Someone asked me yesterday in a meeting: how many times a day should my people be tweeting?  He has been asked to provide his team’s plan for social media. He was having a hard time wrapping his head around what that meant as far as actual deliverables to expect from his reports, and what outcomes were actually expected of his team.

So he asked me: how many times a day should my reports tweet? How often should they blog?

He admitted that he didn’t get social media, but he knew he had to include an element of social media in his planning. In all fairness, he was looking out for his team. They are already oversubscribed on the content they need to produce – technical solutions marketing materials. In his mind, he’s trying to keep from adding another time consuming task to his team’s plate.

So we had a discussion, which I think was a little frustrating to someone who wanted to come out of the meeting with a simple checklist.

How do you “do” social media?

Is it possible to make a checklist? What activities should be on that checklist?

I think many times people equate social media with a set of tools. So they may have a checkbox on a marketing plan for social media, and to them that means they will send some tweets, add a post to Facebook and maybe a LinkedIn group, and write a blog. To me, this is not “doing” social media. This is using social media tools for corporate communication.

To me, doing social media is using all of the cool social media tools to build community. If you are using social media for marketing, the beauty of social media is that you can find your audiences and interact with directly with them. You audience is already engaged, perhaps even in a community about your product, on the social media tools we commonly think of using (Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, Flickr, YouTube, etc). You can use these tools to find your audience, to deliver content, and to invite them to a different online meeting place, etc. You can get to know them as real people, and they will trust you enough to tell you what they really think about your services and products. The interaction part is what doing social media is all about.

What is the profile of the people on your team

This team is made up of customer facing SMEs. One of the goals is to make sure their expertise is known to our customers and partners. The individuals on this team really do need a social presence, but how can we get them there when their boss is already concerned about their available bandwidth?

This was easy to explain from a thought leadership perspective. I suggested that everyone on the team become Dell SMAC certified. Then they should follow a list of thought leaders on Twitter, and see how those folks engage and use social media tools to talk about storage topics. Spending a little time listening and interacting with the storage community with the goal of becoming part of that community is what should dictate how the individuals on the team use that tool.

I also suggested thinking of ways of integrating social media tasks into the normal work flow for his team. For instance, if a new solutions paper is released, that person also should tweet the link, write a blog post, work with my team to organize a Google Plus hangout or Twitter chat, etc. There should be a predictable pattern of events that happen with every project, so that the individuals can guarantee a slow drip-feed of good content to our external communities. This should be the bare minimum of involvement from his team members, the goal would be to find a few individuals who want to do even more.

So how many times a day should I tweet?

Even though the person I was meeting with is a solutions marketer, he still didn’t like it when I said “it depends”. Since he was making a list and metrics for his team, any number I gave to appease him would have been too high (you aren’t tweeting enough) or too low (why are you tweeting so much!!). He wanted to know to recognize tweeting success. Someone else on the call said “when they are having discussions with other well-known storage SMEs on Twitter”. I said, when other people tweet questions to your team members, you will know you they are successful.

I think in the end, he decided 2 tweets a week was a good number. Sigh. I guess #FF could count for one, right?

I offered my help to mentor and hand-hold the members of his team, and to introduce them online. I also reminded him that none of this is set in stone, and I’m looking forward to working with his team and seeing what ideas everyone else has.

How would you have answered this question – how many times a day should I tweet?

I’ve been an information junkie my entire life. I will read anything I can get my hands on. When I was a little girl I read almost all of the books in my school library, but during the summers there was a problem. We lived pretty far away from the public library. Luckily there was a bookmobile that came around, and read almost everything on that too.

I was an expert at researching the Reader’s Guide to Periodic Guide Literature (kids that’s what we used before Google). I’ve always loved to tap into whatever it took to get the scoop on a story, and to find out how something worked. I’m sure this inner librarian bug I have is why I love social media.

