Or something like that. I’ll get around to a proper review of my day at Reboot Britain when the smoke clears (and I’ve got a lot of smoke at the moment!). Meanwhile, here’s my model from the Lego Serious Play programme table from D.Gauntlett’s Flickr stream.

It was the end of a long, long day. Maybe the open gate was more significant than I imagined.

We’ve been working on a project (can’t say with whom) to mash together a whole bunch of the data we’ve been amassing (in terms of graduate destinations, careers resources, generic careers information) in the form of a webservice delivering facts and figures and suggestions about the jobs graduates in particular degrees do, the average wage, some of the employers and the best resources to start looking for information about those particular careers.  It’s all wrapped up with a series of our articles on application forms, networking etc etc…

I’m very excited about it – the deadlines have been horrendous but we should have it out in the open later this month.

A lot of it draws on our careers resource Careers Tagged, which has turned out to have a way too complicated user interface (though a lot of people feed back that they still find it very useful) but the data and tagging engine for which is driving a lot of our current projects, including this one and our new Job Online, which uses Careers Tagged.  Careers Tagged’s engine looks at a job selected by a user and suggests other relevant vacancies, along with a set of online resources to find out more about the background to a particular sector.  The tagging behind it is crowd-sourced but from a very select crowd – the careers information offices and advisers who work for us.  So the relevancy of the hits is surprisingly high.  Not so much crowd-sourcing, perhaps, as tribe-sourcing, to loosely adapt a concept from the Tuttle peeps.

The trouble with crowd-sourcing seems to me to lie in two areas – face-validity and subject expertise.  Whilst there are a lot of great community driven resources for careers information (e.g. Wikijobs), a lot of the information is patchy or biased.  Specialties tend to be under-represented, for example.  So for Careers Tagged, we worked on the assumption that if we had enough careers information professionals involved, we’d be able to broadly cover covers period with a fair certainty that individual biases would be averaged out and that the information/resources highlighted would be of a consistently high standard.    Tribe-sourcing, then, is using a group of loosely affiliated people to generate a product from their combined common interest – the assumption is that each person in the tribe either knows something about the subject or work area and has no ego about being corrected.  If we ever manage to finish anything around these parts, it’s generally due to tribe sourcing.

Don’t get me wrong – I’m a great believer in the Wikipedia concept and users can already add their own tags to Careers Tagged if they want.  But without that core tribe of contributors, we wouldn’t have anything.

There’s probably another post to be written about the relation of tribes to our organisational habits, good and bad, at some point, though any number of bloggers (e.g. Michael Bauwens at P2P, the inevitable Seth Godin, Joe McKendrick at FastForward) have written far more authoritatively on this.

• Reinventing Silos
  The insight that by pouring our intranet into a wiki, we've effectively swapped one silo for another is not lost on me.
  (tags: socialmedia enterprise web2.0 knowledge_management)

• Strategic Blogging and Some Tactics to Nail It | chrisbrogan.com
  Liked this – when I have a minute (or at least twenty minutes), I need to sit down and map these onto the hydra-like blogging activities bursting out all over our rather hydra like organisation.
  (tags: blog blogging strategy chrisbrogan)

Or, more positively, why do people persist in thinking that virtual recruitment fairs are a good idea?

I’m writing this from the organisers’ office of our summer recruitment fair (http://www.londongradfair.co.uk) where our marvellous sales team have managed to pull in 81 exhibitors and over the next 2 days, we expect 6000 or so students to troop in and meet them.  So perhaps I’m a little biased.  But why on earth would anyone register for an online event as opposed to, say, a really good jobs site or a responsive community site.  You could argue that ‘virtual fairs’ pull everything together in one handy package, yet they don’t.  The user experience in invariably clunky, hard to navigate and comprehensively bogged down a clumsey attempts to emmulate the real world experience.  Think late nineties Flash ‘immersive’ shopping sites (if you don’t know, don’t ask – clients actually paid places I worked to build those things once upon a time) but worse.

And the tumbleweed factor!  I know of one event which actually had to pay students to hang out in the ’seminar rooms’ (chatrooms) to give the employers the impression that something was actually going on.

Note that I am NOT saying that there’s no place for integrating online interactions with employers and events – quite the opposite.  But an event is a time, place and population dependent experience with crowds, noise, frustration, conversation, clasped hands, bumped shoulders, queues and (in our case) quite reasonable coffee.  Online is, well, ongoing.  Streams of communication and interaction independent of all the above.  You can embed an event in such a stream but an ‘online’ event with employers where you ’show up’?  Why?  Wouldn’t a webpage with a list of employers, jobs they have on offer and a Twitter handle for each one do just as good, if not better, a job? And much more cheaply?

Anyway, there are some contrary views, mostly from people selling virtual careers fair solutions.  Funny, that.

