The message to business is clear.  Social tools are changing the way we have conversations, collaborate and participate in our workplace.   more »

This is the seventh of eight posts on the recent Unicom conference “Social Tools for Business Use: Web 2.0 and the new participatory cultures”.

By Justin Patten, Human Law.  A fuller version of much of what Justin spoke eloquently about is contained on his Human Law blog.

In short what hit me particularly about this talk was:

(a) the power of Google search results negatively to affect a brand, or even destroy it; and

(b) the advantage to a corporation of having its own Blog space in place, so as to be ready to conduct a PR campaign in the online world in response to negative publicity, as part of an overall campaign using all relevant media.

This is the sixth of eight posts on the recent Unicom conference “Social Tools for Business Use: Web 2.0 and the new participatory cultures”.

Roo Reynolds has written up a full summary of his presentation on his own Blog.

This is the fifth of eight posts on the recent Unicom conference “Social Tools for Business Use: Web 2.0 and the new participatory cultures”.

Phil Bradley listed all sorts of interesting tools in his talk and why you might wish to use them in your business.  I cannot do better than point you to Phil at Phil Bradley, where he provides links and a brief explanation to all manner of tools.

Ian McNairn, IBM, described various components of the IBM suite of in-house tools, many of which are or will be packaged up for sale to external customers, such as its corporate ‘X - Jamming’ service, which the FT and others announced within a few days of the conference.  Ian was extremely enlightening.  I sensed the general audience was somewhat in awe of the toolkit which IBM has assembled internally.  I was.

Ian has a nice little summary of what Web 2.0 means in a video clip on Dave Gurteen.

This is the fourth of eight posts on the recent Unicom conference “Social Tools for Business Use: Web 2.0 and the new participatory cultures”.

By Ruth Ward, Allen & Overy 

The focus of Ruth Ward’s presentation was on simplicity and practicality.

Very interestingly, Ruth mentioned that her first experience of social tools was in the business context of the knowledge management project about which she had been invited to talk.

She described Blogs in the context of a place for “Latest Discussions” within a particular practice group.

The template for each Blog was very simple.

Search within each group Blog is by Category, Theme or Date.

Categories are set by the principal owners of the Blog.

Themes are set by the individual contributors to the Blog, but the Blog owners can go in and add additional Themes.

Wikis as a term was not initially used by the law firm, for fear of scaring users off.  Instead the simple term Group Space was used.

Wikis are used for various purposes, not only in the Wikipedia sense, but also, for example, project management, questionnaires, surveys and training sessions.

In Ruth's opinion, this project (which is still continuing) has been ...   more »