Social media websites are changing the world. Facebook, a popular social site, has over 1 billion active users each month. Six-hundred million of its users connect using a mobile device. In the United States, Facebook has about 168 million users and it penetrates to about 73% of the nation’s online population. In marketing, this is a great way to connect with the public. For example, loyal buyers of citrus products might sign up to “like” a Facebook citrus page, which in turn might send them coupons for products at the grocery store.
Different social sites serve different needs. Facebook and Twitter, for example, are more informal and often involve friends posting brief personal updates. LinkedIn, on the other hand, is primarily a network that connects people for professional networking. Blogs are another example of social media, which allow publishers to create longer messages than are possible on sites like Facebook or LinkedIn. One common feature between many social media sites is that the information posted is generally intended to reach a lot of people. This is great if your goal is to socialize with a lot of friends, market a brand, or get an important message out to the public.
You can’t ignore social media and think it just doesn’t apply to you anymore. Its popularity makes you wonder how these types of technologies can be used more effectively in citrus production and scientific research. To explore this idea further, social media sites can be considered “public” or “private”. The well-known sites above are public in the sense that most anyone can easily sign up and start using their services almost immediately. In contrast, private social networks can provide a way to improve efficient communications between people within a single organization or group of cooperators. Only those specifically granted access to your private network can see the information and interact with other users there.
Depending on the services and security needed, private social networks can be valuable in citrus operations. This is primarily by connecting everyone to the same stream of communication, which is often called an “activity stream” (Fig. 1). Briefly, an activity stream is a reverse chronological listing of brief status updates from network participants. Your colleagues might opt to receive your updates through push services, or they may prefer to log in to their account and get all their updates at once. Status updates are usually short, but can be longer depending on the message and the application. Usually, you have options to post a brief reply to a status update. An example of a status update in citrus might be, “It’s 32 degrees at the edge of the grove.” A reply might be, “Thanks, we got the irrigation over there turned on now.” You could communicate this information with a phone call or email, but the advantage of the social platform is that you can more easily communicate with all your team members at once. Self-starters within your organization could then know that certain actions are required without having to be personally contacted. Interactions like this between colleagues can improve operational efficiency. Applications like this in a citrus operation are limited only by your imagination and the ability of your colleagues to adopt a new technology.
Fig. 1. Screen grab of the desktop interface for Podio. This example shows an activity stream for a hypothetical citrus operation. The activity stream appears in the middle column and the different workspaces are shown in the left panel. The right panel show some of the custom apps created for recording different types of business information.
Podio (podio.com) is but one of many platforms available for companies wanting to create their own private social networks. Podio gets everyone on your team on the same page by connecting them all to the same activity stream. In this sense, Podio is like a private Facebook that is only visible to the people in your organization. However, what sets Podio apart from Facebook is that it can easily be scaled for project management, task assignment, team collaboration, meeting management, data collection, timesheet tracking, and more (Fig. 1). In other words, Podio is a private social network that can operate according to your business rules.
An example of using Podio is to help with harvesting optimization (Fig. 2). A current issue facing the industry is the extensive fruit drop occurring in many parts of the state. Fruit drop metrics are helpful in determining how to dispatch harvesting crews. A field surveyor, for example, could rate the fruit drop in different groves using their Podio iPhone app, then attach a cell phone image to each observation and post it to their Harvesting activity stream. The harvesting crew dispatcher back at the main office can immediately see this information on their desktop and can to direct operations accordingly.
Fig. 2. Screen grab of the iPhone interface for Podio. This example shows a series of fruit drop ratings performed so harvesting operations can be efficiently scheduled.
The Podio platform operates seamlessly across your desktop, mobile phone and tablet. Allowing for differences in screen size, Podio looks and works much the same way on each device. Your activity stream is a central part of the display, and the various projects you have set up can be found by navigating the display as dictated by your device.
Another powerful feature of Podio are the apps you can create for data collection needs. It’s easy to create simple, custom data apps for your team. Examples of apps that could be used in citrus include timesheets, grove surveys, crop test results, safety inspections and more. The information collected in Podio apps can be exported directly to spreadsheets for more detailed analysis and reporting. This great feature could make Podio useful for some kinds of scientific research, especially if the experiment was a cooperative one between multiple growers or researchers. Growers can use their mobile devices to collect data and imagery from the field, and researchers can download the spreadsheet immediately at the lab. Given the importance of visual identifiers over time in greening, this kind of efficient information exchange could be valuable. New variety trials are another application that comes to mind.
Despite their advantages, social media, and private social networks in particular, might not be for everyone. You have to dedicate some time to setting the system up before it is deployed to your team. If you use an off-the-shelf cloud platform, the setup and testing process can take a day or so. Add another day for team training. But, like any computer system, familiarization is the key. Once you get to know the system and come up with your own ways of using your private social network, you might not want to go back to the old way of doing things.
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