OK, that was a long title.  But Dan Schwabel’s reasonably interesting post on problems with trying to be an expert in social media inadvertently highlighted the ongoing issue with trying to make any kind of definitive pronouncement on the scene.  One might have a degree of sympathy with most of his points but he’s way off in terms of point five questioning the earning power of social media, especially on a day when Dell attributed $3 million of revenue to Twitter.  Laurel Papworth also has a formidable list of companies who’ve exploited the social in media to earn revenue and highlights Craig’s List in particular as a success story.  Still, he’s highlighted an interesting issue – what are social media experts for – and generated a fair bit of soul searching in the process, though some people seem pretty confident about their expertise (and perhaps others should come clean about their actual capabilities in personal-self-publicising and power-networking rather than delivering good practice).

Of course, part of the problem with the role of the social media ‘expert’ is the ongoing conundrum of how exactly one measures the effect.  The other is Dan’s point about the necessity of “everyone in the world” being forced to learn about social media, something I completely agree with.  I’m not saying we’ve had universal buy-in but we’re working hard at The Careers Group to see that everyone has a degree of training in some area of social media endeavour and is willing to engage.  That doesn’t mean, however, that everyone is an ‘expert’ and that there isn’t a role for ‘experts’ whose specialism lies in ‘being an expert’.

Perhaps we need to rehabilitate the word ‘consultant’ – if I hire in a third party, if or someone uses our particular expertise for something, they’re buying not only knowledge but an informed second opinion – and I think it’s the informed – expert, even – outside view that’s the key.  I’ve worked in plenty of situations where we could have done something ourselves but have chosen to bring in (or hire) an outside party as either a consultant or someone from a totally different culture.  In either case, it’s been about ideas about seeing things in a way that isn’t always possible from the inside of something.

What’s a social media expert? Someone who has great ideas about social media, ideas you haven’t had.  And I utterly agree with Benjamin Ellis when he asserts that (and I’m paraphrasing here) one key benchmark of such a person is their willingness to describe what they’ve learned from their mistakes.

• Social Media Policies For Your Company: External Policies
  Note to self – we really need to revisit our extant (but basic) policies.
  (tags: socialmedia policy)

• jill/txt » writing with a little help from your friends
  Jill's opened her (fascinating) draft article up to public comment – very interesting (and not a little brave) experiment. Crowd-sourcing peer-review?
  (tags: web2.0 socialnetworking socialmedia article writing collective collaboration)
• Twitter Plans to Squash Google’s Spider?
  "When you do a search on a “trending” topic (a topic that is so big it gets its own link in the Twitter.com sidebar), Twitter will take into account the reputation of the person who wrote each tweet and rank search results in part based on that."

  Be interesting to know more details about how that reputation algorithm will work.

  (tags: twitter search socialmedia)

• Companies Recruiting on Twitter
  Now here's an interesting source. We're still (*still*) struggling with Twitter in a lot of ways as far as making use of it as a marketing tool. If nothing else, this'll be useful for market research of one kind or another.
  (tags: Jobs twitter blog)

Julia Roy writes about Facebook Friend lists as an appropriate answer for anyone trying to keep clear blue water between the personal and the professional, drawing on a Mashable post.  If only it were (quite literally) that simple!  We spend a fair bit of time exploring Friend lists on the Facebook courses I’ve been giving at The Careers Group as most people don’t tend to use them (or don’t tend to use them effectively).   Why?

Well, the fact is, they’re fairly user unfriendly if you’re putting a Facebook profile together from scratch and an absolute bloody nightmare if you’re trying to unpick your relationships with two hundred friends or so.  Every now and then, I sit down to address exactly how I can manage a more ‘professional’ Facebook profile and so far, I just walk away, defeated by the complexity of trying to express the subtle gradations between the various categories of people I interact with via Facebook on a tool which threatens to allow me to do just that!

Admittedly it’s laziness but the ‘Except these people’ filter defeats me everytime.  I want to be able to set up privacy filters without engaging in some kind of Boolean algebra or (worse) setting up friend lists of people who aren’t my friends.

And this all begs the question – why do I actually want to do this?  In ‘real life’ there’s no question of my trying to rigorously segregate the richness of the overlaps between my ’social’ and ‘work’ behaviours.  Anything which really isn’t for public consumption I simply keep behind closed doors where it belongs (no, they’re staying closed.  Feel free to use your imaginations).

Ultimately, the best practice on any network where there’s the remotest prospect of your social life overlapping with your work life to a substantial degree is to never put up anything that your Amish grandmother (assuming she’s of the liberal persuasion that’ll look at a computer) would be embarrassed by.  Boring but true.

Of course, Twitter could be said to render all of this gloriously moot.  But that’s another story.