One of the first and simplest pieces of functionality that organisations put on their SharePoint sites is the ‘News’ bit. This allows people to contribute short items to a running list.  Here’s what is working and what is not working about this for us. 

A bit of context first: we use our SharePoint site for everything from document management, to time recording, to intellectual property development.  The only other application that people use as often is Outlook.

We used to email out important announcements and now they appear on our front page daily.  This seems to be working with people responding quickly to any simple procedures that are posted there.  For example, we all fly a lot – over winter we prefer people to take full flexi fares because airports are often closed at this time due to fog.  This got posted up and immediately was reflected in the fares that people were buying.  No dialogue just a change in behaviour. 

Where it is really working is in the communication of little snippets of news.  Previously we would have been clogging up email inboxes or, more often than not, simply not bothering to tell people what is going on.  We use the news to communicate:

·        Industry changes and announcements

·        Customer feedback

·        New assignments

·        Achievements of the team.

And the feedback is that people like reading these.

This is the good news.  It would be great to just stop the story here.  However, there is some less good news and that is about the level of contribution.  Should it matter that, in a team of 8: 65% of entries are contributed by one person; 30% by another; and 5% by a third?  Or maybe this is just about job role. Maybe this will evolve…let’s see.

I’ve not given an awful lot of thought to brand despite owning my own business for the past 4 years.  I suppose I’ve thought that brand is something you need if you are a tube of toothpaste but not if you are a professional services firm.

Reading ‘Buying In’ by Rob Walker made me realise that we do have a brand and that there are specific reasons why people choose our brand and not another brand.  The more authentic we are, and the more we act in congruence with this brand the more some people will be attracted to it and others repelled.  We need to be telling a story to ourselves and to others.

Most importantly we need to realise that we are not so much competing against other brands as against other demands on peoples’ attention.

So, ‘Buying In’ got me thinking about brand.  Other than that it didn’t do much for me.  After 2 days of reasonably solid reading I’ve got 1.5 very small pages of big notes.  I liked the stories but couldn’t really generate many new understandings or ideas.

I just came across this post by David Meerman Scott which is convincing in defence of social media in the workplace. 

The article also contains a link to an excellet set of social media guidelines from IBM.

It seems like the latest trend in enterprise content management (ECM) tenders is to ask for Web 2.0 functionality or collaboration functionality which is usually translated in the fine print into ‘blogs and wikis’.  So how useful are they really in a business setting? 

Clearly there are a range of possibilities – we could use them to have a conversation with customers, communities or amongst ourselves.  All of this sounds very credible.  I’m on the lookout for real examples of where this has succeeded and examples of where this has failed.  Do send me your stories.

On the flipside of this is that maybe they are yet another distraction.  In a world where most people are paid by ‘time served’ regardless of outcome (which is a topic for another day) do businesses want employees reading and posting to blogs when they should be working?  Visits to blogs drop dramatically over the weekends.  Is reading blogs a legitimate business activity or is it a substitute for action?  I read blogs while I eat breakfast before I start work.  Would it be appropriate for me to spend the first hour of my work day perusing blogs?  I subscribe to about 50 blogs and some of them are work related but not all of them.  What do you think?