Me perusing the Reader's Periodic Guide to Literature

In this post, I’m going to explain how I curate social information using Twitter and my RSS Reader. I may update this in a few weeks once I obtain my Dell SMaC certification. From what I understand,there are some pretty cool tools to tame the social data deluge that are available once you get that certification – I’ll report on that later.

Twitter

In addition to using clients that allow you to separate tweets into streams, I use lists and favorites to capture interesting nuggets of info.

Here are the Twitter directions for making lists. You only get 20 lists, and you can have up to 500 Twitter accounts on each list. I have some huge generic buckets for my lists (edupeeps, emcpeeps, storage). I have a list for my family, because their tweets get lost (and they get mad at me when I miss something). You can also follow lists that other people have created. I love following conference lists, because it gives you an organized list of people who are in the same industry, but don’t necessarily tweet about the same topics. Also, most Twitter clients allow you to access lists you have created on Twitter.

I use Twitter favorites to bookmark tweets. Most of the time I’m on my Android when I do this. I’ll see a tweet with an interesting-looking link but I don’t have time to really read the link. I’ll bookmark it, and then several times a week I go through the bookmarked tweets.

My biggest Twitter advice: don’t try to read every single tweet. You will just make yourself crazy. Create lists to organize the folks you follow. If you are new, follow lists other folks have created, you will probably make some new Twitter friends that way.

RSS Reader

RSS stands for Really Simple Syndication. Most social content will allow you to pull the RSS feed of their content into an RSS reader. I tried to find a nice list of RSS readers, but there doesn’t seem to be one, maybe that will be a future blog post. If you want a more detailed explanation of RSS, check out this video.

I use Google Reader. I am subscribed to 276 RSS feeds. I have those organized into 29 folders. I always have more than 1000 unread blog posts. I like to browse through the reader at least once a week. I follow all sorts of feeds on topics ranging from storage, technology, our competitors, online comics, women in technology, food, autism, and general geeky goodness.

You won’t be able to keep up

Maybe the key is to managing the deluge of social information is to understand that you won’t be able to keep up. Do your best to organize the information you pull from social sources. If you are doing social for work, pay the most attention your work filters (ignore the geeky goodness if you start getting overwhelmed!). If you start pulling lots of information, be sure to set a filter for your family. And remember to leave time to be social, share some of the info you find with others and interact with the people who have shared the information with you.

Since I do social media in an Enterprise company, many times my friends, family, and owners of the small businesses I frequent ask me for help getting started in social media. Most times I don’t have the time to really help them out. Once I win the lottery maybe I will spend all of my time helping smaller businesses harness the power of the network…..but for now I still have to do my day job.

I thought I’d put together a quick primer so my friends and families could have a place to start when it comes to social media. Comments with more helpful links and advice are most welcome!

Before we get started – you need to have a plan

If you want to use social media for your biz, you need to incorporate it into your business plan. You can most likely adopt a very broad strategy other companies use, and customize it for your product or service.

In my organization, our broad strategy is listen –> message –> engage.

• You have to listen to find your audiences, understand trends, understand terminology, scope out the competitive landscape. We use a combination of RSS feeds fed into Google Reader, Hootsuite, and an eRoom database I built, but there are tons of other tools. Check out the comments in this thread for lots of other advice on listening tools.
• Next is messaging. The content you add to social media spaces should be crafted in line with your other marketing efforts. You may be able to attract people to your social spaces based on name recognition, but they won’t stay long if you don’t provide them with current, compelling, interesting content that is useful and interesting to THEM.
  Our strategy is to post the majority of our content in our Proven Professional community on the EMC Community network. We want to have all of our really in-depth conversations there, so we post content there and make sure to link to it from other social media locations.
• The last step is to engage. This is the part people find scary, because you actually have to talk with your audience in a open, unpredictable arena. Will they be nice to you? Will they mock you? Will they drag out some flaw in your product so everyone knows about it? OMG SCARY! You have to be ready for this. But this is where the goodness of social media comes from…actually being real and talking to people.
  You may want to check out the social media engagement report from the Altimeter group to get an idea of how enterprises are using social media to engage with their customers.
• OK I lied, that is not the last step. Now you go back to listening – this time adding listening for how people are interacting with your messaging. It’s like the circle of social media life!!

