Social Collaboration

The book I read to research this post was Social Collaboration For Dummies which is an excellent book which I read at

http://safaribooksonline.com

This book is aimed at people doing charity and social projects but a lot of what is in the book applies to business. The kind of thing in this book is someone recruits volunteers to help in a project where they have to appoint a leader and stay in touch with email or CRM software to monitor their progress. There are websites like Yammer & Chatter which are social media but cater for this kind of thing. If you opt for CRM software the 2 big players are Dynamic CRM & Salesforce.com. If you have a huge project consider a wiki like MediaWiki which powers Wikipedia among others. There is also a website called Podio which is aimed at organisations like this and is a website with paid extras I think. For some low budget projects organisations use a social network to stay in touch. If you use twitter for this anyone on the site can read your messages and on Facebook & Linkedin the privacy in this respect isn't much better. I did really enjoy reading this book and I was looking for things that could be applied to work rather than charity work. I learned a lot from this book and am tempted to sign up to Yammer which is open source and free.