Last Week, I spoke at the Potomac Forum’s session on “How to” in Social Media in Government. My presentation was on How to Write a Blog Post: The first steps of organizational blogging.

I have been blogging in some shape or form since 1999. I started blogging about concerts I attended and the occasional hi-jinks that ensued with my work as a music promoter. Over the years, I have transitioned to community management and supporting the Federal Government with Enterprise 2.0 best practices. Part of being a good community manager is to have a voice that can be heard above the rest of the noise of discussion in regards to presenting policy and guidelines, as well as mitigating wiki edit wars.

As such, I leverage my blog internally in my company and with the customers I support to organize the chaos. Blogs are an effective way to place a conversation or announcement you would normally send to a large email recipient list and can prevent those long chains of “reply all”.

This workshop is a follow-up to my previous talk at the last Potomac Forum I spoke at in August 2009, Hints for Communicating in Social Media.

To see the steps I have covered in my talk, please check out the wiki on GovCollab.

Blogs I contribute to on the open internet aside from this one:

• navstar-inc.com/blog – @navstar
• smcdc.wordpress.com – @smcdc
• Capital Beltway – @thebeltway

I am also a guest blogger for ZDNet and Social Computing Journal on topics of Enterprise 2.0 and Government 2.0. Occasionally, I am also asked to guest post on blogs, which I consider an honor and will link on my website. If you would like me to be a guest blogger on your site you can contact me via twitter (@immunity) to connect for more details.

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Occasionally, I will speak in public, in groups at happy hours, or with customers in the office about Social Media and how to effectively use social software, specifically free and open sourced software when applicable. At the Potomac Forum Government Leadership event at the Reagan Building, I will be semi-formalizing this talk to suggest “Hints for Communicating through Social Media”

During my talk, I will be asking the following questions to those in the audience to think about:

• What is your mission?
• Who is your target audience?
• How do you communicate now?
• What social media tools are right for you?

What is the Difference in all this 2.0 Stuff?

Internal vs. External Communication

Excusing my crappy excuse for drawing on a flipchart, you can see from my “illustration” above what the difference with all the buzzwords that are floating around. This is the main focus of my talk that I give when talking to people who are interested in knowing more, have heard the buzz and think they need “Facebook” or “Twitter” as their answer. But it may not be that simple. I previously discussed this back in April on a guest post on ZDNet, “You Were Never 1.0, but Get Ready for Enterprise 2.0“. Fortunately what I wrote then still holds true months later.

My aim is to prepare organizations, be it business or Government to make a knowledgeable transition into effective communication and workflow using Software as a Service or other Web 2.0 applications in an Enterprise manner. While there is much good being done by Social Media/Web evangelists — myself included, those intrigued should not get caught in the glamour and glitz of something new for new sake, but strategically plan around what the problem is that an organization is trying to solve. The “Jeopardy Method”, of giving the answer then ask the question/dilemma seems to be how things are getting done now. When the case should be — the question/dilemma is “Our Organization is Having a Problem Communicating externally, internally, capturing workflow, answering requests for information, etc… and we need to fix that by?” Identifying the problems, in detail before you have a solution in mind will help you choose the right tool for the job.

Sounds a little old school right? It should — using social media is just a new way of doing old business. Now project costs are lower because the software is not dependent of End User Licenses and pricey volume purchases. Now, you can find the best fit to solve the problem and then customize it yourself, or with a company that specializes in customization of known solution like Mantech and Jive’s software. For example, Jive Software develops and provides the software  platform that Mantech customizes and supports onsite for their customers. The result, “A-Space”, a social networking and productivity site for the US Intelligence Community.

So I am sorry for the late night post, but I was just told tonight that C-Span will be recording and covering live the conference at the Reagan Building, I am a little nervous and definitely will be coloring my hair tonight. After my presentation, I will publish my slides (which I normally don’t do slides), for review. Addtionally, I will add, I do have a finished White Paper on “Enterprise 2.0 for Government” available by request.

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Recently in a phone interview I was asked about the difference between the two subjects in the title. I thought to myself, I have answered this many times, but it would be just so much easier to write my answer and then have it available to anyone who reads my blog or is searching for the answer. Not to mention, putting frequently asked questions in a blog post or a wiki page is usually one of my solutions I offer to someone if they keep having to answer the same question or relay the same information more than twice. So I thought I should heed my own advice.

Simply put its internal vs. external, two different parts, that work separately, but should work together. See my breakdown below for more differences:

OK I put some things in there for levity as I am biased for the Enterprise 2.0 side of the house. The reason, I think organizations should think internally before claiming they get it on the Internet. You may look cool by having a social media presence to get new recruits and new hires. But if you do not have a productive and collaborative environment behind the firewall, you are NOT going to retain the young bright minds to take your organization into the future.

Also, I didn’t know about the existence of this video, of someone I practically consider a mentor in the business and thinking end of all things Enterprise 2.o. I think Andy eloquently speaks on the differences in what he has noticed in the the past 2 and a half years.

