On Guy Kawasaki’s blog, I found a link to a podcast interview with PodTech’s Jennifer Jones talking to Jennifer McClure of the Society for New Communications Research.
McClure talks about ways that large organizations like IBM can embrace blogging as one way to talk directly to customers and employees. Not the corporate-PR type blog, but true individual voices.
Organizations are going to be more successful if they listen better, and listening starts internally and… will be taken externally…
Think about an IBM that has thousands of employees… they not only have voices, they have ears… so IBM has the ability to listen much better…
IBM, according to McClure, encourages employees to blog, and thousands of them have. IBM’s James Snell posted company blog guidelines.
As McClure says, companies have the opportunity to use and learn from what their employees and customers are saying (rather than tracking down the miscreants and setting them straight).
Similarly, it would be “very new” for many companies to post on an internal wiki “this is what we’re thinking about — do you have any opinions or ideas?”
I’m not sure how new wikis are in business, especially with Google Docs now in widespread (?) use. SocialText seems to be doing well with enterprise wikis:
http://www.socialtext.com/customerstories
Harold:
I should have made clearer that “very new” was my paraphrase of McClure. I took her to be saying that in many large organizations, it would be unusual to float an idea or possible change past employees and ask for their input before making a decision.
I remember clearly a “change management process” at one large firm that boiled down to upper management telling the affected groups of employees “your groups are merging and you will work in new ways, starting today.”