There is something about all those “awards” being created. Oh yes inflation that’s the right word for it. Too much awards, so almost anybody can win one, decreasing the average value of a received one, although it may be very well deserved.
European Excellence Award
As an example: only recently ING’s Second Life project called Our Virtual Holland won the European Excellence Award in the category of Corporate Media (subcategory Blog). The irony is that the award was not won for the Second Life project itself but more for the total communication package, including the weblog and the communication with the community (hey, maybe even for the wiki that we used!).
Vote for ING’s first corporate blog in the Blogger’s Choice Awards!
But now there is an other reward to discuss: the Blogger’s Choice Award.
Although I feel that the award winner here, because of the setup of the award, will be the one with the biggest community to mobilize and vote, I still very much like to highlight ING’s first corporate blog.
The blog My Cup of Cha, live since July 2006, is written by Jacques Kemp (Chief Executive Officer ING Asia/Pacific and David Garceran Nieuwenburg (Regional Head of E-Business), two of my colleagues from the Asia-Pacific region.
What is so special about this project, is the “let’s do it” mentality. You might well appreciate the internal hurdles facing an external social media project done by a financial institution. Well, these guys just (carefully) took the brave step and went on and opened up for a conversation, highlighting some of the work on other social media projects and even commenting on ING’s strategy now and then. All with an Asia flavor and style to it.
So, if you feel like it after reading this, please follow this link to the awards site, register and vote. Thanks on behalf of my Asia-Pacific colleagues.
Technorati tags: Blogger’s Choice Awards, ING, Corporate Blogging, Our Virtual Holland, Second Life
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posted Jan 20, 10:16 pm on Jan 20, 2008 |
category: Blogging
/ Work
Some guys just seem to have everything. Take Paul Stamatiou, a 21 year old A-list tech blogger / programmer while still at University. Always got interesting posts and even does some great tutorial’s for the lesser programming gods among us (I greatly enjoyed that one!).
And now, what do I find at Technorati? A whole Nike video ad around Paul and some fancy Nike running shoes – Ipod combination. How about that? What’s next: Hollywood?
Click here to see the video!
I am not making fun of Paul here. Actually I greatly admire his talents for writing, programming and having the time to blog that much. And then there is that running. Having picked up running again recently and then seeing the video ad was what gave me the idea for this funny post tonight.
By the way here are Paul’s comments on that whole ad creation process.
By the way Paul, your last run on the Nike site gives me the date 14th of December! A long holiday?
To balance this blog post a bit on that Nike thing, I wanted to feature here an episode of Loic Le Meur’s Seesmic Startup video’s, in which he really, really says some bad things about Nike shoes. However I can not find that episode! What a pity!
Technorati tags: Paul Stamatiou, Nike, Loic Le Meur
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[3] | posted Jan 7, 11:39 pm on Jan 07, 2008 |
category: Blogging
/ Video
Via the new MyRagan community I found this excellent discussion on the value of internal blogging.
Challenged by a rather negative article of the famous communicator Roger D’Aprix, which, via arguments about information overload and reduced employee productivity concluded that:
But who can tell which ones [blogs] are valuable and which ones are a waste of time without inspecting them? So the productivity losses still add up. The pro-bloggers will hate it, but maybe we need some good gate keeping to filter out the inevitable junk.
Shel Holtz provided an extensive list of counter arguments explaining the potential value of internal blogging and some additional links, which are really worth checking out and use for your own benefit (I will not copy them, as the fully belong to Shel!).
Of course whether an internal weblogging experiment really succeeds might be hard to tell up-front. According to Andrew McAfee in his great article Enterprise 2.0: The Dawn of Emergent Collaboration it really very much depends on management:
The tools reduce management’s ability to exert unilateral control and will be used to express some level of negativity. Do company’s leaders really want this to happen? Will they resist the temptation to silence dissent…[or]… to exert all kinds of subtle and not-so-subtle leverage over online content?
This means that leaders need to play a delicate role…encouraging and stimulating the use of the new tools and refrain from intervening too often…[and] if they fail…their company is liable to wind up with only a few online newsletters and whiteboards for prosaic purposes [and not a thriving internal blogosphere with all it’s great benefits]
Quite a delicate balance if you ask me, but at least worth a try.
