The World of Web 2.0

Find answers faster, connect with experts, use collective wisdom to shape and improve ideas – just some of the opportunities opening up in the business world of Web 2.0.

Process manufacturers around the globe are coping with the global, economic slowdown. Some are focused on cost cutting and others are focused on structures for stability. Some are stunned by the uncertainty and wondering what is their next step. Regardless of our immediate focus, we’re all looking for answers. We believe now is the time to begin new daily practices so you and your organization are on a path to thrive during theseuncertain times instead of just survive.

Thankfully, we have a ready-to-use foundation in place. The internet provides us ways to connect to find solutions, share our expertise, and bring new ideas to our daily challenges. The secret to success during these difficult times might be easier than you imagine. Staying focused on innovation is the key. As famous competitive strategist Michael Porter says, “Innovation is the central issue in economicprosperity”.

We’ll share with you how the changing nature of the web, dubbed Web 2.0, can help you reduce uncertainty by opening yourself to greater, but more focused information flows and expandedcommunities.

Deploying Web 2.0 tools and techniques ensures that you position yourself to seize opportunities with enhanced information gathering and communication strategies. This increased effectiveness allows you to focus more on innovation. You’ll discover that Web 2.0 allows for innovation from finding answers faster, easily connecting with other experts outside your current sphere, discovering new things you didn’t even know to look for, and having collective wisdom shape and improve initial ideas.

While Web 1.0 established one-way communications from static web pages and simple database applications, Web 2.0 has opened up oneto- many, and many-to-many communications.

Wikipedia, a Web 2.0 collaboration tool, defines it, “… the changing trends in the use of World Wide Web technology and web design that aim to enhance creativity, communications, secure information sharing, collaboration and functionality of the web. Web 2.0 concepts have led to the development and evolution of web-culture communities and hosted services, such as social-networking sites, video sharing sites, wikis, blogs, and folksonomies.”

So how do you take advantage of Web 2.0 applications to increase the pace of innovation at your facility?

We offer our ideas on six practices. Each has enabled innovation in our own organization. Our hope is that you put one or more into practice toprove the benefits to yourself.

LinkedIn – for professional networking
We recommend LinkedIn (www.LinkedIn.com) as the place to keep and maintain your professional contacts. LinkedIn is a business-based social network site that allows you increased visibility and easy accessto an expanded professional network.

To begin, you build your profile with information about yourself, like education, work experience, accomplishments, hobbies, etc. Next, you link to others you know and meet through the course of business. When you link, you gain access to their profile as well as their network of contacts, which helps you further expand your professional network.

The value of building a LinkedIn network comes in several ways. The part we find most beneficial is the question and answer portion. When you ask questions, the question goes to everyone in your immediate network and is available for anyone in LinkedIn to answer. This circle of expertise extends far beyond whom you personally know. Also, as you answer questions, you begin to connect with others with similar expertise.

Many companies, including Emerson, have company- and product-specific affinity groups where questions can be asked and answered. One example of this is the DeltaV control system group (www.linkedin.com/groups?gid=1270757), which has several hundred members.

LinkedIn provides a way for you and others in your organization to expand your reach and foster innovation via a wider and more accessible community. We encourage you to begin with a search to find coworkers and business acquaintances already in LinkedIn.

Twitter – for micro communications
Twitter (www.Twitter.com) is a blog service where you can express your thoughts (known as a “tweet”) in 140 characters or less and have access to instant messaging and mobile texting with acommunity of followers.

It works on a very simple model where you choose who you want to follow, and in turn, others may choose to follow you. A “block” function exists to block anyone you don’t want to have follow you.

Once you have established a follow relationship, you can also send private messages, called direct messages to one another.

People find value from Twitter in many ways. The most common use is to ask questions to those who follow you when you need quick answers or advice. For example, a “has anyone seen this?” technical question is a fast way to begin troubleshooting. Business travelers can ask for recommended restaurants and advice in unfamiliar cities. You will find the value of Twitter grows as your network of followers expands and you learn more about them.

Another common practice are impromptu meet ups (or “tweetups” in the Twitter vernacular) at an event or for your follower community. These in-person meetings are many times richer experiences because of your knowledge of your followers’ interests and activities.

You can also find Twitter is a way to build new relationships and generate ideas that help you and your followers.

We recommend you take the first step by getting a Twitter account, following us, twitter.com/DebFranke and twitter.com/JimCahill, and seeing how we are using it.

Flickr – for sharing visual information
Flickr (www.flickr.com) is a Yahoo site that allows you to upload photos, tag them, and easily search and share them with the world. Ever heard the proverb, “A picture is worth a thousand words”? Doyou believe it? We certainly do.

Think about the number of times that you’ve said or heard, “I wish you could see this” or “What does it look like?” This is a common experience especially in a business with globally dispersed teams. You can’t just walk down the hall to look at something together. We find in many situations a picture is the fastest and easiest way to capture or understand something.

Flickr allows your photos to be limited to a private circle or publicly available to anyone. One example of how we use Flickr is on the Emerson Process Experts blog. We use Flickr to host the pictures used in some of the blog posts. This allows others to more easily discover the information contained in the posts through textand picture-based searches.

