The book I read to research this post was Organisations don't Tweet People do by Euan Semple which is a very good book which I bought from kindle. I'll tell you a story a friend of mine works for the Health Service in Britain and his job is mainly taking handicapped people shopping, if their house or flat needs cleaning he does it or if they need to see a doctor he takes them. His job title is community support worker. Anyway every morning he has to see his boss at their head office 8 miles from where he lives and then he has to see his patients. The politically correct term is clients. That visit takes up a lot of his time and of course sometimes he has to visit his head office during the day which takes up even more of his time. He has a mobile phone supplied with his job but any detailed discussion has to be done face to face. Now another problem is he doesn't like technology so he wouldn't be keen on having to learn new software although he does have to enter notes into a computer at their head office. I suggested to him that his organisation ought to subscribe to salesforce.com which is contact management software and they ought to each have their own blog on wordpress obviously password protected but which each member of staff could access. They could have wordpress on their own server and give each employee a laptop and smartphone. I reckon they'd be much more efficient and save time not to mention fuel. His reply was it's a good idea and I can see where you're coming from but if it's not broke I ain't fixing it. Obviously he's got concerns about having to learn wordpress and salesforce.com but I think it's a shame. I thought I'd share that with you. Of course if he was in a business they'd have to stay competitive.
Now we'll get back to the book this is about social media in a general way with little about the intricacies of technology. A lot of it is about how businesses are benefiting from social networking. Euan worked for the BBC and while he was there they started a forum which was a similiar kind of thing to google groups. They were one of the early forerunners of this technology and at the beginning the features were a bit limited. This forum grew to 25,000 members. In his job at the BBC it was important to cultivate lots of contacts. They encountered lots of problems in his work and because he was heavily involved in social media he always knew someone who could solve a problem or someone who knew someone who knew someone who could solve the problem. He gives the example of they were trying to use a television camera they were unfamiliar and he did a tweet to his 5,000 followers for help, within half an hour they had 3 replies that told them what settings they needed. Also especially with social networking that lets you stay in touch with friends and family, it increases your quality of life. Many jobs have an uncertain future. Many trades become obsolete every year. I know someone who was telling he did an apprenticeship in creating carpet dyes. Nowadays the carpet fiber is sent to the carpet manufacturer already dyed. So the job he trained for is obsolete and he had to train for another career.
Now we'll get back to the book this is about social media in a general way with little about the intricacies of technology. A lot of it is about how businesses are benefiting from social networking. Euan worked for the BBC and while he was there they started a forum which was a similiar kind of thing to google groups. They were one of the early forerunners of this technology and at the beginning the features were a bit limited. This forum grew to 25,000 members. In his job at the BBC it was important to cultivate lots of contacts. They encountered lots of problems in his work and because he was heavily involved in social media he always knew someone who could solve a problem or someone who knew someone who knew someone who could solve the problem. He gives the example of they were trying to use a television camera they were unfamiliar and he did a tweet to his 5,000 followers for help, within half an hour they had 3 replies that told them what settings they needed. Also especially with social networking that lets you stay in touch with friends and family, it increases your quality of life. Many jobs have an uncertain future. Many trades become obsolete every year. I know someone who was telling he did an apprenticeship in creating carpet dyes. Nowadays the carpet fiber is sent to the carpet manufacturer already dyed. So the job he trained for is obsolete and he had to train for another career.
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