Andrew McAfee – What is Web/Enterprise 2.0

My simple advice is this if you are a business organization, your Enterprise solution should be in communication with your social media strategy. If you are public organization, who has or hires a marketing team, you should be in control of your brand presence on the internet. You should NOT outsource this. For Government organizations, this position for brand management should be part of your Office of Public Affairs or equivalent. The persons working on this external presence for your organization, should also be a part of the enterprise solution for internal collaboration. The internal collaboration, the Enterprise 2.0 platform your organization leverages to communicate between employees is paramount to the growth of the organization.

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In addition to the posts contained on this site, I do appear elsewhere on the web and in public. Government 2.0 and Enterprise 2.0 are topics I write and speak about often in other publications and conferences. For where I will be speaking next or conferences I will be attending, check out the events page.

Opportunities

Schedule Andrea to speak at your event by emailing vindictiveimmunity at gmail. com.

You can also view my profile at Geekspeakr, a site for women speakers.

Speaking Topics

• Government 2.0
• Enterprise 2.0
• Web 2.0
• Community Management
• Creating Communities with Wikis and Blogs
• Women in Technology

Training and Consulting

• Setting up your Internal Collaboration Network
• Establishing your personal brand
• Changing existing work processes to include social software

If you would like to see more of my additional work, you can check out the following links.

Items in Delicious tagged with my name: http://delicious.com/tag/andreabaker

Guest Editorials:

• ZDNet: The (Government 2.0) revolution should be televised
• ZDNet: You Were Never 1.0, but get ready for Enterprise 2.0
• ZDNet: Government as a dialogue: Will the Gov 2.0 Summit contribute?

News Articles:

• Intellipedia’s next act

Blogs about me or my work:

• Just the Guy We Need for Government 2.0
• Why Nerds and Geeks Have Taken Over the World
• Social Governance Won’t Come Easy
• Apps for Democracy
• Traction Software’s Third Annual Traction User Group Meeting – October 6 & 7
• When Intelligence Officers Get Social…
• Social Computing Journal
  

Video

• Blogtropolus at Web 2.0 Expo SF 2008

Radio

• WFED – Federal News Radio – The Daily Debrief with Chris Dorobek and Amy Morris
  • More on the possible Obama CTO

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In this post, I thought I would take a moment to let you know a little more of the story of my background and how while my career has taken me all over, the lessons learned from one industry to another carry over:

Years ago I ran my own promotions company (Emerging Sounds) for the music industry. My focus was creating a methodology for success in helping bands get noticed and get signed, it was all about grass roots marketing.

This was around the time when e-groups was bought out by Yahoo, so we created groups for our bands that we supported. In addition, we would take thousands of pictures of our bands so while we traveled from show to show, city to city, we had images to capture their essence. This was before digital cameras were affordable and as mainstream as the are today. So we would have to go to CVS or another photo development place, as for the pictures not only in print, but on floppy disk. Those were the “glory days”.

We were the “gardeners” of the Mid-Atlantic Music Scene and we were happy to do it. Why? Because we believed in our product: The bands we selected to promote. This just wasn’t any old band of the street, but ones we felt we knew and could get to know better as people. We became a family with them and in turn, we’re able to put 1000% efforts in to pushing them out to the rest of the world and record labels. This was the beginning of a new era for the music industry as MP3’s on the web were a way of getting your music into the hands of fans. I was working with industry reps giving them the inside scoop of what fans in our area were listening to and who we wanted to see on MTV (they were still playing some videos) and the short-lived Television show “Farmclub“. To me, this is as close to a point when I can remember a user-generated web beginning to form. Before we started calling it “Web 2.0″.

If you take a look at the bands listed on the Mid-Atlantic Music Scene page, you might see names of bands that you still know of today. Some had regional success, some even more national an world exposure (Remember Sev’s Pepsi Blue commercial), and some well are dating world famous socialites.

Sev – Pespi Blue (Same Old Song)

Now to my point of this blog post title. This was all grassroots work. Done by those who loved what they did and it didn’t matter if it wasn’t their “official” job or even if they were getting paid for it. It was for the love of the game. This is what I see happening with social media tool adoption with the communities I am involved.

Just as I took an initiative to create a company for recognizing and promoting the talent in a music industry that was on the verge of a technological change, I wanted to do the same for my organization. I believe I started using Wiki’s in 2005, with Confluence and at least in May 2006 with Wikipedia (when I finally decided to get a user account).

In early 2007, I became the first ever paid Intellipedian. My job as lead wiki gardener (a position I have since passed on to other colleagues) was to maintain the wiki and other social web tools for the Intelligence Community. I used my position to mentor and shape the “edit swarms” that have helped Intellipedia grow into what it is today. I have to believe a lot of my mentoring and efforts in shaping Intellipedia come directly from my experience in managing a music promotions community, all grassroots.

