This week I am in Orlando, Florida for the IBM Edge conference. Tuesday afternoon we had a Birds-of-a-Feather (BOF) session to discuss social media. I was the moderator. We had two independent bloggers on the panel: [Jon Toigo] and [Steve Foskett]. We had several IBM social media experts, including Jack Arnold, Scott Drummond, Mary Hall, Nick Harris, and Rich Swain. Also joining us was Alex Hollingworth, social media expert from Emulex.

At the opening session, Deon Newman suggest we re-tweet him, isn't that plagiarism? What is your take on this?

The important thing is to give credit where it is due. Avoid screen scraping others and passing it off as your own. When you re-tweet someone, you give them credit for their original tweet. You are basically saying, "I could not have said it better myself!" With blogs, you can do the same by linking to other blog posts.

I am active in social media, but am having trouble getting the older colleagues in the IT department to participate. I want them to write down all the knowledge in their heads.

The best way to get employees to do anything new or different is to show them how it benefits them. For example, if the elders are tired of answering the same questions over and over, have them start an internal wiki, blog or knowledgebase to capture the answers to frequent questions. This will save them time, so they can see value for themselves. I suggest looking at IBM Lotus Connections which provides collaboration tools inside your firewall, accessible only to internal employees of the company.

How do we differentiate facts from opinions in our social media writings?

You can always be explicit, for example IMHO stands for "In my humble opinion". I find that blogs are 99 percent opinion, and 1 percent fact, so it is easier to point out the facts linking or citing sources, and let the rest of your writing be considered opinion.

I would like to find people on Linkedin to establish business relationships with the storage administrators, decision makers and influencers within the companies I want to sell to, how do I best do that?

Nobody likes cold calls. If you upgrade to a "Pro" account on LinkedIn, you can send 15 to 25 "Inmail" emails through their system to introduce yourself. Otherwise, consider finding someone in your network that knows them, and arrange for them to provide the mutual introduction for you.

How do I find people to follow related to the topics I am interested in, like storage?

There are tools like [Tweetadder] to help you find people to follow. Or, just search on certain hashtags, and add people you find that use them.

I am concerned about privacy? What can I do to protect my privacy?

Decide up front which topics are off-limits in your blog or other social media. For services like Facebook, check your privacy settings every 30 days. Several people have opted to create a special "Facebook Page" that represents their professional brand, so that the rest of Facebook can be used for friends and family.

I want to start a new blog, which service should I use?

Services like Blogger, Blogspt and TypePad are generally easy to set up. Wordpress is more advanced, but can be more complicated to set up.

I don't care for writing a blog, how can I set up a video blog, or vlog?

Consider creating a channel on YouTube. Another popular site is Vimeo. A "Pro" account of Vimeo provides added features.

I am new to Twitter, what tools should I look into?

I suggest you look at HootSuite. This lets you post to Twitter, Facebook and Linkedin. You can schedule when a tweet will be posted, so you can right them in advance and schedule them for a certain date and time. Also, if you have a blog, you can have Hootsuite send out tweets automatically with the titles and link to each blog post.

How much effort should we put in to Social Media?

As much or as little as you want. Don't force yourself to spend more time than you want. Typically, people spend 1-2 hours per day. Cut down how much you spend watching television to make up the difference. Set up "Google Alerts" that can send you emails when certain phrases appear anywhere. There are also social bookmarking tools like Instapaper, Delicious or Diigo that can save bookmarks in the cloud for things that you want to read, but don't have time to read now.

Which social media would be the best to get chicks.

Writing a technical blog with good quality content. Girls want to be with you. Guys want to be you.

How can I use social media to provide feedback about specific products?

IBM now has a [Reviews and Ratings] for its IBM System Storage products. Consider writing a review today!

Thanks to all of the panel for their help with this!

technorati tags: IBM, IBMedge, BOF, Social Media, Twitter, Linked, Facebook

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