Our office has been receiving numerous requests to help incorporate social media tools into a variety of communication and education projects. Our clients want help creating blogs, wikis, collaborative workspaces, and social networks.

We’ve responded with cautious optimism. We’re always happy when our clients want to try out something new with technology. But we also have to be frank and point out that if you create a social networking space, there is no guarantee that it will be used. You can’t mandate that your audience “be social.”

In several recent cases we suggested our clients survey their intended audience before launching into social media. Here are a few of the questions we’ve developed and have subsequently used in our surveys:

• What social media tools (if any) are your target audiences currently using?
• Do the audiences currently participate in collaborative work online?
• What is their comfort level with social media?
• How do they characterize their online technology profile? Are they toes-
over-the-edge pioneers or information grazers? Or something in-
between?
• What features would they find useful? Working collaboratively on
projects? Accessing news and events? Sharing best practices?
Q&A? Chats? Tweets?

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Popularity: 18% [?]

Social media networking from Twitter and Facebook, to whatever the next hot idea that evolves has one rule for success. “Know Your Audience!” is rule number one in the world of interactive communication. The real issue is less what we know about our audiences , than why we need to know.

Our university and all of the land-grant and non-land-grant peers around the country and the world are grappling with a significant issue in the new media world. We have a lot of content, which we want to push out to our target learners. Following rule number one, we know what they need. I mean really, we’re the “experts,” right? It’s our job to know who they are and what they need.

Our problem is we’re heavy on content and light on engagement. Or so says, ADVERGIRL in her latest blog post.

She lists the top four universities for actual engagement using social media networks. I’ll save you the suspense, Oregon State University is not one of them. But I think the ideas these institutions are pursing offer interesting possibilities for Outreach and Engagement at OSU.

When we consider social networks as tools for our enterprise, too often we miss the point and obsess on the “social” aspect, as if they are something that can’t be used “professionally.” However, if you focus on the “network” part of the concept it is easy to see how and where our audiences can begin to gain value engaging with us. If our goal is reciprocal, i.e. learning from the interaction as much as telling someone what we think they need to know, then the possibilities for real communication seem to surface.

The question is do we have the understanding and interest to develop online social networks that can take advantage of what we know from 100 years of face-to-face education and training? As Clive Thompson points our in his Wired magazine blog, this will not come from managers and CEOs.  Effective use of social networking will come from those who best understand their audiences and peers. It will come from those folks anywhere in an organization that are already adept at networking and understand the fundamental value of being connected.

A social network is basically the foundation for an effective team. Teams of people who know each other from some level of face-to-face interaction can be more effective in the short run than virtual teams thrown together with a goal but no previous interaction. Pure logic, it seems.

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Popularity: 9% [?]

Lately I’ve been absorbed in podcasts on a variety of topics—instructional gaming, carbon markets, sleep deprivation…. I find what I want to learn about on the Web, sync to my iPhone, and listen on the go at my convenience.

Podcasts can be audio or video. RSS feeds provide subscribers the latest files, to be watched or listened to on a computer or any number of mobile devices. Podcasting makes content convenient both in time and space.

I hope I’m learning something from what I am listening to, but I’ve also been mulling over what I’m learning about the podcasting experience itself. I have 10 observations:

1. Listening to human voices talking—especially on headphones, but disconnected from visual input such as reading or watching—has an immediate, connecting, personalizing quality. Audio podcasting can capitalize on the fact that voices in isolation are enchanting to many ears, in some cases more powerful than in combination with visual images. Read the rest of this entry »

Popularity: 14% [?]