Hello everyone. My name is Frank and I’m a Social Media addict. There, that’s out of the way. As a bonus I actually get paid for my addiction – great isn’t it!!!
This is my first post for Bloggertone, and I thought that I’d start by introducing myself and giving you a taster of what I hope to be blogging about on this site.
I’m 33, coming 34, and I like in Kilkenny City. I’m originally from Derry in Northern Ireland, and I’ve made my way to Kilkenny via Manchester, England (where I went to University), and Dublin. I moved to Kilkenny just over 3 years ago, as my wife and I wanted to get out of the commuter hell that was Dublin. Why Kilkenny? Well primarily because my wife was born and raised here, and we already had a network of friends and family in the area.
My wife got a job down here, and I successfully negotiated with my employer to work from home, initially starting with a few days per week, and eventually building it up to a point where I’m now only up in Dublin a few days per month.
I work for a multinational computer technology corporation that specializes in developing and marketing enterprise software products. I’ve worked in this company for just over 8 years, joining in February 2002, after 2 short stints at Irish dotcom startups, Norkom Technologies, and Nebula Technologies. In 1998 I graduated from Manchester Metropolitan University with a degree in Business Information Technology.
My interest in Social Media (or Web 2.0 as we used to refer to it) started in late 2006, coincidently around the time that I started working from home. As I left the regular 9-5 office environment, I started looking for ways to socially reach out to other people in the organisation. It was then that I started learning about the power of Blogs, Social Networks (Facebook, LinkedIn and later Twitter), Wikis, Podcasts, and Video sharing sites such as YouTube. Through these various tools I started hooking up with like minded people, both inside and outside the organisation, who shared my work and personal interests.
At this time I was working in the EMEA (European & Middle East) Knowledge Management Team, with responsibilities for what we called KM Infrastructure, which was essentially making sure that our EMEA teams were able to fully exploit our Knowledge Sharing tools, specifically the Corporate Intranet and Forums.
It wasn’t too long before I started seeing the impact that Social Tools could have on the teams that I was supporting. As I dug deeper, I started seeing small pockets within the organisation that were already abiding by Social Media principles. I was even surprised to learn of some internal tools that would allow employees to socially connect more easily. The problem was that many of these teams were not doing a good job of sharing what they were doing, or had already achieved.
I approached my boss, and eventually convinced him to let me dedicate a certain percentage of my time to Social Media. Over the coming months I started familiarising myself with what was happening inside the organisation, and slowly building a picture of what the Social Media scene was like internally.
During this period I started working closely with a senior colleague who had also bought into the idea of Social Media. In mid/late 2008 my colleague established the EMEA SNBC (Social Networking & Collaboration) Team. I joined this team, and immediately we started working on a more formalised approach to embedding the principles of Social Media in the EMEA organisation.
The last 18 months have been a rollercoaster journey, and a big learning curve for the team, as we have faced up to the various issues and challenges of bringing about a change of mindset.
What I’d like to bring to the readers of Bloggertone is an opportunity to read about our Social Media experience a multi-national organisation. This is an ongoing and very dynamic story, and hopefully one that will continue for some time yet.
I’d also like to learn from the readers, and maybe get your stories and experiences with using Social Media in your organisations. Hopefully we can learn a lot from each other.
Let me know your thoughts in the Comments. Also let me know if there is anything in particular that you would like me to talk about in future posts.
The views expressed on this post are my own and do not necessarily reflect the views of Oracle.
