Emerson Exchange 2008 Workshop Resources
Feeding That Inner Geek While Sharing Your Expertise and Interests
Presentation by Jim Cahill and Deb FrankePresentation
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JC -- Hello everyone! Thank you for joining us today for Feeding that Inner Geek while sharing your expertise and interests. I'm Jim Cahill, self-proclaimed Chief Blogger and marketing communications manager for Emerson Process Management. My co-presenter today is Deb Franke. We both work for Process Systems and Solutions, home of DeltaV, in Austin Texas.
DF – Our plan is to spend 30 minutes reviewing our eight favorite ways to feed our inner geeks. We will share with you our personal stories not to impress you but to impress upon you what is possible. We hope to inspire you to try using one or possibly all of these tools to supercharge your own results.
These cards we’ve passed out are for your questions and favorite geek treats. We’ll collect the cards after the presentation; address as many as we can in our allotted time; and post all responses from both sessions on the Emerson Process Experts blog.
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JC – Before we begin feeding our inner geeks, let’s talk a bit about our ways. We believe that geeks come in various flavors. I want to put it all out there and live on the surface. I can’t help but try any new bleeding edge beta application that comes along that’s part of the collaborative sharing genre, often dubbed Web 2.0. I like to immerse in lots of high-tech RSS feeds and podcasts to keep up with what’s happening on the technology front--over lunch or early on weekend mornings while the house is still.
DF – Jim and I are REALLY different. Jim likes the surface and I am a privacy freak. The thought of sharing my daily life as it’s happening and with the entire world that just happens to create a permanent record that will follow me around FOREVER… freaks me out. But I’m doing it!
My advice for other plain vanillas – if I can do it; so can you. Start with baby steps to overcome the two big fears. The fear of lost privacy and the fear that you don’t have time for these new activities. As a reformed workaholic, more work is the last thing I need. But as soon as I stopped believing in the false walls between my business life and my personal life I have begun to achieve more without giving up anything. That’s because these tools allow me to work smarter… not harder… not more.
Another way Jim and I differ is that I do not enjoy being an early adopter. The bleeding edge isn’t where I want to be. Only when I see a solid platform with demonstrated value do I jump aboard.
Regardless of your love or hate of the bleeding-edge. if you live on the surface or really like privacy we encourage you to reflect on our different approaches, our lessons learned, and keep an open mind as we look at each of the tools to consider how each can serve you.
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DF – What else makes for success?
We see a mix of qualities in ourselves and other geeks that contribute to success. One thing we’ve noticed is an attitude of curiosity. When we are curious, our minds are full of questions (and we're comfortable with new and different things). Most of these social media tools are ever-changing and with the emerging technologies and community inputs; a curious mind helps to cope with the ever-present changes.
Interest in discovery
JC – I think a lot of the things that makes engineers and folks involved in technology, who they are, is the joy in discovering new things and figuring out how to make it work.
Willingness to share
JC – Most geeks I know including me really can’t help themselves when they discover something new. They have to share it with others they know possess this kindred spirit. The really cool thing is that there are more ways to share and more way to discover other kindred spirits with some of these Web 2.0 applications we’re gonna talk about.
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DF – And if you are still reluctant, don’t worry… you won’t be the first and you won’t be alone. This 60 Minutes story, Get me the Geeks, was first broadcasted in January 2007.
Now for the treats. Jim will begin with Google Reader.
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JC – Robert Scoble, once Microsoft’s most popular blogger and now with Wired magazine, said it best in a recent Twitter tweet, “Google Reader makes me smarter than anything else I have found online. The stuff I find there is remarkable. Keep it up!”
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JC – Google reader is first a great RSS reader. If aren’t already using RSS or really simple syndication, you really should. It flips the model of seek and find around to having what you want flow to you as it’s created. It’s free to use. Just go to Google.com/reader to get started.
It also has a mobile version if your phone is web-enabled. This is great for when you have time on your hands like sitting at an airport gate waiting to board and want to read the things that interest you.
One of the big objections I hear from folks is that they have too much to read already. What I say is that RSS is only for what you want to read. There is no obligation attached. If you’re too busy, mark them “all read”... No worries.
