Today I’m at Blogs and Social Media Forum 2 which kicked off just a few minutes ago with an introductin from Euan Semple who is chairing the event.
The first panel includes, in order of appearance (and left to right on stage)
• Myles Runham, General Manager, Europe, Ask.com
• Jem Stone, Executive Producer, Share, BBC New Media and Technology
• Roo Reynolds, Metaverse Evangelist, IBM
• Adriana Lukas, Big Blog Company
• Ben Edwards, Publisher, The Economist.com
The panel kicks off with Myles Runham from Ask.com. He talked about user generated content creating a whole lot more stuff for users of Ask.com to look at. I can’t find his blog, which he mentions later in the panel discussion.
Jem discusses about the BBC’s past approach, where people had to come to bbc.co.uk to talk about and participate with our brands. He mentions h2g2, message boards and BBC Scotland’s Island Blogging project. Now there is a new approach. Dan Hill, who has now left the BBC, talks about using the whole web as a canvas. And Matt Jones talks about being “of the internet” not “apart from it”.
Stone says: “Our approach in terms of people wanting to talk about our stuff… we need to integrate, we need to be on delicious and flickr… we ask people to submit stuff to the BBC… [with our newer projects] we’re going to reflect stuff [wherever people post it]… what we need to get better at is use the tools to monitor stuff and reflect it… we’ve got a few of our own tools that do that, like on BBC News we have the ability to show what people are looking at right now, and soon we’ll start showing what people are blogging about, but what we’re bad at right now is engaging with the conversations [out there]… it’s hard for us…. Euan Semple used to work at the BBC, he left 2 years ago… his perception of the BBC isn’t necessarily the reality… it’s based on BBC people who blog, who use those spaces… you really need to have your staff, your colleagues, out there participating in those places.”
Euan Semple responds (slighly paraphrased): “The more people in the BBC who have the confidence to go outside and blog about what their doing, the better we can understand what they’re doing…”
Roo Reynolds is talking about people within IBM using wiki’s, blogs, and social media: “Myself and my IBM colleagues know each other through flickr, delicious and dopplr…[we use it to meet up and stay in the same hotels and stuff]… Since March 2006, we’ve discovered that social networking expands out into 3d as well… Secondlife completely embodies what people are talking about when they talk about Web 2.0 – social networking and user generated content….You look at a user build world like Second Life, it’s all user generated content, and it’s all about social networking… for me, it’s just the natural extension of everything we’ve been talking about, it’s just the web, it helps us share experiences…”
Adriana Lukas of the Big Blog Company, “It was blogging that made me realise how big organisations work…. I was looking at it from the point of communications… if bloggers can write and be noticed and network, to the point that they are getting noticed… ClueTrain was my background philosophy for this. Once I got started, I realised it wasn’t about the companies, it was about the individuals…. I see social media as the first expression, the first instance, of technology being lines up behind the individual, not the institutions.”
Ben Edwards talks about how he deployed “Community Server… which provides a place for the team to go and upload and share” inside the firewall. His own blog, where he posts up public presentations and other thoughts, is on the community server platform. No word on whether they’re going to turn any of that content inside out, to make it available outside the Economist.com team….
At the end, panelists are invited to have a final word as to how blogs and social media can be of value to the enterprise. Jem and Roo agree:
For businesses to make the most of blogging and social media, people within the organisation need to feel confident enough to blog outside, to have conversations outside, and to – sometimes – make mistakes when doing things outside the firewall.
[Website forBlogs and Social Media Forum 2, London, 05 June 2007.]
Thanks for live blogging this. I couldn’t make the actual seminar, so your notes are much appreciated, but will be at the party at Adriana’s /Big blog company HQ tonight.
Ooh, there’s a party?! No one told me!!
Well, perhaps it’s a speakers’ party, not to sure how it works, ask Adriana, who’s an old friend of mine, or perhaps the organisers will know – her party though.
Reading this it sounds like my own LTS is not too far off doing what the BBC is thinking of introducing. The difference with us? We’ve got an increasing number of our own employees who do engage with the edublogosphere (our ‘industry’) and who can pull on these people quickly when particular education news stories arise. As they say, you’ve got to be in it to win it à la Sambrook. If you are, then it’s really no big deal to bring bloggers’ content in with the ‘mainstream’ material.
Thanks for liveblogging this.