BBC is not only trying blogs and podcasting as tools in their core business – publishing – they’re also way ahead of most companies when it comes to internal uses of social media.
Euan Semple from the BBC DigiLab tells The Broadband Blog about what they’re doing – and why:
“The benefits are that we all get access to the accumulated experience and knowledge of 25,000 staff. Work related questions get sorted in minutes on the bulletin board and people are able to identify the right people to call on for help from the blogs and skills database. Getting 6000 or so questions answered in a month, even if they were minor ones, which many are not, adds up to a significant saving.”
The first thing they did was to put in a bulletin board. After that came “a social networking tool that lets users set up a page of info about themselves and can then be searched for particular skills or interests”.
“We then put in a blog server and now have around 70 blogs being written by about 100 people. They are being used for a variety of tasks from group blogs for project teams to operational logs to pass on info between engineering shifts to personal blogs capturing individual learning and experiences.
Lastly we have implemented a wiki. We chose a tool that allows us to manage access a bit. I know the principle of wikis is to be totally open but that is not always possible or approriate in current corporate culture and we have to acknowledge this and work with it. The people most attracted to using wikis are those involved in writing formal documents, policy, manuals etc.”
That last part is really interesting. It shows us that these tools are used not only by the young, tech-savvy journalists, but by administrative staff. The kind of people we find in every organization. Your colleagues.
Found via Mymarkup.net
Fredrik Wacka is the author and founder of the popular CorporateBlogging.Info blog which is a guide to business and corporate blogging.
Visit Fredrik Wacka’s blog: CorporateBlogging.Info.