Another example of Flickr’s potential value is in situations when you ask, “Do you know how to ______?” Flickr offers a way to share knowledge and a place where you can find quick answers. You can see hundreds of examples of tutorials hosted in Flickr at: www.flickr.com/photos/tags/tutorial/clusters/

We encourage you to brainstorm how Flickr can help you teach, archive, learn, and advance your process of innovation.

YouTube – for sharing video information
Very similar to using photos to share and discover expertise, YouTube (www.YouTube.com) does this with videos.

YouTube has 71 million unique visitors a month, and when you take a close look you will find YouTube offers more than entertainment. For instance, we are currently hosting our DeltaV video case studies and product demonstrations in YouTube, www.youtube.com/user/DeltaVsystem.

Other examples are business educational videos. Try a search on one of your production processes like distillation, fermentation, etc., and prepare to be surprised with the educational videos you will likely find. Professors are posting their classroom lectures and product communities are creating step-by-step tutorials to help each other learn.

Another very practical example is the process safety channel by the US Chemical Safety Board, www.youtube.com/user/USCSB. Itshows the detailed findings of industrial safety accidents and presents animations of how these accidents occurred. These lessons can bevaluable to safety professionals in any manufacturing facility.

Like Flickr, you can create private areas for a group or channels open for anyone to view. With video-enabled phones, taking quick, how-to videos is easier than ever.

YouTube truly offers you free personal development. Take your first step and search for a topic in YouTube for which you would like to learn more.

Google Reade
r Robert Scoble, once Microsoft’s most popular blogger and now with Wired magazine, said it best in a recent Twitter tweet, “Google Reader makes me smarter than anything else I have found online. The stuff I find there is remarkable. Keep it up!”

Google Reader is first a great RSS reader. If you aren’t already using RSS (really simple syndication), you really should. Instead of seeking information on various websites, the information to which you subscribed flows to your reader the moment it is created.

You’ll find RSS feeds on more and more websites. If you visit a website frequently, look for the site’s RSS feed and subscribe to it. It is much like building your personal newspaper entirely of personal interests. To help you begin, we have created a free RSS Starter Kit that you can find at http://www. easydeltav.com/rsskit/. It contains subscriptions to many industry and process automation-specific RSS feeds.

One of the most valuable tools available in Google Reader is the sharing function. When you find something that interests you, you click “share” (and perhaps add a comment about why you find it interesting). Google Reader then automatically creates a website and RSS feed for your shared information. You can make others aware of your feed by adding a hyperlink to your email footer. It’s a way to share your interests and expertise without having to create your own blog or newsgroup.

Google Reader also offers a bookmarklet you can add to your Firefox or Internet Explorer web browser. You can share any web page you come across and find interesting outside of Google Reader. You may have done this with emailing URLs in the past but usingGoogle Reader is a much more effective way to share information.

Google specialized searches
The power of Google and the other search engines to quickly return valuable information based upon a few keywords is well known; although not everyone knows about the specialized Google blog search, blogsearch.google.com. A Google blog search is the best way to find answers when you are looking for advice, how-to’s, and conversations on a particular topic.

For example, a process engineer searches the phrase: “fired heater” fuel gas optimization. At the time this article was written, it returned an Emerson Process Experts post, Recommendations for Increasing Heater Efficiency, a “how to” article from a chemical industry magazine, and three other results.

The Google news search, news.google.com, is another specialized search, which indexes the global, mainstream media sources, our industry and automation trade press, and other specialized news feeds. This can help you quickly find recent news events for a given set of keywords and phrases.

The specialized blog and news searches are unique because you can subscribe to your search results. These persistent searches are like having an assistant constantly searching the World Wide Web for anything new that meet your search criteria. Either you can subscribe to these searches with an RSS reader like Google Reader, or you can sign up to receive email alerts. You subscribe once and save time by not having to repeat the search tomorrow, next week, and a year from now. It’s your personal 24/7 channel of results.

Imagine the plant’s engineers tackling a difficult process problem and being notified when an expert anywhere in the world has posted on the topic. The quick discovery of relevant information and the ability to connect with an expert are both benefits unimaginable prior to Web 2.0.

We suggest that you begin with searches on your company, your products, your competitors, your suppliers, even yourself in what is called a “vanity search”. These searches become your 24/7 listening channel for conversations and news. And it’s ok for your interests to change. With a one-click delete, removing thefeeds is also very easy.

Sources of success
By no means have we shared a comprehensive list. Rather, these techniques and tools are the ones we use and believe are most valuable at finding fast answers, connecting with other experts, and rapidly gathering information to improve ideas and innovate.

There is a growing interest in public and private wikis and enterprise platforms for bringing the value of Web 2.0 inside companies. These can take time to implement and a change in company culture to become established into the communications mainstream. Our advice is to begin with what the World Wide Web already has to offer in some of these Web 2.0 applications, and to take advantage of the private group options to demonstrate the benefits. This grassroots approach can also create more advocates in the process of adopting these applications.

We believe innovation begins with curiosity and overcoming the comfort of the status quo. Give one or more of these Web 2.0 applications a try, and see what benefits you personally experience.Our hope is that you find new sources of innovation and success.

Jim Cahill (www.LinkedIn.com/in/JimCahill) is marketing communications manager and self-proclaimed ‘chief blogger’ with the Emerson Process Experts blog; Deborah Franke (www.LinkedIn.com/in/ DeborahFranke) is e-marketing manager at Emerson Process Management’sProcess System and Solutions business.