Social Butterfly

It would appear that fate has dealt me some interesting cards and I now find myself turning into a social networking and online communities expert. I am quite surprised by how much I already know about this, and very pleased to hear feedback from the various vendors in my selection process, that my comments on the client requirements document are spot on.
What does this mean for me?

Well for a start, as a social media expert I’d better get blogging and tweeting more! Whether I will actually manage this remains to be seen, and I am finding it difficult to post everywhere so it’s either a blog post if I’ve got something long to write (that I think nobody other than the odd recruitment consultant will read anyway), a tweet if it’s a photo, because my iPhone can do that easily since iOS5, or a facebook status update if I want answers to my questions from people who know about such things.
I had a great meeting with Telligent on Friday, who showed me a couple of videos that got me all excited: This one about APAN really moved me, and this one from Socialnomics author Erik Qualman filled me with a feeling of excitement and ‘I told you so’ as it relates to almost everything I’ve been working on in my field anyway.
Something that unites all the vendors I’ve been speaking to is a sense that the community has to sustain itself and it’s unwise to attempt to prescribe to people what they can and can’t do. One of the appeals of social community driven sites is the freedom to be able to use the site in almost any way the user wants, and this is what I will be aiming for in the solution I deploy over the next few months.
With any luck, I won’t be too busy to update this blog with my progress