The Social Applications

I’m going to go over three applications I get asked about the most. The best way to learn more is to try these apps out in your personal space, and determine from there if they will fit into your business plan.

Facebook

• You want to be on Facebook because more than 500 million people are on Facebook, so there is a good chance your audience is there. Facebook is also easy to use, so that is a plus.
• You want a Fan page. This is important – don’t make a Facebook user for your business. Create a Fan page. This allows your users to connect with you, and depending on their privacy settings your updates will be posted to your fans’ timeline. This means your fans’ friends will potentially see your updates, and connect with you.
  Here’s an older Mashable article about the 5 things a successful fan page will have.
  Check out our fan pages (Proven Professional and Academic Alliance). We’ve connected our fan pages with our Twitter, YouTube, and Flickr accounts as well. We’re using apps from a company called Involver for that (and they are free!). We use Facebook to connect to our audiences, and to invite them to our community (where we do the bulk of our messaging/content creation). But if you don’t have the resources to maintain both, maybe a Facebook fan page is enough for you!

Twitter

• Twitter is a micro messaging tool. Users have 140 characters to get their message across. With Twitter, your customers can have a direct line to you! You can access Twitter using a web browser, a client you install on your computer or your smart phone, and even by using text messaging on your phone.
• If you are new to Twitter, you may want to use it to listen first. Do searches for your competition, set up a tool like Hootsuite or Tweetdeck to continually search for mentions of your business or important industry terms.
• Looking for help? I’ve written two Twitter cheat sheets. One of the best places to look for help is Pistachio Consulting’s oneforty web site.
• Just remember – Twitter is very “in the stream”. Its a powerful way to connect with influencers, but it should just be one of many tools in your social media infrastructure.

FourSquare

• You may remember it as an enjoyable playground game, but in social media terms Foursquare is a geo-location mobile application. You install it on a smart phone, and then if you have your GPS enabled you can “check-in” to the businesses you frequent. You get points for checking in, and you also are awarded badges. If you check-in to a locale more than anyone else, you become the mayor!
• Why use it? First of all your customers may be using it. They check in when they get to your shop, and they can also leave tips for others who visit. This morning I left a tip about the diner where we had breakfast. If you are eating at a popular place, sometimes the tips have good advice on what to order.
• Whether you use FourSquare or not, your customers are using it, and they are advising prospective customers if your place of business is a good place to spend money. Or if your place sucks. Because of this, at the very least Foursquare is probably someplace you want to monitor.
• You can also use FourSquare to reward your customers for using FourSquare to advertise your business. Recently I checked into a Marriott and got extra Marriott rewards points for showing the check-in to the front desk staff. That was cool and made me happy to be there!
• Foursquare can also be tied to Twitter and Facebook. This will give your business more visibility every time one of your customers checks-in.

That’s my overview of social media for business – the short version. I hope it is helpful. The most important thing to remember – talk to your audiences. If you are into just controlling your image, you probably want to stay away from social media. Because once you go social, you have to commit to be real.

This book review is about Social Media for Trainers: Techniques for Enhancing and Extending Learning by Jane Bozarth.

The first thing I want to say is that in my opinion, this book is not just for trainers. If you are trying to move from using social media for marketing to using social media to engage with your audiences, you should read this book.

You should also read this book if you are a trainer (or you develop training). The book starts by defining social media terms. Then each chapter covers a specific social media tool: Twitter, Facebook, Blogs, Wikis, and a catch-all chapter for other tools (such as Google docs, YouTube, social bookmarking, SlideShare, Skype, and UStream). The final chapter discusses social learning. Basically, if you need a primer on what all of these things are, you want to pick up this book.

