Guest post by Mitchell Palski, Oracle Staff Sales Consultant

Social media is sure to have made its way into your company or government organization. Whether its discussion threads, blog posts, Facebook-style profile-pages, or just a simple Instant Messenger application; in one way or another, your employees are connected. What are the objectives of leveraging social media in your organization?

• Facilitating knowledge transfer
• More effectively organizing team events
• Generating inter-community discussions to solve problems
• Improving resource management
• Increasing organizational awareness
• Creating an environment of accountability

Do any of the business objectives above stand out to you as needs? If so, consider leveraging the WebCenter Portal Activity Stream as part of your solution.

In WebCenter Portal, the Activity Stream feature provides a streaming view of the activities of your connections, actions taken in portals, and business activities that looks a lot like a combined Facebook and Twitter newsfeed. Activity Stream can note when a user:

• Posts feedback (comments)
• Uploads a document
• Creates a new blog, page, event, or announcement
• Starts a new discussion
• Streams messages and attachments entered through WebCenter Publisher (similar to Twitter)

Through Activity Stream Preferences, you can select which of these activities to show or hide from your personal Activity Stream.

Here’s what you get:

• Real-time stream of activities with in a Portal or sub-Portal increases awareness across your organization or within a working group
• Complete list of user actions reduces the time-to-find for users that need to interact with the latest activities in your portal
• Users can publish to their groups when tasks are finished for complete group traceability and accountability, as well as improved resource management.
• Project discussions and shared documents that require the expertise of someone outside of a working group now get increased visibility across your organization.

There’s a reason that commercial Social Media tools like Facebook and Twitter have been so successful – they spread information in an aesthetically appealing and easy to read format.  Strategically placing an Activity Feed within your Portal is analogous to sending your employees a daily newsletter, events calendar, recent documents report, and list of announcements – BUT ALL IN ONE!