Last month, when Fredrik and I advertised in our respective blogs for freelance writers to join us in a communication project we’re jointly working on, we were taking the next steps in a Big Experiment we’d started. This Big Experiment is to do with collaborative working and the role of blogs, and what that means […]
Category: Workplace
EDS keeps blogging guidance simple
As more companies start blogging – and the list is gaining ground – more are also making publicly available their guidelines on blogging, primarily focused on what the ground rules they have put in place are for employees who blog publicly so everyone knows the boundaries. Good recent examples include IBM, Thomas Nelson Publishers, Hill […]
Ballmer interview turns communication upside down
Watching Robert Scoble’s video interview with Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer is the confirmation for me that formal, pre-planned and carefully-controlled organizational communication has now reached an evolutionary end point. Traditionally, planning and managing communication in organizations is a function managed by people skilled in particular areas of communication (corporate, marketing, PR, investor, internal, etc). So […]
RSS: Great fit for the corporate environment
In its 18 July edition, Red Herring magazine has a good feature article about RSS in the enterprise, focusing in particular on NewsGator and what Red Herring says is its emerging market leadership: […] While a newsreader is a lightweight project – not much of a business – NewsGator has been aggressive about synchronizing a […]
Effective communication starts with the simple things
CIO Insight: Computers in exam rooms help doctors communicate with patients, but only if the doctor already communicates well. For doctors with poor interaction skills, computers exacerbate their problems. Such doctors tended to interact more with the computer and less with the patients. Which just proves a point. You can have all the tools in […]
Mission impossible statements
Most large companies have a mission statement, an expression that sets out the purpose of the organization or what the organization intends to achieve over time. In some large organizations, it’s not uncommon to walk around an office and see posters displayed with a statement to remind everyone of the organization’s mission (which some people […]
Oracle’s content management moves
As the blogosphere continues to grow and companies consider the large-scale business benefits of blogs as integrated elements of enterprise collaborative-working tools, how significant, I wonder, is this news of Oracle’s acquisition of a small company called Context Media, reported by CNET News: […] The purchase gives Oracle software designed specifically for moving documents between […]
Smart companies stimulate disruptive thinking
How do large companies continue to innovate and respond rapidly to new opportunities as if they were start-ups, asks the Financial Times? By developing a corporate culture in which innovative opportunities are spotted, nurtured and championed in an entrepreneurial manner, the paper says. In short, a culture that is "intrapreneurial". In a lengthy feature, the […]
What price British Airways’ reputation?
In last Monday’s edition of The Hobson & Holtz Report, Shel and I spent a good 15 minutes in the show discussing the communication and employee relations challenges facing British Airways and Gate Gourmet following last week’s flight cancellations fiasco. The broader consequences of that fiasco will be pretty far reaching, starting with financial aspects […]
They shall be heard!
Big news in Canada during the past few weeks has been a major labour dispute at the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation (CBC) which has seen programming disrupted as CBC has locked out many of the journalists and presenters from the workplace. So what’s this about? Not much on the CBC website to clearly explain it. As […]
Webinar: Blogs and internal communication
If you have responsibility for internal communication and want to find out how you can use blogs effectively within your organization, you might want to consider participating in a 90-minute webinar on Wednesday 31 August in which I will be one of the speakers. Blogs and their implications on internal communication – are you ready […]
The (ir)relevance of trades unions
If trade unions had relevance, people would join them. But the world has moved on and unions have not. The UK workplace today is a significantly better place than it was in 1972. So says former trades union official Rory Murphy in a lengthy article in the Financial Times which discusses changes in attitudes and […]
Disaster planning, consequences and inevitabilities from Katrina
Two thoughtful articles in as many days from the Financial Times examine broad consequences of the Hurricane Katrina disaster from the business, economic, political and social standpoints. In the first, a feature on disaster planning, the FT says the consequences of Katrina for businesses worldwide are likely to be significant. Insurance claims are expected to […]
New blogging white paper from Edelman and Intelliseek
Edeman and Intelliseek have just published their latest white paper on word-of-mouth marketing called "Blogging from the Inside Out: The Rise and Effective Management of Employee Bloggers." The 22-page PDF document is a rich source of information that includes: Original data on the role employees play in shaping corporate reputation and on the frequency with […]
The giant street market
An email from James Cherkoff alerted me to yesterday’s edition of Shop Talk, a weekly BBC Radio 4 business programme, in which he was one of the studio guests talking about blogs and blogging. Together with Adriana Cronin-Lukas of Big Blog Company, Simon Phipps of Sun Microsystems, Azeem Azhar, a writer and analyst, and Heather […]
Let transparency enter your company
Before you next try and explain to your colleagues or your clients why they should pay attention to business blogging, read a terrific pitch from Loic Le Meur that sets out some of the key reasons. Example: […] One of the reasons why you should open your own blogs is now to participate in this […]
Trade unions can demonstrate relevance
A few weeks ago, I wrote about the relevance (or otherwise) of trade unions in the UK workplace. This was commenting about a lengthy article in the Financial Times that included interviews with a number of former trade union officials who had made the switch, so to speak, to the ‘other side,’ taking management jobs […]
An alternative to email catchup
Light posting ahead until the weekend as I’ll be travelling, meetings, etc. Then, a massive email and post-comments catchup. Do I really mean "catchup"? Comments to blog posts, definitely, but email? My email inbox looks truly horrendous. Boy, do I identify with this: […] My email inbox is totally out of control, with more than […]
Blog network aids graduate recruitment
Reading a review of corporate blogs in the Financial Times the other day, I spotted a new gem mentioned in the feature – a series of blogs set up by Cadbury Schweppes in the UK as part of its graduate recruitment activities. From Cadbury’s press release: Cadbury Schweppes, the world’s largest confectionery company, has opened […]
The rise of individual credibility
A challenging assessment of the differences between executive blogging and business blogging and which are best blogs, by Chris Anderson, editor-in-chief of Wired magazine, writing in The Long Tail: […] It’s a huge mistake to equate executive blogs with business blogging, just as it’s a huge mistake to see the world only through the economic […]