This book is designed to help you situate your understanding of these tools to your own environment. Each chapter defines the tool, gives disadvantages and advantages of the tool in training situations, explains when the tool can be used instead of other things, or when it should be used in addition to other tools. Each chapter has a getting started page, and then a large section of practical examples.

For example, the Facebook and other communities chapter provides many examples of how to engage with learners, and how to draw them out into conversations. One suggestion was to “show that you are reading others’ posts by referring to them in your own posts; construct an argument, offering evidence and supporting resources, remember that a good post is one that gets people thinking and makes them want to reply”. Also the section on Intersession Work has two pages of suggestions on how to use Facebook group to extend a formal learning experience. But if you manage a community, you should check out some of the suggestions (don’t be surprised if you see some in the Proven Professional community soon!).

So yes, this is yet another post about education. If you deliver or create content for training, get this book. Or is this post more than just another education post? If you want to move to social media engagement, not just social media marketing, you should get this book too!

This post is cross-posted from the EMC Proven Professional Community on the EMC Community Network

Here are some of the highlights from the past week in the Proven  Professional Community:

eSeminar – reclaiming SAN storage

The link to the recording of this eSeminar has been posted in the Proven Professionals ONLY community. (Access issues?)

Knowledge Sharing 2011

Have you submitted an abstract yet?

Can you help out a fellow Proven Professional?

Why not share your expertise, and chime in on some of these open discussions?

• For you CLARiiON experts, someone has some naviseccli questions
• Its still not too late to comment on how your Proven Professinal certification has impacted you personally
• Are you a Networker Specialist? Can you advise someone who is just starting down that certification path?
• If you are one of the many Proven Professionals who accessed the Engineer to Engineer webinar on Unisphere in the Proven Professionals ONLY community, did you see that Kristine Cornwall is asking for your input into a new Unified community here on ECN? (Access issues?)

Blogs of interest to Proven Professionals

• VMware
  • What you need to know if you are planning to attend VMworld Copenhagen
  • EMC product support for vSphere 4.1
  • Chad is asking for input on what to talk about.. see his blog or visit the Everything VMware at EMC community here on ECN
  • Proven Professional Nick Weaver talks about VMFS datastores and Symmetrix SRDF-S
  • Nick also maintains a great Twitter list of the vSpecialists
  • Check Gregg’s blog for this week’s “All Things Virtual” to get all the virtual news of the past week
• Proven Professional Mark “Storagezilla” Twomey gives info about the upcoming NFSv4.1/pNFS BakeAthon
• Mark also has a great post about “fog”, which links to a paper on how to tell if your files that live in the cloud are vulnerable to disk drive crashes
• Mark also wants to know what you have in your home lab – comment here
• Proven Professional Steve Todd talks about the challenges of designing storage interfaces when the people using them may be storage novices
• For you Documentum users out there, Proven Professional Laurence Hart gives a nice round-up of what happened during this year’s EMC Writer’s Summit

What were you up to this week?

Share your week with us! I know its the end of the quarter, but why not take a break and be social here in the community! If you are feeling nervous about posting, why not start by just introducing yourself to everyone?

That’s all I have for this week. Keep safe, and we’ll do it again next week!

This post has been cross-posted from the EMC Proven Professional Community on the EMC Community Network.

Here are some of the highlights from the past week in the Proven Professional Community:

University Spotlight

The University Spotlight highlights one of the universites involved in the EMC Academic Alliance program. This month, the spotlight is on Georgia Southern University.There is a VMware IT Academy Center at GSU! Go read about professor (and Proven Professional) Dr. Timur Mirzoev, and listen to the recorded webinar that was held by EMC Education Services and Dr. Mirzoev on Digital Universe in the Cloud : Preparing Your Students for Careers in IT.

IDC cites impact of Proven certification. How does it impact you?

