Core elements of digital collaboration platforms

What do almost all collaboration platforms have in common?

learning the basics about the
five core elements of digital collaboration,
will make your life a lot easier!

No matter if it is UBER, Amazon, Facebook, Twitter, Slack, LinkedIn, My Hammer, eBay, YouTube, ESN…? Many people struggle about the great amount of different platforms. Once they realize that mostly they are depending on others, which platform they should use (because the company uses it, an event participation requires you to use it, you university or even your sports club), many are frustrated because of the huge variety of available platforms, apps and systems.

Let’s make it easy again!

They almost all work quite similar:

Taking a closer look, most platforms start with a registration process – this is to protect your identity!!!

Than you are asked to fill out your profile (so others can find you, you become interesting for others and matching algorithms can do their work). The profile is your door opener for meeting people, showing your competence and topics you want to exchange on. Do not mis-understand that with „being arrogant“ – if you don’t share what you can contribute, why should someone connect with you? Of course you only have to tell about yourself, what you feel comfortable about (no matter what a platform asks you!!) … the amount of transparency will change over time, so review your profile from time to time ( I would suggest 6 month)

Next you should build a network (or more) to follow or connect to valuable people. The network has many advantages: It helps you becoming aware of relevant information, it filters topics, so you don’t need to read everything, it is great as a sparring partner – around the clock and anywhere (you need to build a bigger network for that). A network can be your personalized source for answers, inspirations or also review team, advisory board – it is on you, how to build and engage your network.

Than, of course there is content … the reason you are using a platform. Content can be text, articles, thoughts, quotes, videos, pictures, fotos, links, goods, services, relationships, files, podcasts… everything what can be shared via Internet. The advantage here – it is open, it is infinitely scalable, always available and the effort is really small – compared to the physical world.

Once you start reading or viewing your networks content, feedback is the next important thing: liking good content or giving a comment is building engagement and showing appreciation … a very natural, human behavior. Think about yourself, what is needed to get you started? As soon as someone instantly values your contribution (or in the long run), we feel satisfied. Humans want to be seen, accepted, achieving social status. Like and Comment are the two option in the digital world to do exactly that. For business usage, they can be also used in various ways e.g. accepted, red notice, survey, alignment, discussion…

Last but not least it would be great to have a little bit of structure in all this flood of information: Tagging is the advanced idea of folders: keywords, which can be either attached to content or used within text (marked with the #-symbol). Klick on it and you will get a filtered list by the expression you clicked on – which will always produce relevant and concrete results – much better than with a typical fuzzy search function.

So if you have understood this five basic elements and where to find them typically in a platform (which is also quite harmonized) – you can find your way around in most – even completely new – platforms. Check it out… the digital world will be much easier from now on 😉

Next time, we take a look at different kinds of giving feedback…

Please share it, if you like it!