Shel, can I give you a virtual hug for your excellent contribution? I guess a lot of internal Enterprise 2.0 evangelists are going to benefit from this!
Technorati tags: Shel Holtz, Internal Blogging, Andrew McAfee, Enterpriseweb2.0, Enterprise2.0, Web 2.0, Blog, Internal Communication
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| posted Oct 3, 10:35 pm on Oct 03, 2007 |
category: Blogging
/ Enterprise 2.0
About a week ago I spotted that expression “war for talent” again. It was mentioned in a newspaper report about the troubled corporate culture at the Dutch bank ABN AMRO.
As it appears from Het Financieele Dagblad (sorry in Dutch), the bank initiated a campaign to battle the corporate culture of “fear and keeping silent”. Internal research on the corporate culture has shown that employees are afraid to speak up, fearing management backlash and impacting ones’ career. ABN AMRO management thinks that in order to remain competitive it needs a more open culture in which people feel comfortable to give feedback and provide idea’s for improvement.
Some telling quotes from the newspaper article:
- “Traditional managers, who continue to stay away from open dialog, should fear for their job”
- “Talent must be able to think free and communicate.”
- “Improving the culture is essential in the war for talent, customers, the transformation of the bank and the future of ABN AMRO in the knowledge economy.”
- “If we want to realise our ambitions we need to get rid of this fear and the attitude of keeping silent.”
- “We can only be competitive if culture makes a 180 degree turn, towards a situation in which people address each others behaviour, if they point out suggestions or idea’s, compliment each other and dear to criticise.”
A nice fact about the campaign is that ABN AMRO hired a “communication guru”, called Bradford Michaels, to travel to around 30 offices in the Netherlands to spread the word on open communication. After the campaign, management announced the guru to be a fake, which caused mixed feelings among personnel. Some question this approach, because a campaign meant to generate a culture of trust, featured quite a misleading (or humorous?) element, potentially causing more harm (or additional mistrust) than good.
By the way, here is a short video featuring Bradford Michaels, the fake guru hired by ABN AMRO for their open communication campaign.
JP Rangaswami’s version of “war for talent”
Around a year ago I came across this “war for talent” expression in a powerful talk by JP Rangaswami (then DrKW now BT) during Blogs and Social Media Forum 2006 (please find the link to podcasts: session two).
JP used the expression in relation to social software (in his case wiki’s and blogs) and what the new tools could mean for companies competing for talent (“the war”). His notion: best corporate strategy ever is to attract the best people. But then the issue becomes how to release and free their talent given the corporate environment and tool set, in order to make the people spend their time doing the right thing. JP specifically pointed to the need to get talent share and collaborate and make sure not to keep these people in knowledge silos.
Essentially both ABN AMRO and JP mean the same: provide room for open communication for the benefit for the organisation. But both apply it in a somewhat different direction:
- ABN AMRO foremost and first to build trust, to reap the benefits of feedback loops later
- JP for creating freedom to connect and share (the trust is assumed to be there already).
A role for social software to get some trust?
Now, being very much a proponent of social software too, I wonder how these could fit into the picture? By the way the article has one mention of an internal weblog, that of CEO Netherlands Mr. Schmittmann.
Could social software tools be a part of a strategy to come achieve more trust ands openness? Would employees be willing to participate? Under what circumstances?
Of course, I think that throwing a tool in the situation will not help to improve the situation per se. Their needs to be some kind of trust-reboot.
However, I do feel that if the a substantial part of ABN AMRO management starts communicating through an open channel like an internal weblog, there might be some value. Management has an important example function role during a campaign to force culture changes. But the weblog initiative should certainly not only involve top management, but especially managers much closer to the “work-floor”, because they are the one’s doing the day-to-day communicating and judging over carreer moves. And what would management do with a weblog? Well, here is a list: justifying decisions, providing vision and direction (eliminating the noise), actively seeking feedback and, this is important, provide prove of taking feedback serious.
Of course, one needs to measure the impact, because one issue is that of an echo chamber. There could easily be a situation where the same group of brave (or ignorant) people are commenting and providing feedback and the majority still hold back, fearing backlash. But if all goes well the participation should rise, which could be proxy for the return of trust.
