10 September 2007
Communicators go back to school for social media tuition
Workshops draw in pupils from Royal Mail Group and BP, among others.
Last week, David Ferrabee (see Figure 1, below), managing director of the Change and Internal Communications team at PR organization, Hill & Knowlton UK (and member of the Hub's editorial board), chaired Melcrum's latest Social Media workshop in London.
A selection of communicators from companies including Royal Mail Group, Visa Europe, Ericsson and HBOS, came together for 2 days to learn about the latest trends in and advice about social media within organizations.
Big Brother is watching you
As social media is blurring the line between business and personal
communication, delegates pondered if people actually realize how public
their views are, when posted on social networking sites such as Facebook and
the Communicators'
Network. Consensus in the group found that for the sites to work
best within and for their organizations, there should be a mix between
using them for both social and professional reasons.
Figure 1. David Ferrabee dishes out social media wisdom
Get employees involved
Joe Little, project management
professional in the BP Digital Communication and Technology wing
of energy supplier, BP,
explained how IBM and
the BBC wrote
their company blog policies by asking their staff to add their thoughts,
views and ideas to a wiki.
"You shouldn't be scared, start small and give it a go," advised Matthew Mills, web and communications technology advisor at NATS, about introducing social media tools.
Stuart Butterfield, Web Manager HBOS
Bump up your viewing figures
When asked how communicators control social media,
ideas suggested included to avoid taking a blanket approach and
block it from organizations, but to be
open-minded and try to work out how these tools can be used as an effective
channel.
Clare Holeman, head of employee communication at air traffic control organization NATS, talked about the success of her CEO's travel diary/blog and how at NATS the page went from 60th to 3rd most read page on the company intranet.
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