Jargon, Jargon, Everywhere

What the heck is the difference between "collaboration," "unified communication," and "social media?"  Plenty, but they're all members of the same family. 

This dinosaur views:

Collaboration as the largest container, the bucket that they all fall in.  Collaboration, in essence, is about working together.  Shrug.  All three embrace this.

Unified Communication, or "UC" as it's familiarly called, is about collaborating using realtime communciation tools, such as phone, video, IM, web conferencing and marrying them into offline communication tools like email and voicemail.

Social Media has less to do with realtime communicating and more to do with bringing communities together using web technology -- for a teen, that means keeping up with friends; for an organization, it's typically bringing corporate and customer together.

Perhaps the better question is why are these terms used as if they're interchangeable?  And the answer is:  nobody's read this post yet.

Sharepoint Evolves Too

It would appear that Sharepoint is getting a social facelift. Microsoft bought Yammer, now Sharepoint benefits.  Well good.  About darn time.  Sharepoint interface is terrible on its own. Of all the dinosours out there, (and you ARE one, Bill) Microsoft needs to figure out its evolution faster than the rest in order to stay on top.

Quotable Quotes: Tim Berners-Lee

I'm borrowing Sima Odugbemi's Quote of the Week here:

Berners-Lee’s belief that his invention is unfinished has turned the geek into an activist. “The web is a social invention as much as a technical invention,” he says. “It’s the whole cat and mouse game between the readers and writers that makes the web work.”

The quote comes from Financial Times writer Andrew Edgecliffe-Johnson, in his September 7, 2012 article, "Lunch with the FT: Tim Berners-Lee"

I have long believed that tech support is 80% psychology and only 20% technology, so this resonates.  The web is at least 50% social -- nothing shocking there, but we tend to forget that technology alone does not make a thing "work."  If it did, then, as the article also points out, then GOPHER from U-MN might be our world wide web right now.

Techies can forget that the solution is not "the thing." It's the USE of the solution that's the thing.

So techies, don't blow off the public speaking courses, don't deride Powerpoint, don't ignore the phone calls of your communications/outreach teams. Embrace social.

Unified Communications by Another Name

Had a situation recently where a big boss said they didn't like the term "unified communication" and wanted a strategy position prepared that used "some other term."  I was stumped.

How do you take a term that's already pretty entrenched in the industry and change it without losing a lot of the helpful associations that come with it?  We brainstormed and came up with "communication connections" and "universal communication" and "anytime anywhere communication" but none really satisfied.  After a few revisions of the presentation, we put UC back in.  Everything else connoted something we weren't intending!

I completely understand that prunes are now calling themselves dried plums -- sure!  Prunes have a bad rap as cheap, fuddy dud laxatives whereas dried plums sound kinda yuppie and upscale.  But UC was never a prune -- it's always been a plum.  Who doesn't want UC?  No sense discarding a label that actually works for you.