Day 18: Use Social Media to Your Advantage
As we have seen on Day 13, there are quite some online resources available that you can benefit from. Although I personally would recommend to subscribe to as many relevant resources as possible, your task today is to subscribe at least to three online resources.
Today’s Teaching
Social media can be very helpful in gathering information about how to improve your IWMS. The most important social media are:
YouTube
In the IWMS domain there are quite some very interesting YouTube Channels available that have lots of videos about Workplace Management, CAFM and IWMS. My favorite channels include:
I have already provided you with some of my favorite YouTube Channels, but i would love to read your YouTube favorites.
If you are not familiar with YouTube, here is a wonderful set of Youtube Tutorials.
There are a lot of Twitter users talking about all kinds of interesting subjects. What I can recommend you to do us to go to http://search.twitter.com, and type in the search field IWMS OR CAFM OR “Workplace Management”. In the top right corner you will see Feed for this query. By adding this feed to your Google Reader (or other RSS Reader), you will be informed about new developments in the IWMS arena whenever they appear on Twitter. Other searches (and feeds) could include the names of the vendors, the name of the solution or other interesting areas.
If you are not familiar with Twitter, here is a wonderful set of Twitter Tutorials.
If you are professional, your have signed up for LinkedIn. Your LinkedIn profile is your number one profile when constructed thoroughly. Gathering information to improve your IWMS is absolutely relevant, and besides that it can help you identifying professionals and groups with similar interests. What I (Steven Hanks) particularly use is groups. I would recommend you to search on relevant characteristics (e.g. IWMS, CAFM, CMMS, CoreNet, etc.) in the LinkedIn Groups Directory.
If you are not familiar with LinkedIn, here is a wonderful set of LinkedIn Tutorials.
Facebook can be extremely important to find people that you have lost contact with and might be very interesting for your professional life. It is a way to get back in contact with those friends, family, etc.
If you are not familiar with Facebook, here is a wonderful set of Facebook Tutorials.
Newsletters
Most vendors of Integrated Workplace Management Systems frequently publish information about their company. I would recommend to create a special email address to collect all the mails. (Don’t use your own email address, as SPAM will appear in your mailbox).
RSS
RSS (most commonly translated as “Really Simple Syndication” but sometimes “Rich Site Summary”) is a family of web feed formats used to publish frequently updated works—such as blog entries, news headlines, audio, and video—in a standardized format. An RSS document (which is called a “feed”, “web feed”, or “channel”) includes full or summarized text, plus metadata such as publishing dates and authorship. Web feeds benefit publishers by letting them syndicate content automatically. They benefit readers who want to subscribe to timely updates from favored websites or to aggregate feeds from many sites into one place. (Source: Wikipedia).
A lot of IWMS vendors, and other relevant organizations provide RSS feeds that will appear in your reader frequently. Subscribing and managing these feeds can be extremely powerful improving your IWMS implementation.
If you are not familiar with RSS, here is a wonderful set of RSS Tutorials
Today’s Task
Today you will have an easy task. Subscribe to at least three of the social media formats mentioned above.