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JC – Google reader has a sharing function. The sharing is cool, because if you find something that interests you, you click share and perhaps add a comment on why you find it interesting.
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JC - Anyone who is subscribed to your RSS feed sees what you find interesting. Promoting your feed is as easy as adding a hyperlink to your email footer. It’s way easier than blogging and can be very valuable to others as Robert Scoble points out.
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JC – There’s also a bookmarklet you can add to your web browser like Firefox or Internet Explorer. This means you don’t even have to be in Google Reader to express your interests. You can share any web page you come across and find interesting. You may have done this with emailing URLs in the past. This is really convenient for you and easy for others to jump on and off your RSS feed.
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DF – Thanks Jim. Let’s jump to Treat #2 Delicious.com.
Think of Google Reader as the way to create and share a stream of interests, Delicious is the place for the interesting things you want to save. Before I used Delicious and I found information on the web that I wanted to keep and use, I did a few different things. I printed it or copied the link or bookmarked the site which all worked fine but the thing is that I’m on the web all over the place -- at home, at work, my phone, in RSS, and let’s not forget all those interesting links that friends email me.
Just looking for the stuff I had saved could take hours… but that was BEFORE using Delicious.
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Delicious is a Yahoo site that allows you to easily tag and save web information in a single place. You can choose to share your aggregated information with the world or keep it private. Delicious gives you the freedom to be PC and device independent, and you can add notes to the items so you can quickly remember why you saved it.
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A real world example of a new way Jim and I used Delicious this year is this workshop. We gathered our ideas with a special tag in our delicious accounts and now you can easily link to all our source materials with no extra effort from us. It was so fast and easy; it almost feels like cheating compared to the old school way of doing it.
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JC – OK, third in our tour of eight is LinkedIn, one of the most used social and contact management web applications for business professionals like us.
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JC – Like everything else we’ve discussed to this point, LinkedIn is free to use. It also has a mobile web interface so you can easily access it on your phone.
LinkedIn is an application where you can link up with folks you know, be it business and/or personal relationships. I’ve seen it used mainly in a business context, where you link up with people you meet through the course of your business dealings. You can share as much or as little of your experience and accomplishments as you’d like. Me, I put my complete resume out there!
It has an interesting feature where you can follow those you connect with to see who they connect with, and out again even one more level. You have control over how much information you share about yourself and your network. There are affinity groups you can join and a question and answer section where you can ask your network questions and provide answers, demonstrating your expertise. I find it useful to find out more about who I’m working with and their background.
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JC – I had the honor of being in a Wall Street Journal article about company bloggers and linked in with the author of the story. She sends out calls for information on stories she’s writing. Most times, I don’t have anything to contribute, but it’s great to be connected with her through LinkedIn for the opportunity. As you build your social network, it’s great to have this resource to ask questions or share your expertise when asked.
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JC – One final note before we leave LinkedIn. Google and other search engines index the LinkedIn profiles and make you more findable to folks you may have lost touch with over time.
If you join LinkedIn or are an existing member, consider sending Deb and me a link invitation to help get your network started or continuing to grow.
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DF – For Treat#4, let’s take a look at how you can stay connected with mobile broadband services.
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DF – This is the single biggest change in the last year for me. I dumped my DSL at home and gave up on looking for hotspots. Instead with this Sierra Wireless device from Sprint that plugs into any PC’s USB port, I’m in business almost anywhere.
This little goodie has allowed me to make use of all the blocks of time when I’m waiting and traveling. Waiting at the car wash, a doctor’s office, or dealership…
Boom those half-hour blocks are now super productive. And no more VPN headaches. None of those situations of partial offline work; then the pile of things left over for when I’m back in the office. No more flaky wi-fi’s.
During my first trip to Chicago with the new device, I got 40 minutes of work after the security check in Austin; 20 minutes changing planes in Houston, and on the return flight… the 3-hour weather delay at O’Hare, frustrated my fellow travelers but I happily sat by an outlet, plugged in, and it was as if I was at the office. I made decisions, took actions, and moved on. I have super productivity in small blocks of time thanks to this lovely little device.
