Collaboration can be difficult when your workforce is scattered across offices.  Sure, there’s email and online chat, but these communication tools often make public conversations private knowledge.

Stay connected to projects and people, regardless of your location or level of involvement, with Socialcast.  Socialcast is an enterprise productivity tool.  It’s similar to Yammer, an idea we discussed in Everything looks like a nail, but whereas Yammer has a strictly Twitter flavor, Socialcast is a full-on social networking platform.

Employees have profile pages and the ability to follow each other.   Through the “what’s on your mind” status update, they can publish work activity, ideas, questions, general musings, etc, and other employees can view, comment, or attach files to those updates.  There’s also a groups functionality that can be used to manage projects, departments, or location-specific conversations.

The best part?  Everything is public and searchable.  No guessing who is working on what or what stage of development a project is at.   You can follow all conversation threads on the homepage or opt-in to receive email notifications.  The latter keeping you in the know, even when you’re not actively participating in the community.

The even better best part?  Socialcast is free.  The basic version comes with unlimited users, data ownership, administration rights, and more.  There is an enterprise version for companies that want to take the platform behind their own firewall, but we’re pretty impressed with the level of features you get with the basic version.

Socialcast is a great tool for fostering employee communication (think Yahoo Answers for your company) and creating a real sense of community. You can use it to share information that is often left out of the employee handbooks (e.g. best lunch spots, best times to avoid the line at the local cafe, wi-fi dead zones, etc.) and even to coordinate employee initiatives (e.g. carpooling, happy hours, recycling challenges, baby sitting programs, softball teams, etc.).

If you’re a Twitter newbie, mastering the art of the tweet is second only to the process of building your network.  After all, how can you use Twitter as an effective marketing tool if no one is listening?

Try TwitterMass. This service automates the process of following – and theoretically, the process of being followed – on Twitter.  TwitterMass locates followers based on keyword and hashtag searches.  The idea being people with similar interests will yield more meaningful connections.  So while it’s fine and dandy to add your friends to your Twitter account, a random follower with the same interests could potentially expose you to even more followers with the same interest.

TwitterMass is free and a pretty straight-forward tool to use. Login with your Twitter account and access the “Manual Follow” feature in your Toolbox.   Plugin your keyword(s) or hashtag.  Hashtags are a grouping convention used by the Twitter community; it’s a quick and dirty way of categorizing tweet content (e.g. #digitamarketing). TwitterMass will return a list of candidates and basic background information, like their biography and how many people are following them.   You can choose to mass “follow” or “block” these candidates.   You also have the option of sending a personal message.

As an added bonus, you can put an expiration date on your new followees.   If they don’t follow you back within a set time, TwitterMass will automatically unfollow them for you.   This may seem extreme, but the goal here is to be a leader, not a follower.

I use several services to stay on top of industry tropics and trends.  However, combing through all the feeds, tweets, and bookmarks can get overwhelming.   I’m not ready to make cuts (what if we miss the “it” story or application?), but it would be nice to filter out the riffraff.

That’s the idea behind Popego, a social aggregator that only serves up content that is relevant to your interests.   The service is free, and it takes about 2 minutes to setup your personal feed (maybe longer for the true social service junkie).  Simply tell Popego what your interests are (technology? health? entertainment?) and which, if any, tags you want to include/exclude from you personal tag cloud.   Next, plugin the web services you subscribe too.  Popego works with:

• Blogs
• Google Reader
• Friend Feed
• Flickr & Picasa
• YouTube & Vimeo
• Twitter
• Delicious
• Last.fm
• Digg & StumbleUpon
• LinkedIn
• And more…

You can also adjust the level of influence certain web services have over your tag cloud.

When everything is to your liking, flip the switch, and Popego will generate your personal feed (http://popego.com/username).  This displays stories by relevance (percentage of interest match) and can be filtered by video, posts, or links.   You can also access content through your personal tag cloud.

The more you interact with Popego, the more it learns.  For example, my primary focus is web applications and new media.  I want to know what’s new and how to use it.  I’m less interested in venture funding and social commentary, but I don’t want to discount these articles all together.  By rating the content Popego serves up and fine-tuning my internal settings, I can actually train the service to focus on my interests.

The big event over the weekend was, of course, the unveiling and subsequent frenzy of Facebook usernames.

In the footsteps of MySpace and Twitter, Facebook members are now able to register a username, and more importantly, secure their vanity URL (e.g. facebook.com/feedgrowth).  This replaces the lengthy alphanumeric URLs that are randomly assigned to Facebook members – and are impossible to remember, pass on, or promote.  It also opens up a whole world of opportunity for companies and brands looking to establish a presence on the most popular social networking site.

Here’s how it works: go to http://facebook.com/username and log in.  Enter your desired username.  If your username is already taken, Facebook will provide you with various options.  Obviously, certain names and terms are going to go fast, so you may have to get creative.  To avoid squatters from holding brand names and popular terms hostage, Facebook is making usernames permanent (no changes, no transfers).  So, like a tattoo, choose wisely.

We’ve discussed how important it is to secure your username across multiple sites and platforms as part of your digital marketing strategy.   It will be interesting to see how brand search performance is affected.  Social juggernauts like Facebook and Twitter frequently show up in the top Google search results, and depending on the search, they may even outrank a company or brand’s actual website.

It seems like everyone has a blog – or two or three – these days.  Some companies have gone so far as to create a blog network, extending blogging privileges to departments and individual employees.    

Now there’s BuddyPress, a suite of WordPress plugins that transform the same blog network into a full-fledge social network.  BuddyPress is currently only compatible with the Wordpress MU platform, which is designed for the management of multiple users/blogs on a single WordPress account (The Wall Street Journal, Mashable, and our very own Atlanta Journal Constitution are among the faithful).  With BuddyPress, the actual WordPress backend is converted into a social networking hub, including:

• Extended profiles
• Friending
• Private messaging
• Groups
• Wire Posts
• Forums
• Activity streams
• Blog tracking

You can install the complete package or pick and choose your functionality a-la-carte style.   Either way, the idea here is to let the members of you blog network interact without having to go outside the network or adopt other platforms.

If you’re already on the WordPress MU or thinking of creating a blog network within your company, take advantage of the BuddyPress social functionality.  Both are free and come with built-in community support.