Technical Weblog of Eric Charran

What’s your Social Networking IQ?

What is the best way to judge social networking IQ?  In my mind its not necessarily your knowledge of social networking from an academic perspective, nor is it your knowledge of the technical implementation and networks of social networking that are out there.  However, I define social networking IQ has a person’s ability to effectively participate, benefit from and manage their social networking footprint amongst a variety of social networking networks and implementations.  Whether it be technical networks like such as Facebook, Live Spaces, My Space, etc. or simply an email distribution list within your organization, an individual’s membership should be symbiotic.  This means that members should give to the network like a community as well as receive. Today, most social networks are facilitated by software, so we’ll focus on those.  Also, the term IQ isn’t entirely accurate as it is a measure of your social networking footprint rather than some numerical scheme that judges your worthiness in terms of your memberships.  Thus, to get things started, here is my social networking footprint at work and at home:

• Work

  • SharePoint My Site

    • Actively use the colleague tracker and monitor as well as presence to see who relates to who and what changes are happening to people on my team or close to me.

    • I also post various documents and presentations to share and other types of information that are valuable to others (like a corporate Live Sky Drive)

  • Internal Microsoft Blog

    • I maintain an internal Microsoft blog as a result of selecting to create one from my My Site

    • I also post to the internal SharePoint Rangers blog and some other regional knowledge sharing blogs

  • MSDN Blog

    • I also maintain an external facing MSDN blog on blogs.msdn.com which serves as a knowledge and “gotcha” repository for challenges I face in the field and in the office.

  • Email Distribution Lists

    • I am a member of over 30 (and that’s trimmed down) internal email distribution lists

      • These lists provide a place for individuals to post general or esoteric technical questions and receive answers right in Outlook

      • These lists are tracked by the colleague tracker and published to others when they look at my profile in SharePoint

  • Office Communicator

    • The SharePoint colleague tracker also mines my IM conversations and contact lists to see who I relate to most frequently as well as my email.

    • The colleague tracker forms recommendations based on these and other elements (like AD reporting relationships)

• Non-Work

  • Facebook

    • I have a Facebook account which I am quite active on and have integrated with other social networking and IM tools

      • Messenger, Twitter, etc.

  • Twitter

    • I also have a twitter account and use a utility (Witty Twitter) to both create my tweets and have the tweet set automatically as my Facebook status

  • Windows Live Profile

    • I have an active Windows Live profile and have it linked to my Facebook status.

    • This means that when I update Witty Twitter, my tweet is sent to Twitter, and it also is reflected in Facebook and in Windows Live.

  • Windows Live Space

    • I also maintain a Windows Live Space that was and still is my personal interest blog.

  • Flickr

    • Flickr houses my family’s entire photo library (I am a paying member so I have no upload limits).  I tag photos from Windows Live Photo Gallery and use them to upload to Flickr.

    • This means that my photo stream is tagged with the same metadata as my local photos and I can browse the tag cloud using Flickr.

There are some essential tools that I use to make my life a little easier.  These tools are mostly thick client tools that don’t force me to open a browser every time I want to do something.

• Groove

  • I use Groove to sync my My Site at work so I have offline access on multiple computers to the content on my My Site.

  • I also use it to sync files between firewalls so clients and customers can easily get large binaries without worrying about ftp, etc.

• Windows Live Photo Gallery

  • With the latest beta, I upload to Flickr and Facebook right after tagging. 

  • I apply tags as well as facial tags which nicely integrates into Facebook.

  • This allows me to go from camera to Windows Home Server for storage, to Facebook in a few seconds.

• Witty Twitter

• A smart client WPF utility that allows me to create, monitor and update Tweets from myself and others

• I also configured Facebook to monitor my tweets and make them my status updates on Facebook and Windows Live.

• Windows Live Writer

• A great utility for thick-client publishing, editing and re-publishing of blog posts. 

• Allows posting and cross posting between SharePoint, Community Server, Windows Live Spaces and a ton of other blog-ware.