Jon DiPietro

I founded a web site called “Our ISA,” which is a sort of social media experiment that I’m calling the “open source association.”  This WordPress blog is intended to be an open community of persons concerned with and/or interested in the International Society of Automation and invites them to write articles about its future and comment on those ideas.

I created, maintain, manage, and host this web site using a hosted WordPress site.  The site is also tied into several social media accounts and a Facebook fan page.

This presentation was made at the Fall Leaders Meetings at ISA Expo 2009.  As interest has grown in these areas, the presentation expanded in scope and time to include a wide range of technology topics for ISA Sections.

Leveraging Social Media & Internet Technology

I was one of six panelinsts on a social media round table at the 4th Annual ISA Marketing & Sales Summit in Boston on 9/11/09.  In addition to participating in the panel, I set up several webcasts of various presentations at the summit and also created the Posterous page that was used for delivering much of the content from the event to various social media channels.

The audio from the round table is availble here (you can also read the chat transcript):

How local ISA Sections (or Divisions, Departments, etc…) can leverage the latest Internet technologies for (mostly) free and (relatively) easy solutions to web site management, collaboration, and outreach. Presented at 2009 Spring Leaders Meeting.

Please download the handout (PDF) for additional details. You can also download the presentation from Slideshare using the widget below:

Resources and Links

Web Content Management Systems:
These open source Content Management Systems (CMS) provide powerful features for building sophisticated web sites at no cost.
DotNetNuke
WordPress
Drupal
Joomla!
Google Sites

Collaboration:
Google Applications allow you to utilize several shared applications like email, calendar, contacts, sites, and documents at no cost.
Google Applications

Newsletters:
Vertical Response is an electronic newsletter service that provides free emails for non-profits.
Vertical Response

Networking:
These services provide different forms of social networking. LinkedIn has become the de facto site for professional networking. There are already several ISA Groups active on LinkedIn. Facebook is a more personal experience, but recent changes to the site and terms of service make it easy to create “Fan Pages” to connect with a wider audience (think college students). Finally, Twitter is called a “micro blogging” service and is not all that easy to explain. It is essentially an open ended conversation among people who “follow” one another. If you’re interested, check out “How Nonprofits Can Use Social Media.”
LinkedIn
Facebook
Twitter

Blogging:
Blogs are emerging as one of the most important marketing and communication tools in the world today. To learn more about this topic, you can check out “How to Combine SEO, Blogging, and Social Media For Results” from HubSpot.
WordPress
TypePad
Blogger

Sharing and Publishing:
These miscellaneous social media sites provide various means for publishing and sharing different types of content.
YouTube
Slide Share
Delicious
Flickr
FriendFeed

Examples and Tips
Boston Section web site (DotNetNuke)
Jon DiPietro’s Domesticating IT blog (WordPress)
ISA Group on LinkedIn
ControlGlobal’s Facebook group
Delta V‘s YouTube channel

This web site is built using WordPress and if you’re curious about how it was put together, I have a blog post on Domesticating IT that describes the process in detail, “Create a Compelling Resume Online With WordPress.”

One of my new year’s resolutions was to get my online identity sorted out, which means making the most of the available tools and delivering a consistent message. After taking inventory of the various professional sites to which I belong (e.g. LinkedIn, VisualCV), I decided that I needed an aggregator to take charge and deliver my message, my way, in my style. I had registered my own name as a domain many years ago but not done anything with it, and so I decided to use WordPress to tell my professional story.

What Are the Benefits?

• If you think about your career as a product that you’re selling, wouldn’t it make perfect sense to have a web site? Of course it does, and you want your personal brand to have the same benefits:
• More and more, clients and employers are performing online searches to learn more about the people with which they are considering to engage. Having a search engine friendly web site makes it more likely they will find you.
• Indexing your experience through the use of keywords makes it easy for people to zero in on the skills and/or expertise in which they’re interested (more about that later).
• Multimedia capabilities (i.e. images, video, presentations, links) make it easier for you to tell your story in a vivid and interesting way.
• You can use specialized links to direct people to specific content areas of your profile.
• While this practice may soon be common place, for the moment at least it will help you to stand out from the crowd.