I bet you can’t because (a) that’s a mouthful, and (b) it’s probably never been done before. This is the context of this article on how to use social media networking tools to empower your knowledge workforce.

Can you relate to this? It’s 6 AM. As you wake up in the morning, you rub your eyes, reach over, and pat the bed down for your iPhone. Your daily morning routine always starts the same. You check your Facebook, your twitter, your e-mail and your favorite news reader. Before you’ve gotten out of bed, you managed to reply to a few e-mails, found out your friend is getting married, and uh oh, there’s trouble in the Middle East again.

Now think of yourself as an oil & gas operations manager.

Putting things in new perspective, here’s the few things you really care to know about in the morning:

• HSE issues to report (hopefully none)
• Drilling campaign status & issues
• Production volumes & up-time
• Surveillance & intervention jobs
• Facility status, integrity issues

Imagine this. Now let’s replay the morning scenario as you. It’s 6AM. As you wake up in the morning, you reach for your iPhone. Your daily morning routine always starts the same. You check your company’s social media network to see what work has been done on the rig, jobs in progress, and surface- or well-related problems to report for escalation. Here’s what you find in your dashboard…

If you are interested in implementing this idea, please get in touch with me as I have started development on a prototype solution.

Best known for speedily hunting down e-mail contacts and conversations in Microsoft Outlook, Xobni also has a social networking aspect. It includes photos courtesy of Facebook, phone numbers via Skype, Yahoo Mail, LinkedIn profile information, corporate information from Hoover’s, and now, a Twitter stream.

I have been recently peeping around the market for a solid phone that supports social network services in an integrated way (Facebook, Flickr, Twitter); this all in a phone that does the usual organizer management without toying around. I’m sick of Windows Mobile and its issues primarily because it’s interface is function-based and overly complicated. (I’m not doing File, Open, URL… to play music). On the other end, I am not too excited about Nokia’s interface, case-in-point the Nokia N97 and my wife’s XpressMusic 5800…

Enter HTC Hero. From the HTC Hero website, I quote… “HTC Hero is our first phone to embody HTC Sense™ – an intuitive, seamless experience built upon three fundamental principles – make it mine, stay close, and discover the unexpected.

Make it Mine: With HTC Hero, personalization reaches a level never before possible. Rather than burying important content under layers of menus, the HTC Hero lets you put it at glance view, with a selection of widgets that can be placed right on the home screen. The widgets themselves can be personalized with a variety of designs and sizes that best match your personality.

With Scenes, a new profile feature, HTC Hero becomes multiple phones in one. Create and switch between Scenes that reflect different moments in your life. Your Hero becomes a weekend phone that helps you relax with your choice of tunes, catch up with your favorite friends and capture some memories with HTC Footprints™. And when you go on a trip, your phone becomes your personal guide and gives you instant access to local time, weather and maps.

Stay Close: Today, staying in touch with the people in your life means managing a variety of communication channels and applications ranging from phone calls and emails to Facebook updates.

HTC Hero makes staying close as simple as turning to your friend and saying hello. When you view people, you see the different ways to get in touch, you also see all your interactions like emails sent to your personal and work accounts. You can even check for social network updates and event notices as well as see the latest pictures your friends uploaded to popular photo sharing sites.

Discover the Unexpected: Many of the most memorable moments in your life are experienced, not explained. Even basic functions like the dialer will pleasantly surprise you on the HTC Hero. You can find a person by dialing their phone number or simply by dialing the first few letters of their name. With HTC Hero, you can look at things through different perspectives. Your inbox is not just a list of emails, but a catalog of conversations, a collection of notes flagged as important, and a document library of all your emails with attachments. Your Album is the gateway to online collections of you and your friends on Facebook or Flickr.

Search just about anything, anywhere on your HTC Hero. The dedicated Search button combs through tweets in Twitter™, locates people in your contact list, finds emails in your inbox, searches through appointments in the calendar and very nearly finds needles in haystacks.”Yes