What do you think about this? Can internal weblogs perform a function in turning around a troubled corporate culture? Anyone got a nice example?
Technorati tag(s): Internal Blog, Internal Blogging, Enterprise 2.0, Blogging, ABN AMRO, Social Software, Banks, Internal Communication, Corporate Culture, JP Rangaswami
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[4] | posted Mar 21, 11:17 pm on Mar 21, 2007 |
category: Social software
/ Blogging
I am in the process of essembling a list of essential elements for an optimal functioning “internal blogosphere”.
From these sources I retrieved great information:
After adding a bit of my own thoughts, here is my draft list:
- A very easy to use blogging platform.
- A decent number of active internal blogs.
- RSS aggregators for use by employees: to easily consume the additional information.
- An Intranet Search tool indexing the internal blogs.
- A central blog portal: here discussions surface, topics emerge and stuff can be discovered (lists of active bloggers, also by topic or company division; tag/keyword clouds, etc.; “river of posts”).
- Statistics of visitors, page hits, number of post and comments. James Snell introduced us to the concept of “decay”, being “the rate at which new people come into the system, spend a bit of time kicking the tires around, then abandon it”. James explained in an e-mail, it is actually measured by averaging the time between posts over all internal blogs at IBM. You then track this measure over time and hope it does not increase, but remain stable or decline.
- Maybe an internal Technorati.com? This could help identify post with similar tags and make it possible to “listen to the internal blogosphere”, via RSS subscription to keywords.
Anybody got nice additions I overlooked?
Technorati tag(s): Internal Blog, Internal Blogging, Enterprise 2.0, Blogging
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[2] | posted Mar 20, 11:09 pm on Mar 20, 2007 |
category: Blogging
/ Social software
I need some feedback on an advice I am going to put forward to a manager thinking about what direction to give to his internal weblog. Anybody care to jump in?
Here is the situation. The manager has just started with his blog (3 months) and actually wants to discuss stuff and get feedback related to his department (500 – 1000 persons), but given the lack of interaction in the first months the manager is also considering product or service related topics. This is relevant because the department is also an important service providing unit for the rest of the much bigger company (100.000 persons). However the blog will then “risk” attracting outside commenters with complaints (compliments are just less frequent in these situations) about the product that is being delivered and changing the character of the blog and might put the manager in a awkward position. The manager therefore is contemplating whether or not he should write on service/product related issues, next to the normal internal department subjects.
What should I advice?
Well, here is my draft advice:
- Do use the blog for talking about your product, because it will be discussed elsewhere in other internal blogs (the internal blogosphere is growing) or around the watercooler. With your blog you actively step in and regain some control over the buzz.
- Try to channel the feedback to where it belongs by carefully drafting the about page or having a special button/banner direct complaints/service related feedback to the correct people who deal with solving the issues all the time.
- Trust internal colleagues from other departments to not misuse the weblog. Consider the peer pressure that exists, the fact that commenters are never anonymous and the risk mitigation that it brings (no incidents to date in internal blogosphere nor in wiki’s).
- Moderation of comments is still possible (leave that possibility open in the about page!).
- Make sure to write about how complaints get solved now and then to transparently show that “things are worked out decently” around here.
- Consider opening a services related group weblog, written by a number of lower managers delivering the actual service, in order to channel the feedback.
Anybody care to step in and help me out a bit? Thanks in advance.
Technorati tag(s): Internal Blog, Internal Blogging, Enterprise 2.0, Blogging
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[4] | posted Mar 20, 10:28 pm on Mar 20, 2007 |
category: Blogging
/ Social software
After one year of blogging, I have decided to considerably slow down my frequency of posting. Not because I have turned away from the blogosphere, but mainly to find a new balance between “computer-things” and the rest of my life. Things just got out of hand a little bit.
Of course I will still try to keep up with the RSS feeds of those 200+ blogs I follow, but reacting and sharing my thoughts will only happen once in a while. I do hope to get the mechanism for posting Del.icio.us links working on Textpattern, so there will be some flow around here.
Technorati tag(s): Blogging
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| posted Jan 8, 10:06 pm on Jan 08, 2007 |
category: This blog
/ Blogging
A week ago, I wrote about the success the BBC has had with a discussion forum to kick-off knowledge and information sharing.
