Recently in Communities of Practice Category

Got a preview invite for Vox, and spent 10 minutes or so playing with it yesterday. Vox is SixApart's community oriented blogging platform - think Yahoo 360 / MSN Spaces / MySpace rather than Typepad or Movable Type. To be honest, I'm not really sure I'm in the target demographic, but I can see the value in aggregating posts, comments and other content from your community or neighbourhood. Vox seems to have most of the expected functionality - flickr, amazon, youtube integration (although it would be good to see other sites such as del.icio.us and last.fm being slotted in). But I don't think that functionality (beyond a base level which Vox reaches) is necessarily a key predictor for success - it's more about your network ("friends" in old-skool slang) - getting them onto the same platform, and actively participating (or at least reading) is key. Crowded space, with most of the major players having an offering. But, as with the instant messaging space, none of them really work with each other - I'm wondering if there's an opportunity for someone to create (and excuse the clumsy / incorrect terminology) a "meta-community" site that glue the various platforms together and show an aggregated view of one's community across the different platforms ? [PS - I seem to have some invites - does anyone who knows me / reads this blog want one ? Let me know.] [tags]vox, communities, social[/tags]

Panel about the do's and don'ts of corporate blogging. Struan Robertson - tech lawyer at Pinsett Masons. "Lawyers can give you plenty of reasons why this is a bad idea - here are some of them

• the risk of defamatory material being posted. "best blogs are a little bit edgy"
• negative comments - referenced the mini-microsoft blog "does bill gates or other shareholders want to be reading negative comments - what does it do the share value"
• lots of other stuff

all of which is applicable to almost any kind of communication. Referenced outlaw.com their technology law website - positive impact - demonstrates tech law credibility, makes them seem more approachable, and has generated business. Phillipe Borremans - IBM Blogging internally for 4 years, over 5,000 internal blogs, proactively asking e'ees to blog. Have internal blogging platform - any e'ee can "and should" blog. Blogs, wikis, podcasts are treated as a set of tools that co-exist with other tools (like Notes teamroom). Guidlines are important - talks about the process for creating the IBM blog guidelines. Bloggers wrote the guidelines - these guidelines were posted on a wiki and comments/changes invited. Then handed over to legal. "If you don't have guidelines, don't blog." Don't impose the guidelines - they should be created by the blogging community and then given to lawyers". Blogging depends on a culture of openness. Need to educate, it's not as easy as it is perceived to be - especially internally. Genie Lutz -Partner @ PWC PWC started blogging internally 18 months ago, and 8 months ago externally. 16,000 e'ees in UK - 10% per annum e'ee turnover. Have a number of external blogs. "We sell intellectual property" - the purpose ofthe blogs is to personalise the information. Surprised about the level of readership they've got, and the level of commentary the external market is providing - real sense of dialogue with the market. They are a regulated business - which constrains what they can do/say. Terms and Conditions on everything - FSA have guidelines on what can be said on websites. Philippe Borremans sums it up - "It's about trusting your people and showing common sense..." Technorati Tags: blogging4business

I had drafted the below yesterday evening, and as I was about to hit the publish button, I saw that Steve Rubel had opened up the wiki. Still, it's probably worth publishing, just to record my thoughts on the matter, and also my opposition to invite-only wikis in these sorts of situations.

Steve Rubel posted a entry exhorting the PR community to master the 25% of social media it didn't already have under its belt. I need to draw out one sentence from Steve's very first call to action:

[The marketing community] conceptually get [social media's] importance, how it evolves marketing from a monologue into a dialogue and the importance of listening.

Sounds good - dialogue and listening - all essential in our new world of broadcast conversation. Then, in more recent post, Steve reiterates the importance of PR agencies getting the new world, and proposes that

the senior leadership of the top US PR firms to participate in a transparent dialogue on "the last 25%" over on The New PR Wiki

And here my understanding and support runs into a brick wall of baffled miscomprehension - the only way this conversation could be more old-world is if it were written using quills and transmitted via carrier pigeons (as an aside - see RFC 1149). Yes that's an exaggeration - but I just do not understand why one would use a wiki, and then restrict the editing privs to a certain select few. Most of the invitees seem to have accepted, on the basis that participating is probably better than not participating - but I'm not so sure about that - I think it sends out a message of control and cliqueishness that we must move away from. Most of the innovation in the field of social media is not coming from big companies - and excluding people from direct participation is just wrong (especially when using an arbitrary 15 person company cutoff). I'm not even going to get into any Wisdom of the Crowds stuff about aggregated opinions. All that being said - I do think the actual idea is a good one, and the only thing that needs to change is to make the wiki open to all persons interested in participating in the dialogue Some links

• Original call to action post from Steve Rubel
• Second call to action post from Steve Rubel
• The wiki page - from New PR Wiki
• Mike Manuel posting about the call to action, and why he accepted
• Constantin Basturea doesn't like the exclusivity, and sets up an alternative wiki page,
• Niall Cook - Can't we all find a way to get along?

Interesting - a newly hatched blog community for HR professionals, started up by Michael Specht: hrblogs.org. (via the HR Technology Discussion Board )

hrblogs.org is a free blogging service for HR professionals that will provide Wordpress based blogs to anyone who works within the HR profession regardless of location. If you work as a generalist, manager, recruiter, industrial relation specialist, or remuneration and benefits, in fact any area of HR, hrblogs.org will enable you to establish a free blog.

Running on wordpress, I think it needs an aggregator page with an RSS feed, and an OPML listing of available blogs. I can see how this might be interesting for people new to blogging, but I'm wondering if it's better to sign up for a service like this that might end up locking you in to a community, or start up a more general purpose blog and get added to a community directory. In fact, hrblogs.org could (should) also be providing a community directory service - "add your HR related blog here". But overall, I like the idea, and considering the benefits HR people could realise from social media tools, any initiative that makes it easier to start and experiment with blogs is a good thing.

OK – I seem to be turning into a bit of a Euan Semple fanboy – but this article about him is great.

Running the unusual line between rebelling against senior-management expectations and over-delivery on objectives seems to be Euan Semple’s forte. Since his appointment as head of KM solutions at the BBC, he has jumpstarted collaboration and knowledge sharing among employees on a budget that would make most software vendors squirm.

 

Anyone know if the upcoming London KM Cluster event is actually happening or not ? Link to sign up page still doesn’t work, and lots of linkage to last year’s event.

Worrying – I think I might just bail on this now as I have other committments. Ah well, I guess I’ll see many people at Les Blogs.