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Models for the Social Business Transformation #e20s

The 2nd day at the Enterprise 2.0 Summit starts with a panel discussion about 'Models for the Social Business Transformation' (track 1). Panelists are Luis Suarez (IBM), Jerome Colombe (Alcatel-Lucent) and Nicolas Rolland (Danone).

Jerome starts with a presentation about his experiences at Alcatel-Lucent. This company is in a huge transformation. The transformation was done in less than 2 years, and started just after Ben Verwaayen started at Alcatel. Engage has become part of their DNA.
They set up a platform called Engage. Now with 60.000 profiles (80% of the org.) and 4.000 groups. There are two official community managers, but the rest is managed by the employees themselves. People decide for themselves what they do with the platform.
They analyze what's happening in the platform with social network analysis.

Benefits for Alcatel were:

1. It restructured the internal communications
2. Commitment to convince and help colleagues (engagement of whole of larger part of organization)
3. Emergence of crowdsourcing principles

Risks and pitfalls (the dark side) are:

1. Copycat of bad hits (copying the existing the existing silos, official vs UGC for comms)
2. Bypass organizational decisions (challenge all decisions made before, sensitve topics, question re-organizations)
3. Questioning impacts for social networting (overload of info, anonymous comments, outdated threads)

Alcatel learned as they went along.

Nicolas also tells about the social business steps Danone is taking. Collaborate, innovation and acceleration were drivers for the roll out of social networking tools in 2009. Opened it for everybody (100.000 work at Danone, 40.000 have a computer). In the 1st year 10.000 people joined. The system allows you to fill in a profile with skills and create communities.

After the 1st year they wondered how they would reach everybody. The network was not the intranet (and it should be they found). So they worked on connecting to mobile devices (with wifi access everywhere within Danone) and video. They are also trying to move towards integrating learning and gaming in the network.

Danone does not find that English should be the main language in the network. English is not used the most in Danone anyway (more Spanish, Indonesian).

Social technologies are extending organizations

McKinsey has been following the social business movement for some time now. And they're following to see if it can live up to the expectations. Recently they published the results of their 5th annual survey under 4200 global executives. The polled them how their organizations use social tools.

The finding of the report are interesting. There's clear progress: social tools are being used more and more and in more effective ways. When adopted across the networked enterprise and integrated in work processes of employees, clear benefits are seen. There's a boost in financial performance and market share, which relates to the results of previous surveys. However not many companies are fully networked, meaning they are internally and externally networked.

One of the most interesting things I read in the report was the fact that executives believe if organizational barriers to social tools diminish, they could transform the core business processes. This is a big statement as most business processes are formal and supported by heavy and expensive IT-systems. Exhibit 8 give you an idea of the processes that will/can be changed. This does not imply social tools are good for all business processes. Exhibit 7 should which business processes have the best fit with social tools. As you see, social tools are mostly used to scan the external environment.


The survey mentioned that 72% of the organizations have at least one social technology inhouse. And 40% have a social networking and blogging platform.

Of course we all want to know what the affordances of social business are. According to this report they are:

1. increasing speed to access knowledge
2. reducing communication costs
3. increasing speed to access internal experts

Another interesting finding is the fact that it is easier to loose benefits of social tools than to gain them. Implementing social tools is hard work and requires continuous effort.

My Cluetrain Manifesto Notes

It's been years ago since I read 'The Cluetrain Manifesto'. I think I maybe only read parts of it, back in 2001 or so. After leaving Oce I didn't have a copy of The Cluetrain anymore, so I decided to buy my own copy and read through it from beginnning to end. Now there's a 10th anniversary edition making it even more interesting to do so.

Man, what a ride it was. This book is just great. And amazing for the fact they captured what is going on right now so well. This book is a must-read for a social media enthusiasts. But also for all who just started using social media and are trying to understand if this social-thing is a hype or a trend.

I'm not going to summarize the book for you. But I wanted to share some nuggets with you. If you haven't read the book, I hope this will trigger you to go and do so. Please let me know if you do!