This made me think, first about the fact that discussion forums are not often mentioned among the so called Enterprise 2.0 tools. As if they are not “worth” it?
Second, discussion forums might be the easiest in terms of adoption as they exist for so long now (part of Web 1.0). A lot of people will know the tools from their ventures on the Internet. Of all Enterprise 2.0 tools like wiki’s, blogs, tagging, the outsider the “discussion forum”, might be the easiest to introduce and often with clear immediate value.
General features of discussion forums:
- many-to-many (everybody can ask a question or start a discussion; anybody can step in)
- different sub-forums and category within a forum (providing structure)
- tracking tools like “subscribe to this thread”
- structured information on users (location, number of posts etc.)
- content is searchable and linkable
- WYSIWYG editing (!!)
One could see a discussion forum as a company-wide group blogging tool, albeit a very rough one.
Of course the statement above is a bit harsh. Forums differ from real blogging tools in some important ways:
- It’s “many-to-many” in stead of “one-to-many”
- Not person based, but more often theme, tool or department based (not for a CEO talking to the people I guess)
- No RSS per thread/sub-forum/category (have not seen it but it must be possible in a forum too!)
And of course a discussion forum is not like a wiki too:
- no structured storing of information on logical places (apart from sub-forums or categories)
- there is no aggregator or gardener in a forum to bring together question, arguments and the answers in one section or paragraph
So, discussion forums do not replace blogs and wiki’s, which do have their separate “strengths”, but tend to have some real adoption issues as well.
So to recount, let us list the main pro’s of discussion forums:
- just plain Q&A or information sharing
- the information remains stored and available
- the information is linkable and searchable
- community building
- customisation to different company entities / divisions / employee specialisms or enterprise applications (via sub-forums and categories)
- easy editing (WYSIWYG).
Of course, creating a lively discussion forum has challenges of its own (like “what’s in it for me to contribute”), but in my opinion it could be the tool with the lowest possible hurdle to achieve some genuine information sharing on the Intranet.
By the way, here are two excellent resources on discussion forum building, providing tips to avoid common pitfalls:
So what do you think? Should Enterprise 2.0 start with the good old discussion forum, smoothing the path for the much harder to introduce weblogs and wiki’s?
Edit: visit Rod Boothby’s blog for valuable reaction to this post!
Technorati tag(s): Discussion forums, Bulletin boards, Enterpriseweb2.0, Enterprise2.0, Web 2.0, Wiki, Blog, Internal blog, Social software, Knowledge Management, KM, Intranet
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[4] | posted Oct 16, 10:22 pm on Oct 16, 2006 |
category: Social software
/ Blogging
Today I celebrate my 100th post on this weblog since I started in January of this year. The first time to look back on this grand venture.
To follow up on a tradition of a lot of my fellow bloggers out there, when celebrating like this, I first present some stats:
Second, I would like to reflect a little bit on why I am I doing all of this blogging. After some mind reading I came up with the following list:
- I like to share.
- I like to communicate with people how like the same things as I do.
- I like to leave behind something (“Who writes stays isn’t it?”).
- I love the technology behind my blog engine (Textpattern in this case).
- I like to show off a little bit.
- I like to be part of the blogsphere where great things happen and/or are discussed first.
- I like to the serendipitous “meeting” of people via my blog.
- I like to create.
- I like finding out some high profile blogger links to your blog post causing a traffic spike (thanks Steve and Doc!)
Of course, I could just go through my RSS reader every day, comment here and there and get that connected feeling, but for me, at least at this moment, that is just not enough.
What do you get out of blogging?
Technorati tag(s): Weblog, Blogging
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[2] | posted Sep 19, 10:24 pm on Sep 19, 2006 |
category: This blog
/ Blogging
This is going to be my shortest post ever:
Please give me internal weblogs a.s.a.p.! Oh boy, would internal communication and productivity improve!
Sorry for that, but héy, it is my blog!
Technorati tag(s): Internal blogs, Internal weblogs, Enterprise2.0, Social software, Blogging, Corporate weblogs
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| posted Sep 15, 10:55 pm on Sep 15, 2006 |
category: Blogging
/ Social software
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