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Information overload causes even the best leaders to quickly become overwhelmed with today’s plethora of information resources.  Social Networking is the new buzz for enterprise networking because it has inadvertently created a way to consolidate those various sources of information into useful communities. Controlling the flow of the information torrent coming at Enterprises is such a critical marketspace that Cisco, Google, Microsoft, and IBM are spending millions to exploit it. 

Let me share with you a standard set of tools currently being used for corporate messaging (read marketing) and how you can configure them to channel the information you consume into a set of relevant views for yourself and others.

Let’s start with the basics: corporate web sites, blogs, twitter, facebook, and linked-in. These are the common tools of the web marketing trade.

Companies have spent millions of dollars building web sites that portray a corporate image for the masses.  Spending millions in advertising, press releases and product announcements to drive people to those sites, web sites still tend to be static, like electronic catalogues and store fronts.  Web sites are the destination that you, as a consumer, are being driven to.

Blogs, anyone who watches television has heard the term blog, but most consumers still do not know what it is or if they do, they are not comfortable with the concept of sharing their private lives publicly.  Blogs are electronic diaries that popped up when technical exhibitionists found a way to share their lives with the world.  The corporate world latched on to the concept of sharing information more dynamically without having to re-develop their expensive web sites. Businesses started to use them to have dynamic conversations with their consumers, market analysts and the public at large.  The comments shared with the company could then be published with the original content and create a conversation.  However, the consumer either had to be driven to the corporate blog or had to search it out.

Micro-blogs, like twitter, take the concept of a blog to a whole new level.  They are a public record of thoughts expressed in only 140 characters or less.  Millions of people now had a voice to participate dynamically in individual thoughts shared by everyone, celebrities, politicians, CEOs, musicians, and common everyday people.  Communities formed to have electronic conversations.  Simply by searching key words you could find people, companies, anyone who had posted a thought.  Then you could follow them, keeping track of the conversations or the individuals.

Facebook and Linked-in gave protected forums to people to connect and share with people they already knew or had professional relationships with.  They combined blogging with micro-blogging, organized communities with ad-hoc communities,and social applications that could be used by all.

The population of these social communities is in the range of 100’s of millions of participants. That means the conversation threads are in the billions if not trillions.  That information can be harnessed and provide you with a competitive informational advantage in understanding market trends, reaching consumers and building a corporate image.

I will not go into the entire eco-system in this article but let present this example to tie the components together.

                  My small consulting company has a web site and a blog. (I did not spend millions on either).  I have facebook and linked-in accounts for myself where I am a member of several communities.  I also have a twitter account for myself @stephensdd and for the company @collaborate_kde.  My goal is to drive people to web site where the will learn that we do VoIP training, technical and business consulting. In order to provide value I post articles to the blog and to e-zines.  Up to this point I’ve relied on search engine optimization to get “found”.  Recently I began to use twitterfeed.com to automatically post to the company twitter account every time I create a blog entry.  Each post makes me a part of the searchable conversation, and I draw in followers who then monitor my tweets,then blogs, then the web site. 

            This is not news for those already familiar with twitter, but twitter added something this week that is extremely useful.  Twitter lists. Until this week if I wanted to follow IT analysts for industry trending I had to follow each one individually combing work and personal tweets on the same page causing that dreaded information overload and providing little value.  Now I can create a Twitter list and call it any thing I want, like collaborate_kde/Collaboration_Experts.  I can then add, @CiscoCollab,@Tandberg, @MicrosoftSharepoint (these are made up) and@UCStrategies to alist.  When I want to follow theconversation for that list I simply click on it and I can see the industry conversation trending, product announcements, legal announcements and the like in one view.  That view is separate from my personal tweets and from other industries I may be tracking.

            Two final thoughts on Twitter lists, first they are public and anyone who finds your list on a key word search can follow your list and second you can follow your own company account in the same list.  If I desire to elevate my corporate image to my consumers to demonstrate my industry expertise, than what better way to have my tweets in the same list as the tweets from the giants in my industry.  Since I own the list I am the only one who can modify which accounts it will follow.

            I can now have my other social sites like facebook and linked-in follow my tweets and automatically re-post the same information with one simple entry into the blog. 

Now my 300 + Facebook friends and my 400 plus contacts on linked-in will be notified that I am actively writing articles like this to help you all achieve success in communication!  Good luck and happy tweeting, as always feel free to chime in and make this blog more dynamic.