Speaking of being prepared for careers in IT…..the IDC white paper The Proven Professional Certification – Proving Certification Can Profit cited the impact of the Proven Professional certification program on the storage indutry skill gap. How does this impact you? We need your stories! Please add your Proven Professional story here!

Proven Benefit: Participate in Exam Building Workshops

If you have a Proven Professional certification, you are eligible to help write new Proven Professional exams. The schedule of exams the team needs participants for is located in this document in the Proven Professionals ONLY community. More information on eligibility for the exam building program, see this discussion.

If you are a Proven Professional, and are have problems accessing the exam building links, please use this troubleshooting document.

Blogs of interest to Proven Professionals

• Steve Todd is going to be a manager, and is expecting his new reports to become Proven Professionals!
• VMware
  • Here’s a list of all the VMware Twitter accounts
  • Gregg’s Blog (of EMC Consulting) has a great virtual round-up for all your VMware social media information needs.
  • Roy Mikes posted how to connect your iPad to VMware View
  • Techhead posted that vChat episode 3 is up, and its about vSphere home labs
• Alexander Holt (of EMC Consulting) talks about troubleshooting scripts (and the importance of remember the basics)
• Jas Dhalliwal (of EMC Consulting) explains the basics of an attack on a cloud, and mechanisms available to protect against that.
• Did you know there are two new SCSI commands? Barry Burke blogs about them here, and explains what they have to do with storage reclamation.

Did everyone survive Friday the 13th? I know from the post on the Proven Professional Facebook Fan page wall that lots of people are studying for Proven Professional certification exams, make sure to ask questions in the community if you need clarification on anything. We are a community of experts, we should be helping each other close that storage skills gap!

That’s all I have for this week. Keep safe, and we’ll do it again next week!

I took the commuter rail into Boston today for the Enterprise 2.0 conference. A guy sat next to me and pulled out his Vsphere book by my colleague at EMC Scott Lowe. Of course I had to start talking to the guy (you know me!).

I asked if he was studying for an exam, and he wasn’t. He’s a sysadmin at one of our customers, trying to stay in front of the curve. He asked me about Scott, and I said he’s a nice, smart, very knowledgeable guy. Then he told me – ask him this question for me. So as he spoke I typed his question into my phone:

And right away someone answered me:

I gave the guy my card, and wrote Scott’s twitter handle on the back. But he said he wasn’t on Twitter! So I also wrote down Tweetdeck.

Here you have a highly experienced sysadmin, who is using his commute to read up on a skill he knows he needs to acquire. Reading a book by an author who blogs, who tweets links to his blog (and other blogs) that provide critical information that would help this guy in his quest to learn this new skill. But he doesn’t know about it because he probably doesn’t have the vocabulary to explore the social tools that would connect him to this valuable network.

This makes me crazy! This sysadmin is obviously extremely motivated and experienced. And I honestly believe that it is time for the old geek prophecy to begin to come true: sysadmins will inherit the earth. They understand systems, storage, and networking. But they will still need to evolve their skills to truly rule the world. How can we get them to learn faster? How can we get them to trust Twitter?

Is this something learning professionals need to think about?

It’s the last day of December, the last day of 2009, the last day of a decade. But I still want to answer December’s Big Question:

What did you learn about learning in 2009?

Grad School

Personally, I took five graduate courses (for my Master’s degree in Instructional Systems at FSU)

• Development of Computer Courseware: I am not sure if learned anything new about learning in this course – I did learn that my organization at EMC does a very good job of creating computer courseware though!
• Inquiry and Measurement of Instructional Systems: This is the class that started me thinking differences in the language used by education people to describe measurements, and how these differ from language used by MBAs
• Web 2.0 Learning and Performance: I’m not sure if I learned anything new in this class either, but I did get to try out some new ideas I had about aggregating information sources. This is a great class, if you are in the IS program take it when it is offered!
• Introduction to Program Evaluation: This course introduced me to “The Standards“. They are pretty sense guidelines for conducting evaluations, but a nice reference.
• Performance Systems Analysis: This was  my HPT course. As much as we talk about innovation and doing things differently, all systems we analyze (at least from an academic standpoint) are built on principles created by the men who pretty much got us in this mess. Should we be studying them differently – as the bad examples maybe?