If you were at Fastforward2008 this past February, you might have heard Professor Andrew McAfee mention the story above as a part of his keynote.

So this grassroots term is now being referred to as groundswell, when it comes to the growth of any social web tool. For Intellipedia, it has been a wonderful ride as to see my suggestions to the gardeners who I have mentored use their “spare-cycles” with managerial buy-in. Their work has been to me the great success of the wiki, as we are not only capturing knowledge, but organizing it in a robust way.

I used to use the term “Community Manager” to define my role, however I never felt manager was the right term, I believe myself to be more of an advocate. A “Community Advocate“. I have shaped the term and role from past experience to what I have learned from the likes of Tim Ferriss, Gary Vaynerchuk, Jeremiah Owyang, and others in the world of social media. I am an advocate not only for the tools, but for the people on both sides of the application, the developers and the users. I have walked in both sets of shoes in my life and that experience helps me make the communication flow between the two parties. Then there is marketing… you know the fun stuff. The stuff that drove me to want to do more when I was in the music scene. I believe those skills I have sharpened over the years, so I can tell what potential users, listeners would probably want to hear and see to get them to use their tool or buy their music or go to a show.

I hope that in all my work, in all the talks, in all the blog posts, and online chats: inside the community, my company, and beyond; that my work inspires others to be community leaders. I would love my grassroots work to make the groundswell happen within these “families” to take-off and build bigger and brighter things. And I know they do, I see the work of others and I am proud to call them a colleague.

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Yesterday was an amazingly different and wondrous day. It started off with the hotel finding us the biggest chocolate croissants evar! Then Steve Mandzik and I walked down to E*Trade. After which, we started walking back to the Moscone West when we were stopped by News Channel 5 in SF to talk about the presidential campaign so far. I am hoping my soundbyte made it on air. (If someone can find me this clip I will love you forever and pimp your site, blog, twitter, whatever for you.)

Update: My friend Mike B. found the clip, I am standing next to Steve and his soundbyte made it, but mine did not. Next time eh?

After that, I sat in on Joseph Smarr from Plaxo’s presentation “Data Portability, Privacy, and the Emergence of the Social Web“. I saw Joseph earlier this year at the Future of Web Apps in MIami. This time he had more time to speak and talk about the direction in which the social web is going and the ever growing need for our connections to travel with us, instead of re-friending your friends. I also saw Kevin Marks again from Google and I met Identity Woman, Kaliya Hamlin.

I spent a lot of time back and forth in blogtropol.us and on the expo floor. I was really impressed with the Tell Me app that works with voice on your blackberry to keep your hands free when looking for information. I also got a demo of saleforce.com powered by google apps and the possibilities I can take with me back to Navstar. I still have 4/5ths of the floor to explore. A little each day.

Most of the time spent here is actually networking and talking to developers making cool hacks, scripts and apps. But the afternoon we got to listen to the Keynotes of Day 2 (Tim O’Reilly and Clay Shirky surely were the standouts).

So far the new apps I have been working with since I got here Fireball, powered by Fireeagle. Alertthingy, a desktop app for friendfeed.com. And ribbit, another way to make your phone do so much more for you.

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VMW52Z_a5xM]

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I have a bunch of conferences on my radar, but which ones I will actually attend are still up in the air. I need to make those decisions with my work, so its not just me that gets to decide to go or who on my team wants to go too. But regardless if I go or not, I gotta keep track of them all. I need to know when and where they are at. So I tried Dopplr.

It was cool at first, but thanks to Mashable.com with their recent blogs (this one and that one) on the tool I found something better and cooler to fit my needs. It is called TripIt.

TripIt is a personal travel assistant that automatically organizes all your travel plans. TripIt is free and makes it easy to…

• Quickly organize your vacation and business travel – no matter where you book
• Automatically get itineraries with all your plans, weather, maps, restaurants and more
• Easily access your itineraries via paper, email, personal calendar or mobile device
• Share your trips and see where you overlap with friends and colleagues

And it mashes up real nice with the following websites:

	Google maps and directions
	NOAA weather
	SeatGuru airplane seat advice
	Wikipedia city information
	Eventful current events
	Flickr city photos
	OpenTable dining reservations

Add on to the fact I can email it my itinerary from multiple email addresses (so I can send it my business and personal travel), and it hooks in with many of the travel booking sites and hotels. The coolest thing about it to me is the .ics file it creates from all my trips and I can create that as a new calender feed in Google Calendar. Love it!

It also alerts my friends when I come to their town. Great trick because it always hits me when I am leaving the city I am visiting that I actually know people there.

I also love that it is totally mobile smart phone friendly. I have checked it out on my T-Mobile Dash and its working so far without any hiccups.

I am still playing with it, so I hope discover more about it and hope that you out there in web 2.0 land are using it too and help me use it to its full potential. So chime in, let me hear your thoughts.

Update 

The only thing now I need is my facebook plugin application to replace my dopplr. I think I am going to widgetize my blog if I can with my “dream travel conferences”.

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