Jane Hart writes an interesting post on top-down vs. bottom-up approaches to nurturing social media in organizations, making the excellent point that bottom up support of existing social media activities will work better than imposing social media use from the top down. What I've been observing in my work with clients, though, is a tendency to use top-down strategies to support bottom-up initiatives, especially in organizations where they're just delving... Read more →

Several years ago I was going to fly with a friend who'd never been on a plane before. He told me what he hated most about the idea of flying was that he wasn't "in control." This was a person who never let anyone else drive the car because he only trusted himself to make the split-second decision to swerve or brake should trouble strike. In helping him try to... Read more →

< One of the projects I completed earlier this month for a client of mine was an online career fair. It was geared toward middle and high school students, their parents and educators. Our goal was to expose them to career exploration information and some summer job search tips and techniques. The event took place over a three-day period, with a "teaser" webinar the week before the career fair to... Read more →

For the past few months, I've definitely been blogging less, in part because I've been doing training on social media for several clients. I thought it made sense to share some of what I've been working on, so here are some links. They owe much to the WeAreMedia curriculum developed by the ever-wonderful Beth Kanter and the folks at NTEN. Introduction to Social Media--This webinar and wiki resource page gives... Read more →

Will Richardson has an excellent post, Don't, Don't, Don't vs. Do, Do, Do, in which he muses on "acceptable use" policies of social media in schools and how restrictive and anti-learning they can be. Having spent the past several months working with clients on integrating social media into their organizations, this post really resonated with me. I'm finding that while a few places embrace social media as an exciting opportunity,... Read more →

I had to pull together some resources on using LinkedIn's Groups feature for a client, so thought it might be helpful to post the links here. These are more geared toward starting and running your own group, as opposed to finding and joining an existing group. Features of LinkedIn Groups include: Group home page: A private space for your members on LinkedIn. Discussion forums: Simple discussion spaces for you and... Read more →

Twitter--the 140 character social networking site--is becoming increasingly useful for job seekers. It doesn't work for everyone, of course, but it can certainly turbo-charge your networking, a key strategy for successful job hunting. It can also be an effective part of your personal branding campaign. Here, then, is a (somewhat) definitive link guide to getting a new job (or losing your current one) through Tweeting. (I put this together for... Read more →

As we incorporate social networking tools into learning, I know that some of us are thinking about how to encourage and evaluate meaningful contributions to and participation in those networks. Dave Duarte's list of 20 Ways to Evaluate Contributions to a Social Network seems like a good start. Many of these items are open to further discussion (i.e., what's a "well-structured argument" look like?), but in those conversations, you can... Read more →

One of the big questions I'm frequently asked about using social media is whether or not the tools "work." Depending on the questioner, this can mean a variety of things, but underlying everything is one issue--will my department or organization improve if we use social media? Via Shel Holtz and Workplace Learning Today comes yet another "yes," to that question. Shel cites a brief published by the Aberdeen Group, titled... Read more →

Over on the Work Literacy: Web 2.0 for Learning Professionals Ning where we're on day three of the course, one of the more active forum discussions has been on getting value out of LinkedIn. Fortunately for us, Tony Karrer is a whiz at using LinkedIn to find expertise and he's recorded a couple of excellent screencasts to show the rest of us how it's done. For this week's Web 2.0... Read more →