A business acquaintance, Judy Mod, was promoting her former company, CoreSpeed. She was very gracious to spend time educating me about this new community. Or I should say trying to enlighten me. She kept using words like community and conversation. I kept think of it as a typing exercise. Or text messaging, which I don’t do. The mental blocks went up. I didn’t want to learn online community. But, on the other hand, I need to keep up with technology.

I mean I do have an information technology (IT) consulting company, Noble & Associates Consulting. However, I like to say I am a non-techie techie. My company does business analysis, project management, documentation, training, change management, and process improvement / re-engineering. And, we’re the cure for “Post Implementation Distress”. So we deal with business issues related to technology.

Noble & Associates Consulting also provides ERP (enterprise resource planning) and other enterprise wide software system implementation services from a functional perspective. We bring business background and knowledge, and we can write technical specifications. In order to do that, we must have the ability to understand and coalesce both business speak and computer programmer / developer speak.

I heard one of the gurus of social networking, Sherry Heyl, speak on Web 2.0 at a Technology Association of Georgia (TAG) event. Had I not already been investigating the subject, I really would have been lost. But I accepted her invitation to connect on Linkedin anyway.

Then I attended SoCono8, this past weekend. It was organized by Sherry Heyl, CEO and Idealist of What a Concept! Community, Jeff Haynie, co-founder /CEO of Appcelerator, and Leonard Witt, Kennesaw State University’s Fowler Distinguished Chair. I did finally get clarity on what an “RSS feed” was and what a “tag” was. Then there is something called a “tag cloud”, which I would probably never use. To the uninformed, it looks very unprofessional and looks like garbage.

My take away from that was that social networking was just another method for connecting, developing relations and finding out the interests of prospect and with people in general. There were people of all ages at the SoCon08 un-conference. The twenty-somethings were definitely represented, but there also a good number of grey hairs. The were lots of people with business –to-business (B2B) companies. And back to Judy Mod: She did say one of the ways in which folks are using community is for pre-credentialing their company prior to RFP release for public sector projects. So that relates to business-to-government (B2G). I found I knew some of the SoCon08 attendees from other business / technology networking groups and events. I even met a lady looking for someone to do a SAP (ERP) interface!

OK, so I’m beginning to like this community.

Sandra Noble
NOBLE FINANCES
NOBLE & ASSOCIATES CONSULTING, INC