Facilitation versus creation
27th February 2006 by Shel Holtz, ABC
While we’re waiting for the official team of employee communications bloggers to get rolling, I thought I’d throw this out for discussion, motivated in part by Jeffrey Treem’s comment, but also by a post Niall Cook wrote on his blog. Cook is a counselor for Hill & Knowlton in London. He recently attended a meeting of some 35 people responsible for some of the biggest intranets in the UK. Cook introduced the notion of social software (blogs, wikis, social networking, social tagging, podcasting, etc.) on intranets. The key objection was loss of message control, prompting Cook to offer this conclusion:
…the role of the corporate intranet needs to change to one of facilitating collaborative communication and then aggregating it for the benefit of others.
I’ve argued this for years, going back to the days when message boards were new-fangled. With the rapid adoption of consumer-generated media (CGM) on the web, it’s inevitable that these tools will infiltrate internal networks. What role should employee communications play? I wholly subscribe to Cook’s notion of facilitating collaborative communication so that it benefits the organization.
Read Cook’s post. If you’re so inclined, you can also listen to today’s installment of For Immediate Release: The Hobson & Holtz Report; Neville interviewed Niall for 11 minutes on the topic. Then, let’s talk. How realistic is the vision of an intranet made up, at least in part, of tools that allow employees to create collaborative content?
March 1st, 2006 at 8:12 am
Shel,
I thought one of Niall’s best points came on the FIR interview, when he talked about how employees are using these tools whether companies find ways to integrate them or not, so a company that doesn’t find a way for employees to create collaborative content are going to lose tremendous amount of information.
The other interesting topic is the continual complaints from executives about a “loss of control of the message.” When are communicators get it that control is a myth. It never existed. Setting up systems that aggregate and facilitate is a much more effective philosophy both in terms of information flow and building a healthy culture.
You might want to check out what IBM is doing with its Dogear
application. It is a social bookmarking tool (like del.icio.us) integrated into the compny intranet.
March 30th, 2006 at 1:38 pm
OK. I’ll bite (then I’ll get back to my other job.)
We’re seeing these “pockets” of social networks popping up to - gasp - the surprise of our IT and comms people. The good news is that it’s still scattered.
My question is - not unlike in the advent of e-mail - there has to be a framework for appropriate use. Where does governence and communications about usage expectations come in? Who owns it? Has anyone out there tackled this and developed really neat blog/ bulletin board/ meeting room guidelines?
March 30th, 2006 at 1:50 pm
FYI I just started a conversation about this on the employee communications section of this blog, including a post about recommended corporate blogging policies.