Collaboration

Collaboration: social media tools from email lists to virtual worlds offer enormous scope for collaboration. Low-risk activities like commenting, social bookmarking, chatting and blogging help develop the trust necessary for collaboration.

At greater length: Collaboration is one of the higher goals of social networking - being able to discuss and work with people across boundaries of organisation, time and space.

The tools to achieve this extend from email with attachments through web-based workspaces with messaging, file storage, calendars and other tools. With the right equipment and connections you can talk to and see each other, text, sketch and transfer files almost instantly.

You can set up a workspace in a virtual world, and collaborate with other avatars. However, the conditions for successful collaboration are more human and cultural than technical, with the bottom line being trust.

Bloggers maintain that the conversational and authentic tone of the medium helps create conditions for collaboration. Sharing, commenting, chatting, co-authoring allow low-risk explorations of who you would feel comfortable working with.

At the time of this posting, Google is launching a collaborative platform, WAVE, that shows tremendious upside potential for collaboration.

Collaboration makes a lot of sense to add to most social media marketing plans.

Sharing, commenting, chatting, co-authoring allow low-risk explorations of who you would feel comfortable working with.

Budget: $100 - $300 per week