Aiming to make the grade at Black Belt

Yesterday (Wednesday) I had the pleasure of speaking to a group of 24 internal communicators and waxing lyrical about blogs, wikis and podcasts at Module 2 of the latest internal communication Black Belt class.

It was something of an impromptu addition to the day's agenda, motivated by discussion in this class's first module in mid-October, where a mention of new technologies sparked off a great debate. As one of the people looking into this technology at Melcrum, presenters Sue Dewhurst and Liam Fitzpatrick asked if I wouldn't mind sharing what I'd learned so far.

For internal communicators, the big questions on this oft-overwhelming world of uncontrollable, open conversation and easily generated content centres around "how are these applications relevant to us? Should we really be looking at blogs for our CEOs and podcasts for our group announcements? What on earth is RSS and, I'm sorry, but Second Life? Get real."

We had some great discussion across the board and I was ably helped not only by Liam and Sue, who offered some top examples to further contextualize what I was saying, but Tony Sharp from IBM who added more info to the several examples I had of IBM's work with this stuff.

I used some very well-known examples of senior corporate bloggers, including Bob Lutz at GM (who's now enticed many, many more people to blog and podcast at Fastlane), Jonathan  Schwartz at IBM, Paul Otellini at Intel (who's internal blog was recently commented on by Debbie Weil) and the case study of John Varley at Barclays, who has an interactive diary (technically not a blog, but along similar lines). There are a host of other CEO blogs listed on Debbie Weil's website.

As a tool for a senior leader, blogs can be fantastic – as those above have proved. To me, it just makes sound business sense to give employees a place where they can go and ask questions and engage with the CEO as and when it's possible.

I also had a great question on RSS: "Could this be used to get over the problems we're having with our group e-mails? Sometimes we send out a fair amount of e-mails every day, they can range from a music concert to a major announcement about a new (or exiting) VP. But people often don't want to read about one or the other and so they don't bother reading either of the e-mails. Could RSS be used there?"

Absolutely is the answer. Give people a choice of subscribing to an RSS feed that covers social events, and another that covers senior board news. If they subscribe to one, at least one of those messages will now get through. This is just one simple example of using RSS to cut through the clutter of group-wide information.

Blogs might be getting the big attention at the moment, but having been using RSS now for several months, I believe as others have said long before me, that it has masses of potential across the web and as a quick wins tool for internal communicators.

As for the reception to Second Life? Well, you can read more on that below and at The Black Belt Dojo (plus details of another impromptu tech session on how to set up a blog) but, certainly, the town hall meeting by IBM's CEO helped to put the case forward. Second Life is a cheap, accessible way to do something like that (a global "town hall meeting"). Far cheaper, easier and more feasible, I'd say, than trying it with a real-time video webcast or similar.

Alex Manchester

Comments

[Josie]

It's great to see that, in the Black Belt group at least, there is a growing desire among internal comms professionals to learn what tools like blogs and RSS have to offer.

I agree that RSS has huge potential in organizational communication as a non-intrusive way to offer up information without swamping employees and adding to the "overload."

Maybe its techy-sounding name is the first hurdle that RSS has to overcome..

[Alex Manchester]

Yes the name "RSS" wasn't too well received at Black Belt and I agree, it sounds too techy and just doesn't aid the explanation of it.

Also, I have to say I don't really like the word "blog" overal and vodcasting/vlogging are hideous.

Conversely, when mentioning "podcast", you stand a lot more chance of people knowing what you're on about (well a lot of the time anyway). Clearly that has a lot to do with the ubiquity of the iPod among regular, (read "non techy") people.