The future of work… is now?
A Financial Times story from a few weeks back about investment bank Dresdner, Kleinwort Wasserstein’s use of social computing in the workplace. 450 internal blogs and 2,500 internal wiki pages. The latter now documenting protocols and taking the place of training manuals, and in just six months its traffic exceeds that of the company’s entire intranet.
A bank.
And then a good bit about internal blogging:
Robin Hopper, chief executive of iUpload, a Canadian company that specialises in hosting corporate blogs, says the picture is changing. Businesses that have given their employees blogs often discover a new and surprisingly rich source of information that they can mine in different ways – to feed the company’s public-facing websites and blogs, for example.
About 90 per cent of the news content on the public website of Cannondale, the US bike manufacturer and an iUpload customer, is supplied from blog postings by Cannondale staff.
“They have realised that with blogs they can capture very valuable information,†says Mr Hopper. Mcdonald’s, the fast-food chain, is another iUpload customer.
Nevertheless, Mr Hooper admits many businesses remain suspicious of blogging, as they fear employees will post irrelevant ramblings of the “what my cat ate for breakfast†variety.
Mr Rangaswami recognises the problem but says DrKW has not suffered from blogger banality: “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.â€
Comments
Subscribe :: RSS or Email
Your Emcee
I'm Ian Wilker, a web strategist and project manager. I help organizations engage the social web -- the blogosphere, online social networks, content-sharing services, and other emerging media.
Some Work …
I was lead strategist and architect of these sites, and continue to help manage them:
