Socialcast is a real-time stream of ideas, thoughts, and comments from your organizational community. These can include links to documents, photos, videos, and information from external sites (i.e. technical blogs, RSS streams, Twitter). There are several different streams in Socialcast. They act as filters for the stream engine so you can navigate to the information you are looking for when on the social networking site.
Home shows all the public streams that have been posted. @Mentions are streams that show anytime a colleague mentions you in a post.
Flagged streams are streams you have marked for follow-up. This is a great mechanism to identify shared comments that contain information that you want to research further like an IT article posted by your CIO.
In addition, you can create custom streams. I created a stream called Virtualization that looks for the hash tags #virtualization, #vmware, and #cloud. That way I can review the shared comments relevant to virtualization in my organization.
A blue dot shows up next to the message stream when there is a shared comment you haven’t read.
Socialize!
To share a comment, type your thoughts in the Share An Update field. You can use the @ sign with the user name to mention them directly in your shared stream (@JasonGaudreau). Hash tags (#) can be used to help organize thoughts on a common topic. Tags indicate trends of topics happening in your organizational community. To post a message with a tag, just type the hash (#) sign and then type your keyword (#virtualization).
You can also direct your comments to a specific group if you have setup groups in Socialcast.
Next week we will review how to create organizational groups and use the company directory.
