I've been following Shel Israel's responses to the SAP Global Survey with interest: learning a lot from those I've read but wondering in the back of my mind, "Where are all the little guys?" Definitely, I like to read what the social media gurus are thinking - but I'm even more interested to learn how some of the young, low-profile business bloggers might answer Shel's questions. Then, it occured to me. I'm one of those young, low-profile business blogers. Might as well answer the questions myself. So, here we go. I'm using Shel's "Roll-Your-Own" version of the survey.
1. From where you sit in the world, how has social media changed your life? How about the lives of your other family members? Professionally, blogging has increased my work responsibilities but also kept me more informed. From a corporate perspective, most companies are starting to feel increased pressure from customers and internal groups to incorporate social media into their communications efforts, but few PR or corporate communications groups are getting any extra resources to put into their efforts in this space. Part of me thinks that's a shame. But on the other hand, the lack of resources can keep blogging honest and help ensure that the ground swell of corporate blogs continues to come from the trenches and from those people who actually want to blog, not those who are being paid to blog. On a personal level, my family hasn't been affected by social media, though I do have a handful of friends who are able to stay home with their children and earn a supplemental income through blogging. That wasn't possible a few years ago.

2. From where you sit in the world, how do you think your personal and business lives will change over the next five years? How about for the rest of your family? I've been telecommuting for SAS since 2002, which has been a great arrangement for me and my family. In the next five years, social media tools will continue to increase the opportunities for telecommuting and help provide a social outlet that employees miss when they don't go to the office five days a week. Within corporate communications and PR, we'll continue to move our focus away from the traditional outbound marketing and communications and start moving more towards a social networking strategy centered around authentic interactions with individual readers and customers.

3. What do you feel are the ascending social media tools and which are descending? I think Facebook and YouTube and a lot of the bookmarking sites are ascending. Probably SecondLife too, but I've yet to read any real compelling business case studies for a B2B business in SecondLife. RSS is still just taking off and has room to improve. A lot of people say Google Reader will bring RSS to the masses, but it's not something my Grandma would use. It needs to be simpler. I'd like to see a community-centered RSS reader that makes it easy to share and recommend feeds to friends. I'd guess that Wikis are descending, also because they're too hard to use. And, I'll bet on MySpace and Twitter slowing down too, though I think a Twitter-like platform for business professionals could really take off, similar to the way Facebook and LinkedIn are eclipsing MySpace for professional use. I'm interested in MyLifeBrand and other sites that claim to aggregate all the social networking apps into one. There's a need for that, but I haven't dug in to see if these sites are really doing what they claim. Finally, blogging is still definitely ascending in the business world but might be starting to descend for personal use - mostly because other tools are taking its place. If you're not much of a writer or an entrepreneurial blogger, you can get what you want from online communities instead of blogs.

4. The folks at SAP are particularly interested in social media's impact on the global enterprise as well as small to medium-sized corporations. Do you have any knowledge or advice for them? Businesses are really starting to catch on to the internal information-sharing benefits of social media and the external community-building benefits of social media. There are a lot of marketing and customer care success stories already - and lots more to come. What businesses still need are social media tools designed to increase productivity. There are still a lot of opportunities for collaborative learning and planning online.

5. Do you have any interesting case studies of unique uses of social media? We have country offices that are using MySpace for HR recruitment and Google mashups for online visitor maps. We also have a New Media group that has been working with video, audio and other digital projects for years, both on the intranet and the internet. They incorporated RSS into a lot of their projects early on, including audio and video feeds for their monthly Better Management Today show, and they record video live on site at a lot of conferences and events. We have a great internal blogging program that's just starting to really take off with the executives and a very active wiki community. Sharepoint is huge internally right now too, and some of our most popular intranet sites, like the HR portal, have converted their entire intranet to Sharepoint. We're also supporting a community wiki project for SAS users . We've provided the resources and platform for that site, but it's really run and maintained by and for the users. Our first corporate-sponsored external blog was an event-driven rugby blog conceived and managed by our UK press office. Since then we’ve been trying to encourage others to blog externally as well.

6. What social media tools do you use? Which are your favorites? Why.
I use Typepad, Serendipity, Facebook, YouTube, MySpace, LinkedIn, del.icio.us, flickr, MyBlogLog, SharePoint, Google Reader, Bloglines, Google Analytics, SiteMeter and some others that I'm forgetting at the moment. I started my first blog on TypePad in 2003 and still have a strong commitment to the service for personal blogging (though my personal blogging has slowed down quite a bit since I started blogging for work). I just recently started using Facebook and suddenly find myself checking in there more often than any of the others. A lot of people who've been timid about commenting or creating an online presence with other social media tools aren't afraid of Facebook and LinkedIn. They're clean and simple and easy to get started - but Facebook gives you more reasons to keep coming back.

7. Do you see language as a barrier for social media? Will English become the global language of the Internet? Should it? Language will always be something of a barrier until accurate, automatic translation is available over the Web. It's unlikely that English will become the global language of the Internet. Too many people are more comfortable with their native language. You know, our Danish colleagues seem to be consistently ahead of us in online marketing & social media. Maybe we should all learn Danish.

8. Are you reading more blogs or less these days? Are you watching more online video or less these days? I'm reading fewer personal blogs and more business blogs. When I first started reading blogs for fun, I had a rule of thumb that I wouldn't subscribe to a new blog until I had been there and enjoyed what I saw at least three times. I need to start enforcing that rule on myself for business blog subscriptions too - because my rss feeds for business reading are getting out of control. Video? Probably more. SAS does a lot of internal Webcasts of divisional meetings and executive updates that are great for remote employees. Our external Webcast series are informative too. I watch more SAS video than I do YouTube.

9. Write a question(s) for yourself and answer it: What do business need to implement successful social media projects? We need big ideas and big thinkers, and we need advice on how to move to the next level with social media. Everyone is offering conferences and books and Webcasts on the basics of how to get started with social media, but once you've moved beyond the basics, it's hard to find input on what to do next.

10. Additional comments? I've enjoyed reading the survey responses so far and think you've had a great participation rate from social media experts, but I'd really like to see more answers from the people who are working on social media projects inside corporations. What's working for them, how are they getting the resources and support, where are they getting their big ideas, and what feedback are they getting from their customers?