Blogging from IFTF Workshop

I will be blogging from the IFTF Social Media Workshop.

We have a nice small group in Palo Alto at the IFTF Headquarters. The discussion is lively and we have some exciting things to do. I'll post as I can.

For now I want to talk about the mental yoga we are about to go through to really get into social networking.

We talked about Wikis and Robyn brought up how our page on Wikipedia mistakenly associates Wear Red Friday with us. She explained how we have tried to change that and have gotten in trouble over that with the Wiki community. You have to let the community describe your organization apparently. This leads me to think of Wikipedia almost as a window into how people perceive us rather than an encyclopedia. As it is bad and scary for us to be mis-associated with another group's event, how much would we have spent in marketing research to learn that? What might we do now that we know to improve our brand awareness? Will that information be proven first through a focus group or through a wiki page?

As a side note, I'm tracking fears. People have expressed fear to do these things and fear not to do these things. I'd love to get your comments on this. What do you fear if we do something with social media? What do you fear if we DO NOT do something with social media?

After lunch we went to SRI and talked to David Gutelius CTO of SocialKinetics who showed us iLink, a social networking tool they have developed that is backed by artificial intelligence. By making a smart tool, they are increasing the relevance of personal connections and subject matter. This has been employed by the Army with PlatoonLeader, with Moms through MomsLikeMe.com and the CDC.

The AI along with human moderation has improved the dissemination of information through the ranks by having Platoon Leaders share ideas and discussion in the field. This employs recommendation engines, but depends largely on human moderation to rate the quality of posters. One success factor recently realized involved the army identifying an expert on Counter Insurgency who would not have risen through the ranks so quickly.

After the SRI visit we returned to the IFTF office and had a discussion with David Pescovitz on blogging. This was a great discussion. Some of the big themes were around moderation, commenting and sense making (responding to comments and placing posts to focus the community.)

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