Social Productivity Tips: Status Reports

A couple of months ago we announced the release of Socialtext 3.0, which generated a fair amount of discussion. While going through the discussion, two quotes gave us an idea. Dennis Howlett wrote, “…if SocialText can successfully articulate business use cases that have resonance then the self evident nature of its product should allow it to leapfrog the potential competition.”

One of our PR team members wrote a post and in the comments Ethan Bauley wrote, “…social norms are going to cut it in terms of deciding when to email/IM/call, etc. I think there should be more leadership from executives/etc on this.”

In harmony with a number of other statements people made, it felt like there was a real need for specific examples of how Enterprise 2.0 tools improve work. And, people wanted to hear about it from leadership, which makes sense as management is who holds employees accountable for their work.

So, we are starting a screencast series called Social Productivity that demonstrates how to actually use Enterprise 2.0 tools to work better. And, our executive team is going to do it. Our plan is to make a screencast every other week. We’ll also post a slidedeck along with our screencast in case you’d like to do the presentations in your own words for your office.

This is a work in progress and our goal is to make useful resources that cut through the hype by using specific examples. Since our mission is to make these resources for you. We’d love to hear feedback about making them better and topic suggestions.

Our first episode is how we use Socialtext with our PR firm to maintain a status report. We chose this topic because we know status reports are an everyday reality for many information workers. Although valuable, creating them is a side activity to getting actual work done and the communication is less efficient and effective than they could be. We hope that explanation at this granular level will aid those who hate status reports to spend less time on them.

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