Communicators in Business

I was presenting and taking part in a panel session at the Communicators in Business conference at the Metropole in Brighton last week. It was quite an entertaining session and I was sharing the platform with Julie Howell from Fortune Cookie who presented a well argued case for renewing the focus on accessibility for social media tools, and David Burden of Daden Ltd who specialises in helping businesses with virtual worlds. I was particularly taken with David's arguments that virtual worlds may have a powerful role to play inside an organisation as they provide the 'experience' to complement the 'information' provided by the traditional and emerging web. I think I'll be following this up with him. The whole session was chaired by Louisa Preston, who did a great job.

What was most disappointing however was the level of engagement with social media amongst this group of people. It was a large room - over a hundred people I guess - all directly involved in the communications business. However, only about five in the room claimed to write a blog, and only two or three people had even heard of Twitter. I was very surprised! My conclusion is that traditional comms people are being marginalised - a very real danger for the discipline. Or maybe it's just that people in the social media world are still only talking to each other and haven't really broken into mainstream yet. Either way, I was surprised and disappointed!

Social Media Panel

This week I took part in a panel session on Social Media at the British Library. I was on the platform with Euan Semple, ex-BBC and well known in social media circles, and Conrad Bird, Deputy Director of Government Communications.

It was an interesting morning. I still find it surprising how many organisations are still thinking about whether social media is important to them, or the theory and concepts. Few seem to be dealing with the practicalities of introducing and running blogs, wikis, social networks etc. on a day to day basis inside their organisation. I don’t understand why the delays.

Inevitably SharePoint came up in the discussion and I was interested in Euan’s view that SharePoint does not support transformation. It reaffirms the status quo. This is something I have felt for sometime. SharePoint is far too comfortable, it is not a disruptive technology. It integrates well with the way we do things, with the existing culture, and with the existing technologies. It doesn’t force change. In my view it is far better to go with an open source wiki type solution, or a Facebook type social network which causes an organisation to re-think many things, taking us out of our comfort zone.

We also discussed revolution or evolution - and whether fast evolution is the same as slow revolution. I think not. Revolution implies a radical shift in many things, whereas evolution is a much less challenging affair. Having said that, one of the keys to success when deploying social media tools into risk-averse organisations (and amongst risk averse colleagues such as HR and legal) has to be to emphasise the evolutionary dimensions. Even if the results are revolutionary.

Is there such a thing as a corporate blog?

We've been doing a lot of thinking in the office about blogging. In the midst of all this, I've been slightly uncomfortable with the whole notion of the 'corporate blog'. Blogs are places where conversations happen, and conversations happen between people, not between a person and a corporation. I accept that there can be such a thing, but I think organisations have to be really careful to create a blog that has real personality. Otherwise it ceases to be a blog and becomes just another traditional 'channel'. Authenticity is key, as the blogosphere has an uncanny knack of exposing the inauthentic. Just ask Walmart.

PR Week

Last week I spoke at the PR Week Social Networking & Blogging in Practice conference at the Thistle Marble Arch. Unusually, I managed to get to the whole event. Which was quite interesting. Here are some rambling notes to self.

First off, I was surprised at how many people there were attending. It was certainly one of the larger conferences I’ve spoken at in recent years. This seems to have caught the organisers by surprise as the room was very full – not enough tables for everyone – and with low ceilings and no stage it was difficult to both hear and see.

Then there was the audience profile. I seemed to be the only person talking about how this impacts inside an organisation – all the other slots were about the external impact, which seemed to make the event unbalanced. At the start of my session I asked for a show of hands on who was interested or working in employee communications. Only about a quarter of the room put their hands up. I think that in itself is quite interesting as I’ve blogged before about blending and how it’s becoming increasingly difficult to distinguish between inside and outside.

I picked up some nice quotes from some of the speakers…
“Happy customers blog, angry customers blog louder.”
“Blogs are powered by emotion.”
“Bloggers aren’t shy.”
“Conversation is king – content is just the stuff people talk about”
“The conversation is happening without our permission.”