• Start here and read through the 95 theses! If you like these and want to know more, read the book.
• "... everything that happens in the marketplace falls into three categories: transaction, conversation, and relationship. In our First World business culture, transaction mattered most, conversation less, and relationship least. Worse, we conceive and justify everything in transactional terms. Nothing happens more than price and "the bottom line". By looking at the market through the prism of transaction, or even conversation, we miss the importance of relationship. We also don't see how relationship has a value all its own: one that transcends, even as it improves, the other two." (p.12)
• "... most of the ones I come up with [that apply The Cluetrain well] are essentially small businesses, with simple organizational underpinnings and a scale made manageable by an intrinsic limit on the number of company participants in the conversation." (p.33)
• "The internet was a force of disintermediation. ... The internet was disintermediating the sedimentary layers of increasing nonhumanity." (p.53)
• "Indeed, conversation requires a broad base of agreement from which we then discuss relatively minor differences. Conversation isn't usually about finding the truth. It's a social activity and a way of building social relationships." (p.62)
• "Whether in the marketplace or at work, people do have genuine, serious concerns. And we have something else: knowledge. Not the sort of boring, abstract knowledge that "Knowledge Management" wants to manage. No. The real thing. We have knowledge of what we do and how we do it - our craft - and it drives our voices; it's what we most like to talk about." (p.80)
• "Markets are conversations. Trade routes pave the storylines. Across the millenia in between, the human voice is the music we have always listened for, and still best understand." (p.82)
• "We don't know what the web is for but we've adopted it faster than any technology since fire." (p.115)
• "People talk to each other. In open, straightforward conversations. Inside and outside organizations. The inside and outside conversations are connecting. We have no choice but to participate in them." (p.123)
• "Companies can't stop customers from speaking up, and can't stop employees from talking to customers. Their only choice is to start encouraging employees to talk to customers - and empowering them to act on what they hear." (p.144)
• "The long silence - the industrial interruption of the human conversation - is coming to an end." (p.154)
• "Here's some advice on entering the conversation: loosen up. Lighten up. And shut up for a while. Listen for a change." (p.173)
• "We're all learning to talk anew. We're all going to get it right and get it wrong." (p.183)
• "The web, in short, has led every wired person in your organization to expect direct connections not only to information but also to the truth spoken in human voices. And they expect to be able to find what they need and do what they need without any further help from people who dress better than they do." (p.188)
• "Hyperlinks subvert hierarchy. Hyperlinks subvert Fort Business. Business is conversation." (p.230)
• "Via intranets, workers are already speaking among themselves. Via the internet, markets are already speaking among themselves. The convergence of these two conversations is not only necessary, but inevitable." (p.236)
• ""Follow the money" may still apply, but to find the money in the first place, follow the conversation." (p.248)

Well, those are my highlights! Hope they help. What part(s) of The Cluetrain did you like most?

No Reply

Maybe I shouldn't depend on email as much as I do, like Luis Suarez is telling us. But there's something about email that surprises me. When I send emails to people, ending with a clear question and deadline, many don't reply at all. Why is this? A week or a month later I have to get back to them and ask them again (yes, I keep track of the emails I need to get a reply on). Then they usually send a reply back right away... So it is possible to get a reply back quickly.
I know people are busy. I am too. And I don't assume everyone will be waiting for my email and send back a reply in less than a day. I don't mind if I have to wait. As long as you know the reply/answer will come around sooner or later. Walking up to the person or calling him/her helps of course, if possible.

So, how do I handle email? I basically apply the Getting Things Done rules: if I can answer within 2 minutes, I reply right away. Most email fits in this category... If it takes longer I plan it in my calendar and tell the sender when I'm going to answer. You can do that in 2 minutes as well.

How do you handle this? Do you recognize it?

My Talk at the Enterprise 2.0 Summit 2010 #e20s

Thought I'd share this with you now that the recording is also online. I gave a talk about enterprise microblogging at the Enterprise 2.0 Summit 2010 in Frankfurt. Please find the slides here. The talk was also recorded and can be found here.

Comments and questions about the slides and the talk are more than welcome!

My Global Intranet Trends 2011 Highlights

Jane did it again! Her Global Intranet Trends for 2011 report is out. And it's loaded with all kinds of information about the intranet. Fact and figures, stories and trends. As in previous years I'll pass on some of my highlights from the report. For two reasons: to show you what a great resource this report is, and, to get you to buy it. I think it's worth your money.

There's something strange about the intranet. The intranet has been around for a long time now. Some say the intranet is 'so passé'. Social media is the new intranet. At the same time when I read this report I wonder: if the intranet has been along for so long, how come so few companies get their intranet right? Why isn't it the case that we just copy the great practices of other intranet concepts and technologies to have our own great intranet? Of course I know the answer to at least part of this question. But still, with resources like Jane's survey you should be able to make a very good intranet and move around the pitfalls of others. As I said before, Jane's survey results are a great benchmark for your own intranet. And, they're also a great map if you just started defining your intranet.
Anyway, it seems like we just started with the intranet, like we're just starting to understand and use social media (although it's been around for a while). As Jane mentions in the Preface: the number of conversations about the intranet on LinkedIn, Twitter, etc is still increasing. So, I'll chip in with this post as well!

Now for some highlights from the report.

• This is Jane's 5th report. This year 440 organizations participated in the survey! (That 130 more than last year.) The focus of this year's report is on the leaders in the intranet space. The difference between leaders and the rest is substantial (p. 5). The differences are most defined in the 'people' and 'real-time' dimensions.
• Jane already summarized the intranet megatrends in a post. The intranet is becoming the front-door more and more. Team-orientation is important, largely due to integration of the intranet with tools like Sharepoint. People are more and more important, due to social media in the workplace. Very interesting is the fact that real-time is a trend. The numbers give the proof. And, the last trend, is the intranet becoming accessible from devices and outside the firewall. Jane stresses these trends were already seen in 2009 and are confirmed in last year's and this year's data.
• The previous point is direct input for your intranet strategy. An overarching strategy for the intranet, collaboration and social media is therefore essential (p. 2). I really liked the way the whole report shows how these areas are related and integrate more and more.
• Even though these are the megatrends it doesn't mean we're there yet... Only 10% of the organizations say their entire intranet is collaborative. There's work to do... But 70% of the companies say they use social media of some sort in the organization. (p. 4) Microblogging is the biggest new-entry in the workplace, also showing the need for real-time communication in companies.
• As you would expect social media is a big topic in organizations. The benefits are real (p. 41), although not many (less than 20%) are measuring the value. (Measuring in general is not done much. Only 50% measure the value of their intranet. p. 22) People stress that moderation of social media is needed due to findability, security and language issues. Going from experimentation to enterprise-wide deployment of social media is a big jump (p. 30).
• Interesting statement: "It takes at least 3 to 4 years for social media to become established in a organization." This is something to think about. Organize for the longhaul, said Andy McAfee in his book Enterprise 2.0. This report also gives the data to prove this (p. 42). Don't think social media is an instant success!
• Clearly the report shows social media starts at employee level. To be successful in the long term senior management needs to step up. The data telling us that senior management blogs are highly appreciated, could convince some to step in hopefully. (p. 52) And McKinsey recently showed that companies using social media are market leaders.
• Governance of the intranet is still a big issue. In only 12% of the organizations top management is committed to the intranet. I still find this an amazing fact. How do we get senior managers to see how important it is to support information and communication processes in the right way? How do we get them to see that information and communication is the lifeblood of the organization? On the other hand, their commitment is not a guarantee for success (p. 69). The report does not mention what the guarantee is... ;-) Maybe you know?
• What make the leaders different in this space? They have commitment from top management, social media is well-established in the organization and the intranet is the way of working (it's integrated in their business processes) (p. 11). But only 4 organizations meet all three criteria. 16 meet two out of three criteria. I'm curious if this has to do with the fact that their intranet is more (or less) related to their primary business processes (p. 18 says not many have integration with business applications e.g.). This curiousity increases when I read that 'communication' is the key driver of the intranet. (p. 14) Communication is not a business process...
• There's something strange about the questions and the resulting data about the unified intranet model. The question is whether organizations are moving to a unified intranet. However, relating to the previous point, shouldn't this depend on the type of the organization if they move towards a unified intranet or not. Right? Maybe a fragmented intranet fits perfectly with the way they do business.
• 80% of the companies have a single entry point. And personalization is not popular at all (84% don't have it). (p. 17)
• After reading the numbers on blogging, wiki, video sharing, etc. deployment, I was wondering: having a blog is not the same as actively blogging. It would be nice to hear from the respondents that are blogging, for instance, how many blogs they have and how often they post/comment.
• The section about the benefits of social media is very insightful. (p. 41 and on) I loved the way respondents gave examples of hard and soft benefits. Furthermore the data shows you get more benefits by using social media. I think both points are something that we are learning from new media. Hard benefits aren't the only thing that count in business and IT. And you can only assess it's value by experiencing it. At least this relates well with my experience! :-)
• And a last highlight: The good thing for intranet managers and employees is the respondents say their work will become more and more strategic, due to the importance of social media among others.

