A report in the Financial Times on social media in the workplace highlights some terrific examples from companies who talk about the benefits to be gained from deploying blogs, wikis and RSS.
Dresdner Kleinwort Wasserstein:
[…] More than 450 DrKW employees have internal blogs and the bank has built an internal wiki with more than 2,000 pages which is used by a quarter of its workforce. After just six months, the traffic on the wiki exceeds that on the entire DrKW intranet. […] The wiki is also used with video clips to substitute traditional manuals in training new recruits. […] DrKW uses Really Simple Syndication (RSS) technology to inform employees when the contents of wikis or blogs are changed.
(The FT reported in December 2004 on DrKW’s use of blogs for internal communication.)
[…] KnowHow’s hosted service aggregates content from blogs, newsfeeds and applications such as Oracle. The content is filtered to match the interests of each user and pushed out as RSS alerts, either to a Google browser bar, a dedicated RSS reader or an instant messaging client.
The FT feature concludes with a good thought for those who worry about employees spending time on blogs, from DrKW’s JP Rangaswami:
[…] Is blogging a good use of company time? They are going to have these conversations anyway – in the lift, for example – and if the topic is boring, people lose interest. It is self-policing.
3 responses to “The next wave at work”
Hi Neville,
I’m a self-exiled Brit working for a PR company in Canada and am a regular reader of your blog and have recently started listening to FIR as well – which I think is excellent.
I’m only a few years into my career but am fascinated by social media and how it’s changing the PR landscape. Because I’m new, I’m not sure if the “editing wiki’s by PRs” arguement passed me by.
A lot of my clients have wiki entries which I’m pretty sure they’ve never heard of or seen and that contain out-of-date information or don’t have the latest products/services. What do you (and Shel) think about the ethics of PRs editing their clients’ wiki entries? Obviously we want the integrity of an open source entry combined with the very latest developments while making sure the entry doesn’t look like the client’s web page…
I’d be really interested to know your views, as the ‘doyen’ of the social media scene!
Keep up the great work on FIR,
Ed
Thanks for your comment, Ed. And from one self-exiled Brit to another: hi!
That’s a good question re PRs editing clients’ wiki entries. I think the answer to your question on whether they should or not would be: “it depends.” If editing is to correct errors, then anyone with the corrected information could edit an entry, not necessarily a PR person.
But you have to think about some of the sensitivity surrounding wiki editing in general where some people have been caught out with changing content, not simply correcting mistakes. And you can imagine the special furore that would result if such a person doing that was in PR!
Generally, though, if part of a PR person’s job is looking after information about a client on a wiki, then that person has a legitimate right to edit content such as to correct errors.
It’s a good topic for Shel and I to talk about on an upcoming FIR. So stay tuned!
RSS och wiki – bättre än portaler och intranät…
För bara sex månader sedan hade rubriken här varit löjeväckande. Nu är den måhända en dragning av kvällstidningsmått, men den är inte osann.
Det är Financial Times som beskriver utvecklingen i ett antal företag. Hos investmentbanken Dresdn…