Blogging

According to the social signals for my blog posts at eLearning Learning, people liked the printable Twitter Cheat Sheet I posted.

Twitter was big last year. One of the most important additions to my PLE was #lrnchat. How amazing is it to be able to connect with education and performance experts from all fields? The remind me that there are so many ways to look at topics, not to fall into the trap of believing the hype, but to really analyze and evaluate systems…have reasons for the things you suggest and believe. And also not to take it all so seriously, that is nice too.

Another popular post (based on social signals) was one where I tried to find a definition for informal learning. I actually wrote this for one of my executives. I knew if I put my thoughts out there, my PLE would challenge it. And y’all did not disappoint!!

Wrangling with the idea of how to use communities in corporate learning took me back to my undergraduate days (my BS is in Information Studies) many times, especially in a post I made about Communities, PLEs, small groups, & power. This is something I’m still wrestling with. If Social Media is about the social, then finding a way to manage the power networks that allow (and prohibit) connections to networks is critical…especially in a highly political corporate environment. This is probably a core reason you can’t just build it (a community for learning) and expect learners to just show up. I’m sure this will be a big topic for me in 2010 as well.

I also wrote a post explaining how I personally use social media to learn. I compared it to fishing, I guess in a nod to my Gulf Coast heritage. I don’t think I’m unusual, especially for someone who works with technology. I still have to explain to people how important blogging is to me as a source of personal growth. The connections and shared information I’ve made from the blog have really helped me stretch and verify my thought processes.

Wrapping it up..

In summary, I’ve learned that I know lots more about learning than I knew. I’ve also learned that there is so much I have to learn. So, here’s looking to 2010. I’m sure I’ll have more provocative posts, and I’m sure you guys will knock my back down to reality!

For those of you who may have missed my tweets and Facebook updates, I’ve been on vacation this week. We rented a condo on the Gulf of Mexico in my hometown (I’ve learned that staying with family sorta negates the restful feeling vacation gives you).

The drive down was pretty uneventful. Once we checked into the condo we had some issues. First of all, we came down so we could go to the Billy Bowlegs Pirate festival. We planned to check into the condo, leave my daughter there (she has sensory issues that make navigating big noisy crowds a nightmare) and walk across the bridge to the landing. But our condo wasn’t ready. I asked for a time, asked when it would be ready, and was promised a call when it was ready.

They never called. We missed the landing. We decided to just show up and see if the condo was ready. It was. It probably had been, and they forgot about us because they were busy.

We got to the condo, and several things were just wrong. The AC was broken. The cable modem wasn’t connected to anything and we didn’t see a splitter. The shower curtain had crusty brown stuff on it. The icemaker wouldn’t dispense ice. Almost every single dish has a chip in it.

This is what our internet setup looked like:

I was trying hard to keep the vacation calm – but the AC and the internet were necessities. The AC because we are on the Gulf Coast in June. The internet because that is how we navigate things now – looking at menus, times, etc so that we have less stress from crowds, noise and all the things that can sabatoge our outings.

I called the front desk to tell them about these problems, and encountered some of the worst customer service I have ever had. I kept trying to explain that the cable modem was not hooked up, but the woman decided I was just too incredibly stupid to plug in an ethernet cable. I resisted the urge to tell her what I actually do for a living (create technical training for a product customers – like cable companies- use to manage these networks!!!) She finally informed me that I needed to call the cable company so they could walk me through plugging in the cable.

Yes, this made my happy vacation vibe slip for a moment. That’s when we decided to just jump on an unsecured wireless network from another unit in the condo. That worked fine until the cable company lost a core router and their service went down.

I never called about the other issues because of the complete unhelpfulness of the first person I talked to – the gatekeeper of customer service – was so rude. I had decided I’d deal with everything else and just blog about the experience later.

