The Nashville Tech Story (6/4/09)
When a problem arises, it is easy to dismiss it, especially when it is a committee, you are a volunteer, and you are not looking for more work. Unfortunately, we have several terrific committees that look at challenges a little differently. Recently, the Membership Committee under the leadership of Jeff Johnson (C3 Consulting) encountered an issue with communicating and sharing documents. We went through the customary and usual suspects of Google Docs, etc. However, this challenge had a particular twist in that we needed to do this through Linked In where the group was already gathered.
With more than 1,000 Linked In members for the Nashville Technology Council, it is important that we harness the collective intelligence of this group and create ways for them to share and create ideas. We decided it would be worth a little time to search for a Linked In plug-in. As a result, we found Huddle.net. Huddle is a shared workspace for collaboration, and it has a Linked In plug-in. Very cool. I really wish Linked In would open up the API, so more plug-ins could be developed.
Huddle allows Linked In members within a smaller group to collaborate, share documents, and have discussion confidentially. Why do we need another tool? Maybe we don’t, but if you have a large group of employees, volunteers, or customers on Linked In, I think you will find this tool does the trick. You could use this tool to create a focus group of your customers where you invite only the ones in that you want feedback from at that time. You could use it to have past employees give you feedback about how the business could do a better job for the existing employees. Or in our case, you can use it to allow committee members to contribute at their convenience.
So Huddle Up and let’s start communicating together on Linked In.
