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

1. What are social tools and why are they relevant? 

Social tools is short for social networking tools. 

Social tools is the term used to describe a group of emerging technologies which people in their millions are using to communicate with each other over the Web. 

The statistics which several speakers produced are scary, especially for those in firms which are not currently in the “technology forward” category (see recent posts by Dennis Kennedy suggesting the gap between technology forward and technology backward law firms is going to get wider). 

Social tools are primarily about conversations, collaboration and participation. 

2. What are examples of social tools?  This is my simple, but unexhaustive, list and in keeping with the overall theme of the conference, which was about a back to basics approach to the Web. 

IM (Instant Messaging) (e.g. MSN Messenger, Skype Chat)

RSS Feeds (e.g. all the main news media sites, etc)

Blogs (e.g. the 26,000 blogs in IBM alone among its global 310,000 workforce)

Wikis (e.g. Wikipedia)

Podcasting (e.g. all the main news media sites, etc)

Photos (e.g. Flickr)

Video (e.g. YouTube)

Voice over IP (e.g. Skype) 

3. Why are social tools relevant to business use?

Euan Semple (formerly head of knowledge management at the BBC)

Euan was the opening speaker at the conference and posed four simple questions around people's daily work.

Can you keep up with what you need to know?

Can you find stuff you need to find?

Can you get things done?

Can you work with other people? 

If your organisation's current IT systems are not helping you to do any of these things better, and certainly if they are making your working life much more difficult than it needs to be, then look to use social tools in your business.

 

Web 2.0 requires a "different mindset".

 

ERP (Enterprise Resource Planning) systems have been described by employees in large corporate organisations as like "organisation concrete".

 

Social tools, in contrast, are lightweight, easier to deploy, cheaper and sometimes free alternatives to their heavyweight, hard to deploy and often expensive management systems currently on your desktop. 

Lee Bryant

Social tools can help daily work in very basic ways.

Social tools can minimise a waste of brainpower in organisations.

Social tools enhance peripheral vision and intuition.

Social tools help to feed minds, not machines.

Social tools help to bring some structure to the exponentially growing ecosystem of information data, because such data is referenceable through a combination of links (aka tags, bookmarks, etc), feeds, subscription, aggregation and participation.

Social tools provide users with the signals to find the data they need among moving traffic.

Social tools offer users with headlines which interest them.

Social tools allow you to do existing things better or stop doing things and do them differently.

Social tools mean you can do things differently.

Social tools are about reaching out more to your audience.

Social tools require a change of thinking.

Kevin Anderson, Guardian Unlimited

"Blogging keeps me close to my customers." (quoting Robert Scobel)

Social tools help break down information silos.

Social tools build team cohesion.

Social tools expose employees to cutting edge tools.

Social tools foster use and expertise of those tools externally.

Social tools provide the opportunity to cut the cost of production.

Social tools give people a social reason to use the Web and they are more likely to learn how to use it better and transfer that skill into how they use it more effectively in their daily work.