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JC – Number 5 on the hit parade… Twitter… something difficult to explain yet something I find so darn useful. It’s a service that’s now a few years old and rapidly growing in use. Anyone here ever tried it?
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JC – It’s a cross between a micro-sized blog where you can express your thoughts in 140 characters or less, instant messaging, and mobile texting. It works on a very simple model where you choose who you want to follow, and in turn others may choose to follow you. There is also a block function to block those who you don’t want to follow you. This is something I’ve yet to use.
If you have established a follow relationship between one another, you can also send private messages, called direct messages to one another. I’ve set this up to have these direct messages come to my mobile phone as text messages. It’s really easy to set up.
You can send tweets from a web browser, desktop clients like Twhirl, mobile web browsers and through text messages on your phone. There’s even voice-to-text interfaces like a service called JOTT or TwitterPhone where you call a number and it converts your voice message to a text tweet.
We have a number of Emerson folks who use Twitter to share both work and personal interests. There’s also members of the trade press like Automation World’s Gary Mintchell and Control magazine’s Walt Boyes who tweet. I’ve learned more about other folks and their interests in a few months of Twittering than I have in years of knowing them in various capacities.
One big word of warning with this. It took me 6 months to figure out why I’d ever want to use this. If you sign up expect some “scratching the head” time to understand the value in this.
If you sign up for Twitter, please consider following Deb and me. We’ll get an email and the opportunity to follow you in return.
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JC – We’ve created a Twitter group around the DeltaV system for the purpose of building a community to ask and answer questions. Our numbers are still small, in double digits, but continue to grow. The URL listed shows a wiki page I set up to describe Twitter and how our DeltaV Twitter community works.
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JC – Here’s an example where questions have been asked and answered. In this case, I received an email asking about how to extract a list of DeltaV equipment IDs. A few members that follow the DeltaV account “tweeted” their thoughts.
Although the numbers are small, the value of the information exchanged will grow as the numbers who join increase, because of the breadth of experience shared.
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JC – I’ll close my thoughts on Twitter with two very practical uses. The first is real-time note taking. If you have a Twitter account and a phone with texting or mobile web capability, you can provide quick notes on things you hear and learn. If you add #EmEx you share these with others who know to use this tag to search. To search, go to Search.twitter.com and enter this #EmEx tag. And, to really be on top of things, subscribe to the RSS search so you get notified when anybody else tweets using this tag.
The second practical use is social meetups. If Deb and I decide that we should all meet at the lobby bar or some other spot at some time during the Exchange, it’s far easier to use Twitter to announce the meeting spot and tag it with #EmEx, than to call, text, or email to meet.
Make sure to establish your Twitter account, tag your posts with #EmEx and look for or organize those impromptu meetups.
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DF – Flickr is our #6 Treat. Flickr is a Yahoo site that allows you to upload photos, tag them, and easily search and share them with the world.
This is one of those sites where I had work to get past the noise to see the opportunity.
Ever heard the proverb “A picture is worth a thousand words”? Do you believe it? Well I do and I’ve seen reports from May that Flickr has more than 30 million unique monthly visitors. There’s something going on here and it’s offering more than just a place for family photos.
Let’s explore some possibilies. Think about the number of times you’ve said or heard “I wish you could see this” or “What does it look like?”
I experience this often because I, like many of you, am part of globally dispersed teams. We can’t just walk down the hall to take a look at something together.
I find in many situations a picture is the fastest and easiest way to capture or understand something.
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DF – So let’s expand on this a bit. How about situations when you ask “Do you know how to ______?”
Might it also be true that a picture is still the fastest and easiest way to understand something? While this first example is related to photography – how to put pretty stuff in water drops – there’s no rule that Flickr is only about photography.
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DF – Here is another example. This person has used Flickr to also host a tutorial. A different format but the same principle…. Flickr offers a way to share knowledge and a place where you can find quick answers.
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DF – Another example. This photo is of a wireless transmitter. While this photo was public, Flickr allows you to have private collections too. Imagine how many dusty manuals exist that can be replaced by a Flickr photo and description that would be accessible to everyone at any location.
