter to learn more about Google Analytics.  Let me know if you would like me to post it here.  Let’s get on to the fav five friday list.  Usually I post 5 things here, but what about 5 things 5 times over?  Yeah, 25 things!

25 Ways Social Media Prepares You During Down Times

My friend Chris Brogan, which I never met, has helped numerous people in the world of social media.  He has a list that will help you with your web strategy and social needs.  There are some good tips on being proactive & making a little cash.  These are simple things you can do with Google, your blog, Facebook, LinkedIn, and other social media strategies.  There are even some tips about eliminating negitivity.  Check out his list of 25 ways social media prepares you during down times.

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