In general I really liked this report. The overall structure feels much better (than previous years). The data is presented in nice information packages that we can all use and reuse. The report is long, but it's reads easily and is structured in such a way you can skip over sections (and come back to them when they're relevant).

I hope it's clear this report is not limited to the intranet. It's about the digital workplace in general, about enterprise 2.0, internal/external social media use and in essence about IT organization and implementation. That's why this report is so rich and you should read it. I hope you enjoy it! And after reading it, please share your thoughts with us.

Oh, and if this post doesn't convince you, get the free samples from the report itself here.

Jane, thanks again for this report and all the work you put into it. Hope to see you soon in Utrecht!

Launch of a merged intranet and first steps to an integrated social media platform #epem

Johan Hillebrand, Head of Internal Communication at ABN/Amro.

Two main challenges Communications has: information overload (too much email…) and they couldn’t find information. Another thing that was mentioned was: stop paper communication, move to digital. They decided to take on these challenges by building a new intranet.

Goals for the new intranet:

• Fewer channels
• Offer relevant information
• Centralize content

They choose to have the intranet look a lot like their internet site. No complaints about confusing the intranet for the internet yet. (They launched a couple of weeks ago.)

They kept the look and feel very simple. They combine general and local news. They assume people have 10 minutes to read news and cluster that in a box.

ABN has a separate social media platform (not integrated in the intranet). It's called Arena. It was built by one of their contractors. They plan to integrate it into the intranet in the future. But the look-and-feel is the same. They piloted within retail-banking (and it’s still in pilot phase). The platform was set up so all staff can engage in a dialogue.

Objectives for the social platform are:

• Create dialogue with staff
• To share knowledge in order to improve our services
• To accelerate problem identification
• Etc.

First feedback on both seems hopeful.

Intranet opportunities and challenges in a multi-brand organization #epem

Jenni Laajarinne of Amer Sports Corporation is the first speaker today! 6300 employees. Amer Sports is behind brands as Wilson, Atomic, Salomon and Suunto.

Her talk will focus on using social media applications to encourage community-thinking.

She has a case example of our organization using and internal social media application to encourage community thinking in the year that marked the company’s 60^th anniversary.

They have home-grown CMS, created by IT. They have 6 brand intranet and 4 business area intranets. These intranets are pretty autonomous: the look-and-feel is different, the structure is different, etc.

They were looking for a fun and exciting way to celebrate the company’s anniversary. They wanted to take the opportunity to celebrate the employee’s passion for sports. They set up an intranet page to share their sports moments. It ran for 3 months (so it should be simple to use for there is no time for adoption!) and there was a monthly prize. Employees could upload text, pictures and videos of their sports moments.

The content could be searched in all kinds of ways (type of sports, year of event, name of contributor, votes, comments).

They also defined what they would like to measure to tell if it was a success or not. It was a mix of soft and hard targets. Like: raise awareness of Amer Sports and passion for sports, raise awareness for anniversary, gather at least 100 sports moments, engage 2250 absolute visitors during the campaign and increase usage of the Amer Sports intranet.

They 106 sports moments and the number is still growing even though the campaign has been stopped. 3500 unique visitors and lots coming back more than ones.

Social computing and the collaborative intranet #epem

RichardHare, British American Tobacco is the next presenter. They have 60000 employees. Richard is a Knowledge, Communication and Collaboration Consultant.

He starts out with the question who loves their intranet? And who’s users love their intranet? Not many hands go up.

Complaints about their intranet:

• Search takes 20 seconds to return meaningless results
• Content out of date
• Difficult to navigate when based on hierarchy

… but people still want sites.

They connected the roll out of the content management tool to the roll out of the new corporate brand. This helped pull things together. (He showed several local intranets. Most looked the same.)

Their intranet only has top navigation, no left-hand navigation. Activity updates in the middle, daily news on top. People-centric navigation.

Evaluation of the set-up was done with senior management based card sorting and benchmarking. To define if people can find things and understand what the labels are called.

Social media at British American Tobacco

• 1997: online communities based on Notes
• 2004: blogs
• 2008: social networking

Reason to start had to do with a 2005 survey telling their employees were more afraid to say what they thought. So, they set up communities. But the users needed encouragement. They set up a workshop and wrote a manual on community building. Communities still weren’t flying. So they tied it to the World Cup 2006 and it helped people open up.

Then they opened up the creation of communities. Then moved over to blogging. Also accompanied with some guidelines.

In 2007 they saw social networking taking up speed. So, in 2008 the set up Connect, which is their internal social networking site. This implicitly leads to a people directory. They made a cool visualization with Gephi to show how BAT is connected.

The survey of 2009 showed that employees value these steps and that they are more open (share their voice more openly).
The whole platform is built in-house, based on Lotus Domino.

Integrating collaboration – linking virtual workspaces with your intranet #epem

Oops, missed the 1st minutes of Neil Morgan, Head of Global Intranet at WWF International (5000 employees).

How did they get to their new collaboration platform? Surveyed users by asking questions and watching the way they worked. Based on the survey’s they came up with personas. They found that lots of work was very labor intensive.

To address their ‘problems’ they turned to Google. People were already using Gmail, Google Docs, etc. They went for Google Apps:

• Calendars
• Docs (e.g. Forms), Spreadsheets Presentations
• Google Sites (best practices, wiki space, etc.)

Neil stresses how really simple it was to set up Google Apps and how simple it is too use. He also shows how well the parts of Google Apps integrate. Search Docs or Search All from one box. Create a document, share it easily and chat about it in the sidebar. Etc.

How do they link all these sites back into the intranet portal. They implemented a newsroom approach on the central intranet. They want the sites to think more in a newsroom way. Write news items locally with links to more info. This is picked up centrally. They also tie the sites together using search (also Google).

Tips from WWF

• Online collaboration must start with real world collaboration (trust…)
• You will make mistakes (fail quickly and move on)
• Promote a culture of openness in teams (share early and often)

Benefits

• Group editing
• Self-organization
• Easy authoring tool (promotes contribution)
• Collective intelligence

Brand development within WWF is done using storytelling.

Reason to Go Google is costs and the range of services. It’s a platform to build on.

Overall strategy for employee portal evolution into an enterprise 2.0 platform and integration of effective use of social media for employee engagement and internal communications #epem

Next up is Viviane Dupre of Bombardier.

Bnet evolution will be done in a more formal and structured approach. It’s more than intranet; an enterprise 2.0 implementation.

They have high level management buyin for the project. A heavily organized governance model.

Current version of the Bnet employee portal is from 2004 with less than $100.000 investment. It replaced 100 plus intranets. They have 350 content managers. Minimal governance at the content level. Bnet has been identified as a business critical application.

In May 2009 they did a survey. 5000 employees responded to the survey. 64% gave a negative rating of the home page. They also asked what employees actively used on the internet. Like Youtube, LinkedIn. 42% were contributors in 2009.

This project was also used to improve employee engagement. By empowering employees, be recognized. Increased employee engagement should lead to increased customer engagement.

They wrote up a mission for the Bnet. Stressed enabling and increasing productivity.

Three pillars of Bnet: Communication, Personalization, Collaboration. She does not use the work ‘social’ because of the negative connotations it has to some.

Bombardier also uses Wordpress for their blog platform. They are working on a internal Youtube. Not so much for formal communications, but for human interest.

Personalization means LinkedIn type profiles on the company directory. Picture, short bio, blogposts, expertise, etc. Employees can fill in what they want.

Collaboration is about the deployment of collaboration tools to support dialogue, professional networking, communities of practice and collective intelligence.

They are still researching if their new platform actually contributed to improved employee engagement. The results have just been collected.

What are the business benefits?

• Increased employee engagement
• Adapt to new reality. Viviane also relates to what young employees expect of corporate tools.
• More efficient use of staff
• Lower computing costs
• Reduced travel expenses.

They consider themselves as followers and tap into experiences from other companies, wrt. tools, business case, etc.

They chose Sharepoint as their defacto platform. (This was decided by IT…) She's not sure if SP will replace WP, but SP will be overall platform.

Intranet governance and implementation of guidelines for the right and efficiënt use of social media tools and intranet apps #epem

Next up is Sean McNiven, SAP. Sean is head of the Social Web.

Sean starts out with Web 0.0. Web 0.0 was and is the coffee machine. It’s still their running communication platform. This platform is now also happening on the web. The rules are practically the same, says Sean. So the guidelines are the same as well. Be honest, be respectful and add value, don’t pick fights, separate opinion from fact, be human, etc.

