This is the second article in my series on ways that you can get more involved and better connected to the SharePoint community, focusing on ways that you can plug into the social media aspects of the community.

I was flipping through SlideShare.net this morning and did a search for SharePoint. The first one that came up had over 50,000+ views! What could be THAT interesting in SharePoint, enough to convince 50,000 people to view it?

The German SharePoint user groups and the whole community ecosystem have led to an improved understanding of SharePoint and the arising possibilities in SharePoint usage. Additionally, the local networks improve the knowledge and resource exchange between companies.

I spent a half hour with Jeremy Epstein today, talking about building and cultivating an online community. Jeremy and I met last week at WPC and hit it off right away. We turned on the recorder so you can here the give-and-take between us as we discuss community development.

The answer is to roll out social computing tools within SharePoint to improve search and provide additional methods for surfacing data within your environment.

At EndUserSharePoint.com, we have the same type of thing enabled, but most people don’t know it. In our comments section for each of the articles, you as the commenter have the ability to display an image along with your comment

Many companies have chosen not to activate the social media features in SharePoint, and will continue to be a hardsell… unless strong arguements are made for its use.

It’s been a month since SharePoint Saturday EMEA and I see more people have “taken the bait” and want to put together their own event. I know two, specifically that are scheduled: Live Online SharePoint Saturday Arabia, March 27th, and Live Online SharePoint Saturday India, April 24th.

Coincidentally, just as I published an article on using EndUserSharePoint.com to filter all the noise on SharePoint, the TechCrunch Crunchup Conference posted a video of a roundtable discussion on Filtering Noise. The panel is a group of some of the most prominent people in the Social Media world.