Social Media Presentation at PLM Connection

Last week I held a session at PLM Connection on Social Media in PLM. We did one in 2009 that covered industry research,  customer survey feedback and what we as a company were doing from a content and community standpoint. Over the past year, the uptake in social media interest and use in this industry has been quite dramatic and has expanded beyond Wikipedia‘s definition:

“media designed to be disseminated through social interaction.”

I typically differentiate social media, social computing and social networking. I know many use those terms interchangeably or one of them as an umbrella for all. But I think it’s important to break them down. So that’s what we did in the presentation.

And I used my social network to enhance the content and perspective in this presentation ;-), inviting two subject matter experts to present with me.

As one of the key analysts researching social computing in PLM, Jim Brown of Tech-Clarity provided attendees with his latest findings. That spawned some good discussion by attendees. While the crowd wasn’t huge, there were folks from large enterprise companies looking for new ways to collaborate to others from academia looking to integrate social in the classroom to smaller organizations looking to tap external social networks for ideas. See Jim’s white paper on Product Collaboration 2.0:  Using Social Computing Techniques to create Corporate Social Networks. In addition to Jim’s research, we noted one of the latest Forrester reports = Use Social Computing to Build Differentiated Products (see summary post on Roy Wilderman ‘s blog).

Then as one of our key subject matter experts in enterprise social networking, Tord Dennis discussed social capabilities that are already integrated in PLM tools and some perspective on where things are headed. Tord works with our Teamcenter Community special interest group. He has worked closely with customers like Northrop Grumman on their use of social computing in their organizations. Tord had a joint presentation with Microsoft the following day that I’ll share more on in another blog post.

Then last but not least, I shared some specific social media channels for the audience to consider engaging in. I broke it down into the who, what, where, when and why. Fortunately we had a couple of the “who” right in the audience – Jim Brown, Kenneth Wong of Desktop Engineering and Josh Mings of SolidSmack. I highlighted Rick Stavanja’s explanation of Twitter under why. We talked social interaction both from internal and external channels. For example, internally, we had an overhaul of our customer discussion forums over the last year and externally I shared the forums that come up top in our conversation mining reports.

So below is the link to our slide deck. Please review and share what questions you have about social in PLM.

Social Media in PLM