A brief history of their employee network: 1995-1997 DMS and structure; 1998 SAPNet Communication, Team Collaboration and self service; 205 Corporate Portal based on Netweaver; 2007-200 Corporate Portal, Relaunch Enhanced UI and Personalization; 2010 SAP Employee Network, SAP Corporate Portal + integrated external tools and social media / Enterprise search.

The governance changed considerably over the years. From open/decentral to closed/central in 2007. Now the governance is hybrid: open groups, governed communities, expiry of unused groups.

SAP has many modules that integrate into one intranet. SAP’s intranet is the (only) way to get to SAP information and communication.

They use the Wordpress platform for SAP Internal News. The Star rating is important for them to give feedback to the Communications department. They allow comments on the news item as well.

Remark: SAP sees that the border between internal and external is blurring rapidly.

SAP is using Jive for their communities and groups. Alfresco is their backend. Communities and groups consist of online documents (wiki-ish), discussions, polls or blogs.

SAP Talk is their internal microblogging platform. They use StatusNet. They want it to be easy to post internally and/or externally at the same time.

They also use Wordpress for employee crowdsourcing. They use it to ask or vote for questions or suggestions you’d like to see addressed at Global All Hands meetings and during special information campaigns. Voting is anonymous, posting and voting can be done in your name and anonymously. They see more and more people posting in their name, showing increasement in trust.

(By the way, I just asked Sean if they use this for ideation as well. He said they used social media in general for ideation. They also installed an extension to Jive for ideation. But that didn't work well.)

Video sharing is done, called SAPTube. Everyone can upload videos.

Sean also points to their social media guidelines. He remarks they are getting shorter and shorter. It should be one page max. Or as Microsoft says: Don't be stupid.

Strategic intranet governance and business driven adoption of social media for increasing value @ BT #epem

Wow, that’s a whole mouthful! This is the first presentation at Employee Portal Evolution Masters 2010 in Berlin. I’ll be live-blogging through this conference. The subtitle of the conference is Strategic business approach for employee portal lifecycle management and integration of social media in rapidly changing digital environment’. Another mouth-ful!

Mark Morrell, Intranet Manager of BT has the honors of opening this conference. The title of his talk is the title of this blogpost.

BT’s intranet is about 16 years old. It started in 1994. It’s available to 140.000+ employees including 3rd parties. All information and applications are online. They can access it wherever they want. They use it for collaboration online too: blogs, wikis, podcasts, RSS, Twitter. Their intranet was also a push towards a more paperless office.

They benchmark their intranet through the Intranet Benchmarking Forum. And they’re one of the best…

Why did they start using social media? Social media is technology embedded in social behavior. Social networks, global data networks, etc are BT’s business drivers!

Social media also meets the demands of the younger employees. Nearly 90% of BT people under 25 use social media. Less than 50% of BT people over 50 use social media. Mark sees people are blending work with personal use of social media (also relates to more BT employee working from home when they want). For that reason they use social media that is already available as much as possible. Like Twitter. They therefore use one persona not different identities for all use of social media. So, there’s not a personal and work Twitter account for Mark.

Social media external is used to interact and develop new relationships with my customers, partners and suppliers. They don’t use it as a marketing tools.

Mark stresses in general social media tools are easy but you should also make sure they stay that way. Also w.r.t. social media guidelines. They have guidelines for using social media. E.g. no anonymous posting. Balance guidelines with benefits as well as risks.

Benefits are:

• Finding the right person
• Finding the right information
• Joining a community of interest
• Sharing/creating views and opinions

They want to actively research the benefits people have gained by use of social media.

Mark walks us through their intranet. You can find much of this on his blog. No commenting on BT news yet. Employees can submit their news (like birthdays) but it is curated. They show the last 3 wiki-pages, blogposts and podcasts on their Intranet homepage.

They have about 700 active blogs (at least 1 update every month).

The BT wiki (based on Mediawiki) is related to as their encyclopedia. Navigating through blogposts and wikipages is done with tagclouds a.o.

BT also has regular CEO chats (with the real CEO).

Mark also tells it took quite some time to convince senior-management to allow and adopt social media inside and outside the company.

Presenting at the Enterprise 2.0 Summit in Frankfurt

Just to let you know: I will be giving a talk at the Enterprise 2.0 Summit in Frankfurt am Main in October. Please find the full schedule here. My talk will be about our microblogging experiences and my vision on how the information and communications processes supported by microblogging relate to more formal business processes.

Hope to see you there!

