I don’t know of a single communications manager or executive that doesn’t want to introduce blogging to some segment of the employee population. There are undoubtedly some, but these cautious folks are in the minority. And the cautious ones are the smart managers.
Web 2.0 or social media such as blogs, wikis, podcasts, social bookmarking, etc. is all very interesting – and potentially incredibly powerful. I’m all for it and, as you probably know since you’re reading this blog, I’m a big advocate of social media.
Most organizations, however, have a sub-par intranet. I’m being kind of course because many, many companies have horribly dreadful intranets. If your intranet is anything but very good, you shouldn’t be wasting your energy dreaming about blogs and podcasts. A successful intranet requires far too many well thought and executed ingredients that should always be a far greater priority than blogs. Such mission critical priorities should include:
- A well-defined governance model
- Strong support from executive management
- Interested and motivated users
- Defined strategic directives and measurable goals
- Standards and polices for page development and content management
- Content publishing system (CMS)
- A solid search engine supported by a detailed taxonomy and meta tagging strategy
- Effective information architecture
- Strong, well-written, focused and meaningful content
Anecdotally, I have to tell you, I don’t know a single person that listens to podcasts except for one or two people. And I know and meet a lot of like-minded people who are hardly luddites. They’re technology savvy and have iPods. But they have no interest in listening to an amateur broadcaster talk about their favorite (fill-in-the-blank).
Consider this statistic according to the technology experts at Forrester from this spring, that only 1% of U.S. households regularly listen to podcasts (Podcasting Hits the Charts reveals). What percentage of employees do you think actually care to listen to podcasts? Your guess is probably right.
Blogs and wikis are in fact more pervasive and extremely powerful. However, if you can’t put a checkmark beside each of the bullets above then forget about Web 2.0 – invest some time and money into the mission critical imperatives.
