As reported in Part One and Part Two of this blog post, I ‘work socially’ as CEO of NewsGator. Here is a look at the evening of just one productive workday using social computing tools. Like I mentioned in the two previous posts, I continued my goal of educating and informing my personal network of influence as noted by an asterisk*. Note that these are excerpts rather than exhaustive details:

5:15 – 6:15 pm
 

1. A sales rep asks a question in our internal Activity Stream about the best Enterprise 2.0 conferences. I point him toward a couple of great industry analyst sites where they post their upcoming locations – they have good summaries of relevant industry events.
2. Ask a question about photo editing in Activity Stream to see if anyone can help me solve a vexing photo edit problem I’m having on my PC.
        a. Ten minutes later, a colleague responds with a helpful suggestion, but it doesn’t solve my issue.
        b. About an hour later, an external consultant weighs in with the answer I need. I mark this response as the official answer for my question*.
3. Respond and re-tweet a few comments on Twitter via TweetDeck.
4. Visit Facebook and check out the NewsGator page. I comment on one of our posts which points folks to an upcoming NewsGator webinar.
5. Receive an alert about a community formed for a new customer in Australia. I join the community so I can follow all of the activity about that customer*.

6:15 – 8:15 pm 

My social radar is down.

8:15 – 8:45 pm

1. Post article on Social Business and Gov 2.0 to Government community.
2. Quickly review a prospective new competitor’s offering and add a wiki page on it to our Competition community and notify the individual who tracks competition for us*.
3. Sent a Direct Message via Twitter to an analyst in our space offering to pre-review some features in our upcoming release.
4. Commented on a discussion thread about a project update for a relatively new client. The sales rep posted recent positive feedback from the customer. I offered my congrats to everyone involved. A true 360 degree customer view*…
5. Posted this as my last comment of the day in the activity stream: “IDC predicts in 2011 the digital universe will be 10x the size vs. 2006; More digital content created in 5 years than all of history before.”

********

Conclusion: Evening has me winding down but I still manage to generate four instances of obvious value to my personal network bringing my total to over 20 social slam-dunks in just one day…so, what do you think now? Does the Social CEO have an ROI?