I am attending the Gateway to Innovation conference today in St. Louis, put on by a variety of local IT-oriented organizations and sponsored by some of the larger IT shops like Scottrade. The opening speech was by Mark Showers, the former CIO of Monsanto, and Peter Gray, a professor at the University of Virginia. They talked about understanding the structure of your internal personnel networks, and how information flows both inside and among workgroups. They survey people within particular organizations and match what data they collect with the formal org charts and team reporting relationships that are supposed to be there.

In one oil exploration company, they investigated why one drilling team was much more efficient than their peers and found that one guy way down the food chain was the glue that held things together. He worked closely with all the different stakeholders and pushed for better collaboration between departments, something that the company eventually implemented with the other teams to improve their productivity. Part of the problem they found was the overall boss wasn’t trying to connect the teams and didn’t really communicate with anyone outside of his direct reports, who primarily communicated just with the boss and not each other. They also found that if companies invest in improving the connections and collaboration abilities of their less effective employees, and just bringing them up to average can have big impacts on overall productivity.

Questions that were going through my mind during his talk:
• How dong does it take your boss to respond to your email asking for help?
• When you need to schedule a meeting with the boss, does it take longer than 24 hours to get on their calendar? The teams that are better at collaborating cut down these latencies.
• How many direct reports are there to the boss, and do they talk to each other or just to the boss?
• Are you empowered to make your own decisions? The less often that you have to escalate things up the management food chain, the better.
• How many outward-focusing projects (standards committees, community orgs, etc) are you involved in where people can get to know you and add to your network? These are the key people to watch because they spread their knowledge and influence outside the organization.

In preparation for a keynote speech that I am giving next month, I took some time to look at a variety of social media consolidation and notification services. You might find one or more of them useful for your purposes, even for those of you that still don’t poke, tweet, or know what RSS really stands for.

First is Ping.fm that can post to multiple social networks at once. You sign up, give them your login credentials at Facebook, Plaxo, LinkedIn, Flickr, Twitter, WordPress and many others. When you want to update your social networking universe, you send one message to your Ping.fm account via an email, a text message, or a Web form, and it goes out to everyone.  This can be a big time-saver if you post across different networks and don’t mind sending the same information to all these places. I haven’t used it as much because I tend to post different things to LinkedIn vs. Facebook, as an example.

Friendfeed.com works in reverse. It consolidates your entire social network “feeds” together in one place, so that your network can follow your posts across your blogs, your social networks, and other sites. You set everything up using the various RSS feeds that these services create, which is pretty clever when you think about it. The downside to Friendfeed is that your adoring public has to sign up separately for this service, which means Yet Another Social Network Request to fulfill. Still, I have been surprised at how many people are following me in this fashion, and how many of them are the A-list blogger types that you want to engage and be at top of mind in any event. Clearly, this is one service to pay attention to if you are trying to get the word out about your products and services.

Twitter is certainly all the rage these days, and a number of services have taken some of the best notification-style pieces out of it in interesting ways. If you like the way Twitter works but don’t want to share your updates with the public, such as just with your work colleagues or a special task force, then take a look at Presentlyapp.com. You can use the free Web service or pay to install it behind your own firewall for the ultimate private group. They even make use of the same kind of scrolling interface that Twitter has made popular.

Another take on private discussion forums is from Yammer.com. They cost $1 a person a month. Think of this as one of those old-school BBS’s that has been updated for the Gen-T and Web 2.0. I think if you want something quick and dirty and need to have a group discussion to knit your project team together, this is worth a closer look.

Buzzable.com can be used to create groups of Twitter users if you want to send out notifications to all of your partners or customers at once. LinkedIn is finally implementing this feature on their groups, but that is probably too much work to get the initial group assembled, given their still draconian triple opt-in rules.

So these are just five services that I have found that have something going for them. Whether any of these companies will be around next year is hard to tell. And I can guarantee that none of them have received any TARP funds from the US Government. If you have other suggestions, email them or post a comment here.

If you are looking for something better than Google Docs to work on a document or a presentation with a colleague, this column is for you. I will touch on four alternatives that are all better solutions and can give you ways to create your work product faster.

