A WORKING SMARTER RESOURCE A Practical Guide to using Social Media in your Job An overview Jane Hart
Centre for Learning & Performance Technologies bit.ly/some4job

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

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 A Practical Guide to using Social Media in your Job 3

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

If you can't find the answer in your organisation's intranet or learning portal, then you, like millions of other people probably go to Google. In
fact Google.com receives 7.2 billion daily page views and 620m daily visitors. But are you getting the most out of Google? In How to use Google to search effectively, we look at some of the clever ways you can use Google to get the best search results. A Practical Guide to using Social Media in your Job 5

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 A Practical Guide to using Social Media in your Job 6

Wikipedia and YouTube usually rank quite highly on a search results list. But what other sources are useful and valuable that you should know about?
We list some useful sources of information and instruction. A Practical Guide to using Social Media in your Job 7

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. A Practical Guide to using Social Media in your Job 8

Be kept informed about what's happening by monitoring the web for new content using
Google Alerts. A Practical Guide to using Social Media in your Job 9

Read industry, analyst or organisation
blogs where new postings are being
made all the time.
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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 A Practical Guide to using Social Media in your Job 11

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. A Practical Guide to using Social Media in your Job 12

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. A Practical Guide to using Social Media in your Job 13

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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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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Yammer is a private micro‐sharing service for both in‐company and community use ‐ based on 140 character updates.
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4 ‐ Communicating with your colleagues Communication is a key aspect of working
effectively and productively in your team, department or organisation. A Practical Guide to using Social Media in your Job 17

Email has become the standard way of communicating online, whether it be friends, family, colleagues or business.
Web‐mail has now become very popular, particularly Gmail, because it is accessible from any computer ‐ at home or work. A Practical Guide to using Social Media in your Job 18

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 A Practical Guide to using Social Media in your Job 19

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. A Practical Guide to using Social Media in your Job 20

If instant messaging is blocked in your organisation, as it sometimes is, other alternatives are online talk and video groups, like Voxopop and Zorap. A Practical Guide to using Social Media in your Job
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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 A Practical Guide to using Social Media in your Job 22

5 ‐ Sharing resources, ideas and experiences with your colleagues A key feature of the use of social media is that
it supports sharing ‐ of resources, ideas and experiences. A Practical Guide to using Social Media in your Job 23

Sharing calendars: One of the simplest things to share is your calendar, this will let you easily schedule meetings and events with
others. One useful tool for doing this is to use Google Calendar A Practical Guide to using Social Media in your Job 24

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. A Practical Guide to using Social Media in your Job 25

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 A Practical Guide to using Social Media in your Job 26

Sharing resources: If you want to share resources like photos, videos, documents, presentations, etc) with others,
there are a number of major hosting sites that allow you to upload your own resources and then share them privately or publically with others, e.g. Flickr for images, YouTube for videos and screencasts, Slideshare and Prezi for presentations. A Practical Guide to using Social Media in your Job 27

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. A Practical Guide to using Social Media in your Job 28

5 – Collaborating with your colleagues A further aspect of the use of social media is that
it supports group and team collaboration. A Practical Guide to using Social Media in your Job 29

Collaborative working normally refers to a group of people working together to create a document, presentation, spreadsheet etc. Online office suites let people work
together on a file and have an equal ability to add, edit, or delete items in it. Working collaboratively in this context means only one version of the document is maintained ‐ rather than multiple copies showing different edits. Google Docs is the most online office/collaboration suite. A Practical Guide to using Social Media in your Job 30

There are also a range of live text collaboration tools that support real‐time collaborative writing and useful for ad hoc collaboration, e.g. TypeWithMe.
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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 A Practical Guide to using Social Media in your Job 32

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. A Practical Guide to using Social Media in your Job 33

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. A Practical Guide to using Social Media in your Job 34

Having a good online experience is essential in order to manage your own personal productivity, so it goes without saying you need a good web
browser, as it is your "window on the web world". Firefox is a very popular, free, open source browser. One of the reasons for its popularity is the thousands of add‐ons available for it which increases its functionality. A Practical Guide to using Social Media in your Job 35

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. A Practical Guide to using Social Media in your Job 36

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. A Practical Guide to using Social Media in your Job 37

Find the complete Guide
at
bit.ly/some4job
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