There was quite a lot of discussion about corporate blogs. I’m not convinced there can be such a thing as a corporate blog. By their very nature, blogs are personality driven. Without the personality, it becomes just a publishing channel with Forum type functionality. There’s nothing wrong with that, but it is substantially different in nature to a true blog.

The most interesting part of the day was the panel session – interesting because the panel members were all representing ‘old media’ – and had very old media views. For example, newspapers using blogs just as an outlet for content that doesn’t make the daily printed version and so on (that’s a niche channel, not a blog). The panel could have been much more lively if there’d been a blogger who wasn’t a journalist, or an ex-journalist with a stake in the traditional.

Having said that, one of the panelists - Sara Lloyd from Pan MacMillan talked about “digital natives” and “digital immigrants”. I found that a great way of thinking about Generation Y and the rest of it.

And there were a lot of references to ‘mainstream’, when people were actually talking about traditional media. I wonder when the number of people reading and writing blogs becomes such that the blogosphere becomes the mainstream?

The afternoon included a great session by Will McInnes on the practicalities of blogging. It was great fun, and perfectly illustrated the point that many people in our industry talk about the new social media world, but few really understand it. Will does.

All in all, whilst I think we’ve come a long way I the UK, we’ve a very long way to go before we understand that the old notions of control are breaking down and the PR people have to forget about spinning stories, but joining conversations.

Knowledge or Information?

I’m doing a fair amount of work these days on the governance arrangements which need to be in place for some of the new social media tools, such as blogs and wikis.

The wiki phenomenon in particular is an interesting one.

One of the key success factors for traditional intranets is the implementation of tools to ensure content is kept up to date, is usable, accessible for people with disabilities, and complies with the organisational policies and any regulations that affect your industry. Important so that users can have confidence that the material they are viewing is safe to use as part of their business dealings. Trusted content. This is most often achieved by having clear ownership of content. Someone you can pin responsibility to. However, in the new collaborative world of crowd-sourced content there is often no one particular owner of content, so who do you pin responsibility on?

This means we need to think differently about content governance.

But there’s another dimension. People sometimes refer to the content on these collaborative platforms as knowledge. Explicit knowledge. I don’t think there’s ever really been agreement about when explicit knowledge becomes information. There are as many views as there are practitioners. Whichever way you look at it a significant overlap will exist between knowledge management policies and information management policies. The two need to be taken together.

Then you have the issue of whether a single organisation – even some of the largest – can ever really generate effective ‘crowd-sourced’ content. Wikipedia is a good example of effective crowd-sourcing and the wisdom of crowds. It depends on a substantial volume of people having sufficient knowledge of a subject reviewing and editing content such that its accuracy and relevancy increases in, typically, small incremental steps. However, inside an organisation there are often only a handful of people who have sufficient knowledge of a subject to make a valid contribution. A handful of people does not constitute a crowd! So what happens is that the wiki platform – put in place for crowd-sourcing content – starts to be used as a (sometimes simple) content management platform, by-passing the controls and policies in place on the normal content management system. Sometimes this is done for mischievous purposes – to get people out of the rigour associated with owning important content. However, it’s more often because the wiki platform is so much easier to use than the official organisational content management system. So you can’t blame people.

You can add to that the tension between knowledge management (keep everything so we can learn from it) and information retention (get rid of everything as soon as you can).

And the fact that a wiki platform will often contain a mix of genuine crowd-sourced material and individually owned ‘published’ content.

It’s complicated.

So what’s the answer? Should we re-classify traditional content managed intranets as ‘legacy’ intranets and move to a different form of governance for the whole intranet, or should we try and force different kinds of kind onto different platforms, which will be difficult as people will naturally gravitate to the platform of least resistance?

What is clear however, that the drivers of these policies are still there, and in fact are becoming more prevalent. Growing concerns about data privacy, identity theft, stories about the potential impact of loss of data etc. mean that governance is likely to be tightened rather than relaxed. Another tension.

I’m going to have to think about this some more! Watch this space.