Cooperation

How do we use social media to promote teamwork in your business? There are several tools which we might use, but first lets define what we are talking about.

Cooperation

Cooperation involves the breaking down of a task into separate pieces which can be completed by separate individuals and recombined to complete the larger task. This is different to collaboration which involves mixing peoples efforts on the same task. Some of the social media tools you might use for co-operation in your business are

• Media Sharing – it is easy now to share your media through different social networks. you can now share you music, videos and photos, examples are through Picasa, Flickr, Instragram, Facebook and Twitter. Having these documents, images and videos shared effectively is invaluable for quickly making new material available to the team, additionally this can help limit duplication of efforts and out of date documentation.

• Social Bookmarking –allows sharing of websites with others example through  Stumbleupon, Digg etc. This is a great tool for leveraging online resources for support, training or creative purposes within the team. Having the bookmarks grouped allows quick and easy sharing with larger groups.

Connection

Connection 

Tools for Connection

• Social Networking:

Niall Cook talks about the value of Social Networking:  “connection tools relies much on connecting employees with content and each other”. Social Networking allows people (customers and businesses) to connect with each other, connecting online based on ones  hobbies, causes or interests they share. Furthermore  within business Social Networking is increasingly becoming an important marketing avenue and a vital feedback source.

• Search :

Search engines can be great for finding information, or spectacularly useless. It is commonly the case with not-so-spectacular engines to end up with no results, or a million results that you dont want. One approach to fixing this issue has been the rise of social search, primarily supported by the idea of tagging. Tagging a page or document allows context to the result beyond the media itself. Rather than finding a result based on whats in the document, you can find it based on what the previous person used it for, or their interpretation of its usefulness. This can create much more relevant results when the community is active enough to tag appropriately.

• RSS :

RSS helps people to be subscribed to their favorite sites and have it updated every time there in changes or additions to the site. This tool saves time in the same way that Facebook updates save you checking all your friends pages individually. Within a company an RSS feed could also be used to ensure the quick dissemination of information to staff.