I’ll be in London tomorrow, doing a favour for a friend, and facilitating the first part of “Social software: Maximising knowledge-sharing in your business,” a workshop being presented for the Ark Group.

The friend is David Ferrabee and I’m more than happy to be the warm-up act (as I quipped on Twitter this morning) for a few hours until David gets there.

I expect to enjoy a most interesting time as I get to set the scene and help everyone there focus on how the day will unfold.

Ark’s event agenda says this:

A one-day masterclass designed to help you:

• See social tools in action and appreciate the business purpose in context
• Secure buy-in from senior management to staff and encourage widespread use and support
• Create a culture of communication and collaboration
• Identify the appropriate social software tools for your business
• Determine best practice guidelines and policies for users
• Integrate social tools with your existing systems
• Understand the technological requirements and considerations

I’m sure all of these points will be covered one way or another during the course of the entire day, especially in the case study sessions with Denise Maskew at United Utilities, Ben Gardner at Pfizer and Richard Hare of British American Tobacco.

How the day actually unfolds will be driven by how the day starts. That’s the bit I’ll be warming up. :)

I plan to start with considering the words ‘social software’ and seeing if we can all agree on a definition. Wikipedia’s is good if rather intense, one reason I asked on Twitter earlier if anyone could suggest a succinct definition of social software. Two suggestions so far.

If you have a suggestion, please add it here in a comment, or tweet it. Thanks.

And speaking of Twitter, I want to encourage everyone to tweet away during the event, engage with the broader community in the twittersphere and demonstrate social software in action.

We have a hashtag: #arksocialsoftware – if you do tweet about the workshop or anything related to it, please use the hashtag.

Looking forward to warming things up.

[Cartoon courtesy of Hugh MacLeod. Have you seen Hugh’s new book? Check out my concise review.]