I called again Wednesday – 5 days into our trip – to complain again about the internet. The woman this time was very nice. So I told her about the icemaker, the dirty shower curtain, and the broken dishes. She sent people to fix things, and everyone who came out was very nice and competent. They replaced the wireless router.

And on Wednesday, I tweeted about the customer service FAIL I had encountered. And I included a reference to the rental company we are using – Resort Quest.

And someone was listening!

Someone called the room, made sure everything got fixed, and took care of us for our troubles. This is the level of customer service that I had expected from the very beginning of our trip. Because the management company was listening on twitter, there was a way to get around the original gatekeeper of customer service who had soured me on dealing with anyone at the company. I also feel if I had mentioned the name of the resort in my first tweets, our problems would have been resolved earlier.

So instead of having to write an angry email about how ripped off I felt from staying in a poorly managed property, I get to remember the beautiful view and the great customer service we had from @ResortQuestNWFL. I have to say – the view and location were amazing. And aside from the encounter with the person on the phone, everyone has been incredibly friendly and helpful. If you want to experience the mix of Southern and Gulf Coast culture, and be on the most beautiful beaches in the world, you should think about staying at one of the Resort Quest properties on Okaloosa Island or in Destin.

I also got Brian to admit that Twitter is good, and that in itself is priceless!

A couple of comments to me this week are prompting this post. Someone in my senior management made a comment that I am very active in social media but I don’t really use it to learn. And someone on twitter asked me the question about EMC|ONE, (EMC’s internal social media site):

Here was my answer to that question:

But both of these questions got me thinking about my personal learning environment. Social media plays a huge role in how I learn these days. I’ve been comparing the way I use social media for learning to fishing. Let me explain what I mean.

Its like fishing

There are a few areas for which I am always looking for information:

• Education (for school and work)
• Management software, networking, SANs, etc (for work)
• Autism in adults (personal reasons)

I put out a line to lots of different places, hoping to get a nibble. If I have a project that creates a need to search for information on one of these topics, I just follow the line and look at all the information that has been gathered.

But sometimes there will be lots of activity on the line, so I will go and check on it to see what is going on in that space.

Here are the social media places I look for info:

Newsgator

I use Newsgator for my RSS aggregator. I follow lots of EMC folks, and lots of people who blog about our industry. I follow lots of edubloggers. I also follow lots of autism and Aspie bloggers.

I try to go check on this line at least once a week. But if I get busy, sometimes I forget to check the line.

Twitter

I use Tweetdeck to organize twitter. I follow a lot of folks, and I have them separated into groups like “work” and “edu”. I also have search columns for specific topics, and that is usually related to what is going on for that day. For instance, if there is a conference, I will have a conference tag column. If it is Thursday or Friday, I will have a #lrnchat column.

I can pay attention to tweetdeck more often than I do newsgator. Sometimes I will notice the people I am following are all talking about the same thing, or using the same tag. If I notice that, I’ll try and figure out what has captured everyone’s attention.

I also seem to come across information I need much quicker using my twitter network.

My Blog

I’ve written before about how I use my blog as reflective practice on what I am learning. I also learn quite a bit from the people who take the time to comment on my posts, or to link back to me.

EMC|ONE

At EMC we have an internal social media site known as EMC|ONE. It rides on the Clearspace platform. One way to manage the experience with Clearspace is to receive email notifications for the different spaces. There are several technical communities I follow. I don’t always interact in the community – sometimes I just watch for activity on the line that would either impact or help my course development efforts. I most always share those tidbits with the folks on my team.

I am sure there are other ways I use social media to learn. I didn’t even mention Facebook, IM, diigo, meebo, or delicious.

The point is that these tools help me keep an eye on the subjects I am interested in, even if these subjects change very rapidly. My goal is to find a way to make this way of learning easy for everyone else.

How about you – do you use social media to learn?