Office Over Easy

Listen to the Podcast here  

What is social networking?

1. Shared Interest - Communities gather on common ground. For the purpose of our discussion which is specific to SharePoint intranets, this means the company, a product, a team, or an area of expertise.
2. Web-based – SharePoint is accessed via your client web browser and in the same way, can be accessed from any web browser or mobile device depending on your infrastructure and security requirements.
3. Instant – Fans of a blog or participants of a discussion board get instant updates to content via RSS Feeds.
4. Personal – This is a relationship with a person, not an official representative of the project or the brand.
5. Public – It is assumed that access to MySite profile information is granted to the entire company. Other tools may only be accessed within the parameters of a single site collection.

SharePoint social networking tools

• MySite Profiles – Filling in your profile with past projects and unique skills allows people within the company to find you without knowing your name. Managing what 'Everyone' sees when they visit your profile is the most fundamental thing you can encourage your users to do. This allows people to get to know someone and see if they are in fact the right contact for their question prior to reaching out to collaborate. Scenarios include finding a professional mentor and getting support for a product or issue. If people find you via search, you are helping them to get to the right contact.
• Blogs – Posting conference notes are an effective way to publish something that is front of mind for the author but may not yet be relevant to the organization based on deployment timelines or project plans. Still, to have the information online and searchable by the organization allows you to send people a link when they ask for your expertise on a topic as opposed to waiting until that moment to try to balance multiple priorities.
• Wikis – Chunking up larger documents into wiki pages may be a good solution if you have sensitive documents. Instead of granting users access to the entire document which may contain confidential bid or pricing information, you could pull out the relevant definitions from the technical documentation and create a corporate glossary in a wiki library or site. 
• Discussion Boards - These are now integrated into Outlook 2007 making them much easier for users to make the comparison to e-mail conversations. Because wikis may have a longer retention in the organization, this space is a logical place to hold project discussions that lead to decisions.
• Podcasts – While they are not considered an out-of-the-box feature of SharePoint, considering that all a person needs to podcast is Windows Sound Recorder, a microphone, and a place to store the files, it does make good sense to at least have a vision and give your users some guidance on when it is appropriate to podcast within the organization. Interviews with managers and highlights from quarterly meetings are a good place to start. To quiet issues of having content recorded, you may want to put together an approval process. How convenient that content approval is a feature of a SharePoint library.

Four reasons why your users aren't embracing social networking

1. Risk – You haven't told them it's okay to podcast. There is too much risk for them to be the first.
2. Training – You haven't told them what a wiki is. How do they know the difference between what to put in a discussion board and what to put in email if you don't tell them? Most users will continue to work they always have until they are showed a new tool that makes the task easier.
3. Priorities – There boss isn't paying them to blog. You'll need to ensure their manager's approval prior to encouraging admin professionals or subject matter experts to take the time required to contribute to a social network. This could include a nomination process whereby their manager has to submit them to a list of approved bloggers. It may seem an act of over-governance to do so but you should find a way to make it clear to the worker that they not only have permission to take a few hours each week to participate in the community but will also be rewarded for their efforts.
4. Mentors – People need examples. Create a list of featured blogs or a web part with recent discussion posts on your team site. Don't expect that people will merely search for information that they don't know they're looking for. Happening upon something is the worst way to try to build a following as it will only make the organization seem deficient that these types of tools aren't grouped together and easier to find. What I mean to say is that 'bloggers' will become their own community as much as the topics they post on.

1. Someone sends me an email or asks me a question about SharePoint.
2. I go to the internet and start typing in multiple variations of the question until I find the right words to use to dig even deeper.
3. I look over msdn whitepapers, read forum threads, and two-year old blog entries trying to find an answer to a very specific question.
4. I forward snippets of code on to developers to translate to me to see if that's what I'm looking for.
5. I get pulled off onto something else and never get back to answering the person's question.
6. The person emails me again to follow up.
7. I start over.

1. Someone asks me a question about SharePoint.
2. I post it to the twitterverse.
3. SharePoint experts comment with their opinions and links to articles and blog entries to help me analyze information specific to my business scenario.
4. Within minutes, I have an answer based on the experience of hundreds of SharePoint people all over the world.