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Three products in the social-software toolbox -- blogs, wikis and RSS -- have begun to gain traction inside companies.
Blogs are probably the best known, thanks in part to their popularity on the Web and partly because of the handful of executives who use blogs to address customers and employees and to muse about industry trends. Lately, blogs are showing up inside companies -- including Procter & Gamble Co., Northwestern Mutual Life Insurance Co. and ad agency TBWA Worldwide, among others -- as a way for rank-and-file employees to discuss important industry trends, to bring project team members up to speed, or for employees to vent about changes within the company.
Wikis aren't as familiar as blogs, but they may be even better suited for business use. They're versatile tools for doing almost any sort of collaboration, from project management to building vast repositories of knowledge. (That's what the best-known public wiki, Wikipedia, has done.) At Walt Disney Co.'s Pixar studio, for instance, wiki technology is being used to help coordinate new computerized animation tools for the studio's planned 2008 release of a film called "WALL-E."
Finally, RSS (for Really Simple Syndication) knits together all the material created on blogs and in wikis and delivers it in easy-to-find fashion. RSS lets employees keep up to date on the latest blog post or change in the project-team wiki. It also can alert users to changes in business-critical information like an entry in a spreadsheet or even the computerized output from production equipment, such as error messages from semiconductor machinery.
Other Web 2.0 te
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22 Jun 07
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18 Jun 07
maggie foxarticle on corporate use of social media & the notion of "Enterprise 2.0", though the author did describe internal social networks as "MySpace for corporations" which shows a total lack of understanding.
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THREE TOOLS STAND OUT.
Three products in the social-software toolbox -- blogs, wikis and RSS -- have begun to gain traction inside companies.
Blogs are probably the best known, thanks in part to
their popularity on the Web and partly because of the handful of
executives who use blogs to address customers and employees and to muse
about industry trends. Lately, blogs are showing up inside companies --
including Procter & Gamble
Co., Northwestern Mutual Life Insurance Co. and ad agency TBWA
Worldwide, among others -- as a way for rank-and-file employees to
discuss important industry trends, to bring project team members up to
speed, or for employees to vent about changes within the company.
Wikis aren't as familiar as blogs, but they may be
even better suited for business use. They're versatile tools for doing
almost any sort of collaboration, from project management to building
vast repositories of knowledge. (That's what the best-known public
wiki, Wikipedia, has done.) At Walt Disney
Co.'s Pixar studio, for instance, wiki technology is being used to help
coordinate new computerized animation tools for the studio's planned
2008 release of a film called "WALL-E."
Lee Bryant, founder and director of Headshift Ltd., a
United Kingdom tech consultancy, tells of a law firm client that
started with a package of blogging, wiki and RSS technology among three
groups of about 20 people. As word of the successful use of the tools
spread, others began demanding access. Nearly a third of the firm's
5,000 employees have begun using them.
"Companies can get going with something quite simple
and quite small very quickly, and they can grow from the bottom up,"
says Mr. Bryant. "You get to learn from your mistakes, and you can stay
under the radar until it's strong enough and people don't want to turn
it off."
BROADER SUCCESS REQUIRES MANAGEMENT SUPPORT.
These tools may spring up in scattered pockets, but
companies can only get the full advantage with widespread use -- and
that takes active encouragement from managers.
"If companies want this stuff to succeed, they need to
increase the number of people participating," says Andrew McAfee, an
associate professor at Harvard Business School who coined the term
Enterprise 2.0.
Sometimes it's just a matter of making the technology
available to everyone. Milwaukee-based Northwestern Mutual wanted a way
to capture some of the knowledge of employees, nearly a third of whom
are expected to retire in the next five years. So it made blogging
software from Burlington, Ontario-based iUpload available to all of its
5,000 employees; about 100 are active bloggers.
In other cases, managers have to use more-direct methods to get people to use the tools. At Sun Microsystems
Inc., William Snow, senior director of the Web platform engineering
group, wanted engineers to get comfortable using wikis for formal
software documentation. To get them started, he required engineers to
write up a wiki page describing each of their projects.
As a result, team members are using wikis for meeting
notes, project plans and software reports, and the amount of documented
information has quadrupled since the wiki software was deployed. "A lot
more things are documented that used to be in people's heads," Mr. Snow
says.
PICK THE RIGHT TOOL.
Blogs and wikis are often seen as interchangeable, but
there are important differences. Blogs are best for time-sensitive or
time-stamped information, and for details that are best tied to a
particular author -- an update on an individual's role in a continuing
project, for instance. Wikis work best for information that needs to
last and be frequently revised, and where the information is more
important than knowing who contributed.
TRUST, BUT HAVE POLICIES.
Northwestern Mutual, a 150-year-old insurance company,
might seem an unlikely advocate of open blogging. Yet it opened the
door for any employee to have a blog with few restrictions. Employees
simply have to review and agree to the company's policies and
guidelines for blogging before they get started.
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