2. About this Guide
In the workplace, individuals are making increasing use of
social media tools to support their own as well as their
team's performance and productivity.
The free availability of a huge number of online tools
means that it is now very quick and easy to set up and
use these tools for your own purposes.
The Guide looks at a range of activities you are likely to
encounter in your job and how using social media tools
can help you and your team become more productive.
The complete Guide is available at bit.ly/some4job
A Practical Guide to using Social Media in your Job 2
3. Contents
1 – Finding things out on the Web
2 – Keeping up to date with new content on the Web
3 – Building a trusted network of colleagues
4 – Communicating with your colleagues
5 – Sharing resources, ideas & experiences with your colleagues
6 – Collaborating with your colleagues
7 – Improving your personal productivity
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4. 1 ‐ Finding things out on the Web
If you are looking for
help or information
whilst you are doing your
job, what do you do?
Where do you go first?
A Practical Guide to using Social Media in your Job 4
6. But don't forget there are also
a number of other and tools
around to search the web.
You'll find some suggestions in
Search the web with other
tools
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8. 2 ‐ Keeping up to date with new
Web content
The world is changing fast, and
your job may require you to
keep up to date with what is
happening in your industry. In
this section we look at some
ways to do this.
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9. Be kept informed
about what's
happening by
monitoring the web
for new content using
Google Alerts.
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11. Even better, subscribe to blog and
website news so that it is sent to
you automatically, rather than you
having to spend valuable time
searching for new content, and
aggregate all your news feeds in a
reader like Google Reader
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12. 3 ‐ Building a trusted network of
colleagues
Another very important
and key way of keeping
up to date is to be in
constant contact with
colleagues whose
opinions and thoughts
you trust and value.
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13. Although Facebook is often
frowned upon in business circles, it
has over 400 million users, so there
are plenty of opportunities to build
a network of colleagues from all
over the world if you so desire.
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14. LinkedIn is a large network aimed
at professional people, where its
focus is to help members establish
professional connections with
others.
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15. Twitter is a public micro‐updating
service which allows individuals to
keep in touch with one another
using tweets of up to 140
characters.
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16. Yammer is a private micro‐sharing
service for both in‐company and
community use ‐ based on 140
character updates.
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17. 4 ‐ Communicating with your
colleagues
Communication is a key
aspect of working
effectively and
productively in your
team, department or
organisation.
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19. There are also a number of spin‐off systems that
extend the functionality of webmail even further, i.e.
Google Buzz ‐ which extends email into a
conversation, and Google Wave ‐ which extends
email into a real‐time conversation
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20. Instant messaging (IM) has also
become a very important way for
people to communicate with one
another immediately. Skype is an
important tool supporting both
text chat and voice calls.
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22. Although many web meeting
systems are enterprise tools,
there are a range of web
meeting tools that offer a range
of functionality for small
meetings that anyone can set
up, and for free.
For instance Dimdim is free for
up to 20 users
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25. Sharing files: If you want
to share files across
computers or with others,
there are a number of
tools to support
this. Dropbox is a very
popular tool.
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26. Sharing web links. If you want to share weblinks
with others, then social bookmarking tools are an
easy way to do this. Two popular social
bookmarking tools are Delicious and Diigo
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28. Sharing ideas, experiences and
more: You might want to consider
using blogging or podcasting tools
to do this. With blogging tools
you can write regular blog
postings that document your
thoughts that others can
comment on. A very easy tool to
get started with blogging is
Posterous. If you prefer to create
podcasts, then these can easily be
achieved using a tool like
Audacity.
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29. 5 – Collaborating with your
colleagues
A further aspect of the
use of social media is that
it supports group and
team collaboration.
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32. Wikis ‐ or editable web pages ‐
provide another way of working
collaboratively on a common
resource, e.g. building a knowledge
base or resource area. Once again
there are a range of wiki tools
available to do this, but PBWorks is a
useful one
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33. When working within a team or group you
might want to have a shared group
workspace where you have access to a
number of social media tools to work
together as a group. Grou.ps is a free tool
that easily lets you set up a secure, private
group space with social networking
functionality, forums, blogs, wikis etc as
well as RSS feed.
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34. 7 – Improving your personal
productivity
Here are some further tools that will
help to improve your personal
productivity as well as aggregate
the resources and tools
you already have.
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36. Another useful tool is a personal
online dashboard. This lets you
keep track of all your online
activities in one place, and is also
know as a "start page". One of the
most popular dashboards is iGoogle,
which lets you create a customised
version of the Google home page as
your personal start page, where you
can aggregate content from
different social media tools.
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37. There are many other tools that
can help to improve your
personal productivity, e.g. tools
for keeping your computer
backed‐up, for information and
time management, as well as
note taking. Many tools also
provide collaboration features so
can also support team
productivity.
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38. Find the complete Guide
at
bit.ly/some4job
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