These are just a few examples but I encourage you to brainstorm how Flickr can help you teach, archive, and learn.
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DF – And of course it doesn’t have to be all work and no play. An update from our talk last year is that we have completed the move of our Duncan@Play photo collection to Flickr . It is now super easy to add and see the hundreds of photos of our lovable spokesnonperson.
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DF – Very similar to using photos to share expertise, YouTube is lucky number 7 on our agenda and is for videos.
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DF – YouTube has 52 million unique visitors a month and when you get past the noise, you’ll find YouTube offers more than entertainment. For instance, we are currently moving our DeltaV video case studies and product demos to YouTube. Let’s look at other examples.
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DF – Businesses are creating educational videos. This example from Google Developers teaches you how to build a Google Gadget.
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DF – Professors are posting their classroom lectures.
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DF – In this example, step-by-step tutorials are created by product communities to help each other learn.
It’s very exciting to live at a time when the only reason to be ignorant on any subject matter is that we choose to be. YouTube truly offers you personal development for free.
Jim has a great story to illustrate this point.
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JC – My personal use story involves my son. He’s gotten into Guitar Hero and developed my love for 70s and 80s rock. He started playing around with a real acoustic guitar we had around the house. We discovered that YouTube is filled with tutorials of people showing the fingerings of most of the classic rock songs. I showed him a video like this of the Guns and Roses song, Sweet Child ‘o Mine and he was ripping the difficult intro in a few minutes. Too bad I didn’t have YouTube as a youngster when I was plinking around with a guitar!
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JC – OK, our last stop on the geek tour is Friendfeed.
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JC – Think of it as the place which pulls all of your online presence together, by virtue of tying together all of the RSS feeds from all of the applications you use. Things like your Google Reader shared feed, your Delicious saved items, your LinkedIn activities, your Twitter tweets, your Flickr photos your YouTube videos, and a whole lot more that we simply don’t have time to cover. The screen a right shows a number of additional services, and if you check it today, the list is even longer than when this screen capture was taken a few months back.
Friendfeed’s model is just like Twitter where you can choose to follow who you want to follow, and others in turn can choose to follow you.
What I personally like best about Friendfeed is that it is a human-powered discovery system of interesting stuff. Unlike Google and its algorithmic way of determining what should be atop the index, Friendfeed displays what other people find interesting and have willingly shared. And like blogs, others can jump in with comments and express if they like a particular entry. Like my Google Reader RSS feeds, I like to check my Friendfeed over lunch or in the quiet of a weekend early morning.
If you google Web 2.0 you’ll find about 430 million hits, so what we’ve presented is by no means an inclusive list. It’s what we’ve tried and found valuable in some way.
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JC – Personally, one of the most exciting things about this journey into the social media / Web 2.0 space is the increased visibility for my thoughts and ideas. I share the following not to brag but to demonstrate the possibilities of using these applications to put your expertise and geekdom out there.
In the famed Google vanity search, I’ve bypassed two Jim Cahill politicians. Two business books have described what we’ve tried to do with the blog, including the current Groundswell best seller.
And just the week before last, I had the honor of being a keynote presenter at an ISA conference for automation supplier sales and marketing folks.
You just never know what can happen if you’re willing to put your expertise out there for the world to discover. For me, it’s been a heck of a lot of fun.
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DF – I couldn’t agree more. So, there you have it - our last slide.
As I mentioned earlier, all of the source materials for this presentation can be found at Delicious.com. This presentation is available on Slideshare.net and on Jim’s Emerson Process Experts blog. Let's get started with those questions and even more geek treats… please pass the cards to the front and we'll power through as many as possible in the remaining minutes.
JC – We really appreciate your time and listening to our ideas today. We hope you take a few of these ideas back to fill your inner geek and to be inspired to use them to have more fun and be more productive and successful in everything that you do.
For those of you who saw our workshop last year and remember that we had only one slide with a bulleted list! We thought we’d push ourselves to new heights, so there you have it—40 slides without a single bullet. We hope this feat does not prompt new turmoil here in the capital city or get us in trouble with the PowerPoint police!
Thank you!