Practising what we preach
By Molly FlattAs we keep telling clients that they need to become conversational within as well as without, by learning how to turn their employees into brand advocates and transform their internal comms into a creative, collaborative social network all of its own, we’re careful to walk the talk ourselves.
Having experimented with platforms such as Wikis (not dynamic or visual enough, and unwieldy with a big team) we’ve seen great success with SocialCast, which allows us to share and debate internally in a way that feels absolutely intuitive to the Facebook generation. The series of microblogging-style update options, where you can throw up an idea, a question, a link, or indeed a worklog explaining what you’re up to, are a refreshingly immediate way of keeping connected to members of all the different teams, and as a global company, we find it especially useful; our offices are spread across both London and Oxford, and at any one time a good few Heads are likely to be at an event or meeting abroad.
Of course, it comes up against the same issues we see in public social media; as your Socialcast presence draws in feeds from all your other sites (Twitter, Flickr, Digg etc) the work/personal lines can become blurred, and we’re still working out how to keep things focused without stripping away the intimacy that keeps it human and creative. But it’s already stimulated a lot of conversation about how we can make the way we work better - which is what we’re all about, in the end.
What have your experiences been of branching into conversational comms? McKinsey have a neat summary on Web 2.0 tools for companies here…