I have tried Google Docs in a few different situations, and they have been abject failures for different reasons: either the group of potential collaborators has never worked together before, or is too widely distributed geographically or organizationally to have developed any common work habits. As someone who has written two books with co-authors (along with countless magazine articles that get edited along the way), I can tell you the hardest part about collaboration isn’t the technical aspects — it is the human interactions and developing the various trusted relationships with your co-workers.

The other downside to using Google is that at its heart it still is serial workflow – I write my document and email a link so that you can continue. What we need are tools that can combine the immediacy of Instant Messaging with the viral power of social networks to help a group of content creators to get started to work together.

If your ultimate product is a document, start with the service Etherpad.com. You can bring up a common shared workspace inside your browser and multiple authors can add their comments in a chat window off to the side and compose on screen in real-time. Each author is given their own colored font to keep track of changes, and you can go back to particular versions quite easily. This service is great if you want to work with a writing partner on a proposal, say. Or if you have to assemble a final report from several sources and want all the authors to quickly converge on a series of recommendations.

But that solution is just for text. What about that bane of corporate life, PowerPoint slide decks? Here a service called SlideShare.net has a nifty solution. It goes beyond just sharing your slides by having a layer of social networking on top of things. You can add comments to individual slides, group a series of presentations together (such as all the sessions at a particular conference), add a voice narration track that can be synchronized to the slides, and more. All of this is of course available inside a Web browser. The speaker’s notes that accompany each slide is also displayed and indexed by the search engines, which can be a good or bad thing depending on how you use this feature. And you can embed your slides in your blog or broadcast them to your friends on various social networks. The downside is that your builds and transition effects are lost, so if your slides have a lot of these effects, you aren’t going to be too happy with the service. I also had issues with using Mac Safari for the uploads.

Moving on beyond slide decks is the service called drop.io for real-time collaboration that is based on an IM-style chat service. You bring up a browser and point to a common URL and off you go. You can drag and drop photos, documents, whatever and they show up in the common workspace, which you can view as a chat stream or a file directory. You can add comments, voice messages, even faxes (remember them?) to your shared workspace. When you have reached a point where you want others to review your work, you can send out a broadcast message to your Facebook or Twitter friends or gather everything up in a Zip file. For collections of files less than 100MB, the service is free.

Speaking of Twitter (isn’t everyone these days?), one final service that I will mention here is Yammer.com. If you think of this as a private social network discussion board that combines some of the notification and flexibility of Twitter with that of the traditional BBS’s, you got it. You can share files, have a tag cloud and a layer of search on top of everything too.

There are lots of other specialized collaboration tools – Collab.net’s free Subversion is useful for tracking software development projects, SocialText has several different tools and Clarizen.com’s fee-based project management tool is another one that I haven’t tried but seems useful in that area.

The nice thing about all of the services that I mention is that they all have free versions. With drop.io, if you want more room, you can get upgraded for $10 a gigabyte per year or if you want more management for $20 a month plan for 20 GB of storage. Yammer has a paid version if you want a managed private shared space that starts at $1 per person per month. Isn’t the Internet a grand experiment in free data processing? Nevertheless, it is great to be able to try something out risk-free. Do let me know of your own suggestions and what has worked and hasn’t for your collaborations. And if you want me to come speak to your company about these and other technologies, you can download my slide deck here (it is very much a work in progress) and see if it would be appropriate.

The sharp folks over at Royal Pingdom have put together a report here that details the various outages they monitored during last year for numerous social networks. The graph shows the longest continuous downtime for each one, and is just one of many interesting items from the report. One result shows that LinkedIn’s outages are becoming more frequent when the end of 2008 is compared to the beginning of the year. Twitter’s reliability is actually improving.

Check out their post here. Some great and clever ways to say that your site is down.

You would think that in this day and age of online everywhere and social media all the time, using the Internet to help raise funds for charities would be a big business. Nevertheless, it still is in its infancy, and while there are a number of applications that can help ordinary people collect money for various causes, none are close to being anywhere as good as they should be. And none of these tools can compare with a well-maintained email list for ease of use and to actually deliver results.

I should know: for the past several years, I do an annual bike or walking charity event where I raise several thousand dollars. Some of you have graciously donated regularly, year after year.  Some of you have turned into becoming your own fundraisers, and I gladly support your efforts so in effect we are just passing back and forth a donation. And one of my side efforts is the site accidentalfundraiser.com, where I do podcasts with Carol Weisman, a professional speaker who consults to non-profits on fundraising, among other things. 

So here is a brief lay of the Internet fundraising landscape. I welcome your comments; please post to my Strominator blog if you don’t mind, so that others can see them. 

First off you may not know what cause to support. You can start with change.org, which will search more than a million non-profits, or at least so they say on their site. Another site, Idealist.org, has volunteer opportunities, internships, and other programs that you can search too. 

Once you find a cause, you want to start to build your network. There are a number of tools to do this, such as fundable.com and chipin.com. You type in some details, what your goal is and when you need it by, and they will collect funds and send to your PayPal account. 

What you really need at this point is a list of email addresses of potential marks, I mean, donors. All of these tools can take just a plain text list, or if you want to get fancy and personalize with the names you can create a CSV file that matches their format. 

In some cases, your charity may have already made arrangements and set up their own backoffice software donation system. This is the route that the majority of events that I have been part of, such as the Komen and Avon walkathons and the MS and JDRF bikeathons. The two bigger vendors in this space are: Kintera (which is owned by BlackBaud, a vendor with a lot of other donation management products that are used by professional fundraisers) and Convio. The latter is the better of the two tools, but both are cumbersome to import your address list and manage the emails that you send out and replies that you get. And once you get your donors imported in one system, you can’t easily extract this information if you have to use another one for another cause. 

I use a combination of an email list with an Excel spreadsheet that tracks the donations. It is easy to see who has donated when, and while it takes some work to maintain, it is quickly portable from one event to another. 

Now you might ask what about social networks? If you search Facebook for the keywords charity, donation, or social cause, you will find hundreds of apps that can be used for this purpose. Most just have a few members, which doesn’t inspire confidence. The two most well known are Facebook Causes and MySpace Impact. Both are more akin to portals that connect you to various causes and non-profits. If you are a big user of either network, you can start here and see where they take you. 

Outside of these efforts, there are others that are rather offbeat, such as Save the Earth, with 35,000 members. They donate money to save rainforests for everyone that installs and plays their game. Another is SocialVibe.com, which allows users of various social networks to put a “badge” on their profile pages, where they can be sponsors and collect points that go towards charitable efforts. The more profile views you have, the more money gets donated to the charity of your choice. This summer they donated $100,000 to various causes. And a company called DankApps.com has developed several social cause apps for Facebook. These apps donate two cents for every new member that installs their app, along with a revenue sharing agreement to support charities to prevent child abuse and other causes. Another idea is care2.com, with close to 10 million members on its own social network and where you click on various causes to donate. 

You would think the social networks are an ideal place to raise money. After all, you have developed a nice network of your 5,000 closest “friends” and why not start here soliciting donations from them? While the social networks should be all over this, the hard reality is it is still difficult to develop applications and harder still to manage your contacts, replies and donations. The net result is that most social network apps are clunky and hard to use, and this negates any of their potential viral effects.  

What I have found is that the events that I participate in have their own viral nature: people hear about what you are doing and want to do more than just send you a check, so they get involved in an event in their town. Or they get drafted into joining a team, which has its own secondary effect. If you already support various charities, you are drawn to these efforts because a) you were already giving something anyway and b) you might as well support your friends and causes that you have some personal connection to. 

What about some other efforts? I have been part of Kiva.org, which collects your money and uses it to make microloans to various people around the world. The money is gradually repaid, and then you can loan it out again, a sort of miniature version of Freddie Mac (well, maybe that isn’t the best example, but you get the idea). You pick the project to loan to, and you can track their progress in terms of raising what they need and the repayments. 

Then there is trusera.com, run by friends of friends of mine, where you post videos supporting various charitable efforts and plus3network.com, where you can claim sponsors per mile of various personal athletic efforts to raise money for charities. 

I have just hit the highlights here. Some other good suggestions for tools can be found here.

Good luck with your own social causes, and you’ll be hearing from me next spring when I start up my fundraising effort for 2009.

Fellow blogger/seer Tristan Louis asks and answers this question in his latest post here. He goes to the video tape and shows us the stories that were most popular ranging over the past many months about the latest Web technologies. Fascinating reading and analysis.