Welcoming a New Blog on Communications

I love pointing to new good blogs! Regularly friends and colleagues start a new blog. My friend and colleagues Jan van Veen just made the leap. He started his blog called 'Corporate Internal Communications'. Jan is an expert in (internal) Communications. He's also very interested in what the Internet, especially social media, is doing to Communications inside and outside companies. Jan and I have been collaborating heavily in this area.

I hope you all go over to his blog and subscribe to it. Leave a comment to welcome him to the blogosphere! His first post is about the end of the intranet. His second is about how simple publishing on the web has gotten.

Good to have you in this space, Jan. Go for it!

Company Thought Leader Blogs

I've been looking around at how companies use blogs. I see several types of blogs:

• A company blog, sometimes a blog per country (written in the local language)
• A page with an overview of official company bloggers. Usually these blogs are focused on product or market areas.

Some of these companies have several more bloggers, but they are not listed on the official blog page. These bloggers often clearly state they work for a certain company, but 'the musings on my blog are strictly personal'.

For some reason I find this strange. Why aren't these blog posts (with disclaimers) also listed on the page with official blogs? I think this has something to do with the old style of 'managing' communication. The official company blogs are basically controlled posts, somewhat different from official press releases (they have comments...!), but still pretty much the same.

In this model it would also mean that all our talk about our work and the company we work for with friends and family should consistently have a disclaimer. But it doesn't. It's not natural. Talking about your work and the experiences it brings is natural. Basically all this talk controlled and non-controlled is good. It's building your brand. It's showing to the world you have employees who are smart (- even when they convey disappointment about the companies vision or strategy). Your employees are your thought leaders. The communicate the culture of the organization to the world and take the feedback they get from friends and family back to work.

So if this is mixed in real-life, let's also mix it in our official communications.

What do you think? Do you know of companies that already actively mix communications? I'd love to hear your thoughts.

Update May 31, 2010: Stowe Boyd recently wrote a great post about this topic underlining my point. Thanks, Stowe! The ReadWriteBlog also picked up his post.

Social Media and Internal Communications - Breakout Session Océ #intra10

As you may have notice in my tweet behavior I attended Intranet 2010 this week. Just like last year, it was a great ride! Great location, interesting keynotes, interesting participants, good food, etc. I haven't been to many conferences that are so well organized and are simply great from beginning to end.

Jan van Veen, my colleague who is manager Internal Communications, and I also gave a breakout session. It was titled 'Social Media for Internal Communications'. I inserted the slides below.

I would like to thank the Entopic organization for organizing this conference again! And to all participants: We enjoyed your questions, compliments and interactions!

Pres Oce social media for internal communications intranet 2010 congres

View more presentations from Samuel Driessen.

Breakout Session at Intranet 2010

Will you be at the Intranet 2010 conference in Utrecht, The Netherlands on March 16? If so, I hope to meet you there. Last year I gave a breakout session. This year my colleague Jan van Veen and I will also be giving a breakout session. It is titled 'Social Media and Internal Communication'. We promise it's going to be interesting and we are looking forward to your questions and remarks!

Too Much Communication

Last weekend I read an intriguing article in the Dutch newspaper, NRC. A communication researcher, Tjardus van Citters, wanted to give us all well-meaning advice. (Dutch titel: 'Welgemeend advies van een communicatie-expert: minder communicatie, s.v.p', Sept. 20, 2009.)

His article gives an overview of the sources that are increasing the number of signals we process each day. For instance the number of communication providers has increased. And the fact that our senses are being addressed more than ever.

This overview leads to his advice to communicate less. Why? Because our health is at stake. Our brains get more impulses to process. The model of 'selective perception' is out-dated. We get irritated by communication we did not want to see, leading to restlessness, even illness.

He therefore advises us to turn off signals. Read the news once a week instead of every few hours. Unsubscribe to things you don't want to receive. Be clear what kind of emails you don't want to get. Read from paper instead of screen (- you can concentrate on paper better than with reading from a screen, he says). And remember: the interest/importance of the message is defined by the sender.

Wow. This is really different from the trend that says we we moving to 'life streaming', 'filtering' and the 'real-time web'. I don't feel I'm becoming sick, irritated, etc. by the amount of information and communication signals I'm processing. Of course I do find we should think before we communicate and share. It should be mindful.

But I feel like I'm missing something here. Are you experiencing what is described in this post? And where can I read more about this subject, also proving the statement that more communication is unhealthy?

Tags van Technorati: communication,social media,information,information overload