Unless you’ve been lost in the jungle for the duration of the Naughties, you’ll have noticed the huge impact that social media has had on everyday life, from statuses about what our friends have eaten for dinner, to tweets breaking new news first.

Without a doubt, this change in social communication in our personal routines has also impacted how we communicate in a work environment.  New ways of communicating with colleagues have emerged, making internal comms simpler, easier and more diverse than ever before.

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Most organisations have woken up to the social media phenomena by now, although there’s still some confusion and debate around which platforms to use, and how to maximise participation and effectiveness of these feeds. Here’s some food for thought for those of you starting out, or considering embarking on a little ‘social media spring cleaning’.

What can social media do for me?
There are plenty of benefits to using social media:
- it can build closer relationships and increase engagement with your customers and stakeholders
- it can help you to gain further insight into what makes your customers tick
- it can get your customers talking to you and to each other
- should you need to give or receive information quickly, you have a receptive communication channel ready to go. Read on…

After a global recession, which put millions out of work, it seems that some jobseekers are having to come up with more innovative ways to stand out from the crowd. Not content to sit back and wait for the right role to be advertised, some are putting the internet to work for them in creative ways, and we could all learn a lot from how they’re doing it.

Alec Brownstein is a great example. In his quest for the perfect job he spent £4 ($6 USD) on Google adwords to reach five creative directors at major advertising and marketing firms: Scott Vitrone, Ian Reichenthal, Gerry Graf, Tony Granger, and David Droga. Basically he banked on the fact that these directors would be googling themselves at some point, and amongst the search results was his ad which simply read “Googling yourself is fun, hiring me is fun too.” He got four interviews, two job offers, and according to FastCompany.com, he’s now employed at Young & Rubicam. Definitely a slam dunk for Alec!

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Last week, Facebook revealed their latest tool to help webmasters “Socialise” their sites – Facebook Open Graph.

Open Graph is Facebook’s latest foray into search engine functionality and if all else fails, it’s best to think of it simply as the first step towards a social search engine. Facebook is hoping that as people browse the web they will “like” pages by clicking a Facebook button which then informs their friends via Facebook.

Open Graph will enable sites which you’ve never been to before display recommendations and information tailored for your tastes based on what you or your friends have previously “liked”. At surface level then this is just a slightly more powerful version of those buttons you see around the web which enable you to share stuff you like with your friends. But the story of Open Graph is going to be so much more than that.

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Most intranets are largely static sites. On its own, an intranet is essentially a shared drive, serving up centrally stored documents alongside internal articles or communications. Some organisations use words such as “communication hubs” to describe them, but for the most part that communication is one-way.

These days, however, an intranet really can be a hub for your company. The intranet portal now closely mirrors employees’ expectations of world wide web functionality. Systems such as Microsoft SharePoint allow users to communicate with each other and collaborate, much as they would using social media tools such as blogging, Facebook and Twitter.

There are a number of capabilities that you can implement relatively easily, with SharePoint in particular making many of them available as standard.

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The observant consumer abroad may have noticed patterned squares on their purchases. In Japan, these shapes now take up space on the side of whole houses, and seen teenagers whipping out their mobiles to take photos.

Of course, these codes contain more than just obscure patterns. Devised in 1994 for industrial use, ‘QR codes’ were employed for tagging boxes as a more information-heavy barcode. For example, the German Post uses them to keep track of packages.

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Usability is generally trumpeted as a major consideration in website design. What is often ignored are the results of a website losing its usability – or, indeed, its familiarity. Yesterday, a number of users were unable to log on to Facebook. Why? Because they weren’t actually on Facebook.

What happened was that, for a couple of hours, Facebook slipped off the top Google rank for the search “Facebook login”. Instead, a blog called ReadWriteWeb (an excellent read, by the way) slipped into first place. Not noticing the change, users simply clicked on the top link anyway and were taken to a ReadWriteWeb article about Facebook, which looked entirely unlike the actual Facebook page.

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Healthcare providers are finally opening up to social media – and it’s about time. I wrote recently about the Gardasil campaign, and now we have the UK NHS opening their own Facebook page: Say Yes To The Test.

Say Yes To The Test is a campaign to inform people about chlamydia, supported by the NHS website. At the time of writing, the Facebook page has been live for around two weeks and has over 36,000 fans. Given that the average Facebook user has 130 friends and that every new sign-up displays on all of a user’s friends’ profiles, the page has potentially reached 4.7 million users.

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We’ve already written our top 5 resolutions for 2010 for intranet owners – but what about those of you out there on the Great Wide Web? Keep reading for our top 5 New Year resolutions for website owners…

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Maintaining an intranet can be a tricky business, but why not kick off 2010 with some New Year resolutions that will make your intranet fly? Read on for our top 5 tips for the year…

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