OPEN

Euan Semple offers some reflections on social computing and change in the ways large companies communicate with themselves. This man’s always worth listening to – he knows more about this than anyone I’ve met.

If you don’t know Euan, he is a  consultant who helps big organisations use blogs, wikis and other social media to communicate and share knowledge internally. He was head of knowledge management at the BBC until earlier this year where he helped build systems that were eventually being used by 18,500 out of 23,000 people at the corporation.

Here’re some of his remarks:

…people are people and share the need to communicate with each other to get things done and the desire to belong to something bigger than themselves that is worthwhile. Even if social computing is not universally appropriate it does tend to be almost universally attractive

Euan also notes that awareness and understanding  of social media is growing:

The number of people for whom blogs, wikis and forums are anathema is reducing rapidly and given that most of my corporate audiences, unlike conference attendees, are not self-selecting this represents a considerable shift over the years I have been doing this.

But the way that social media works – even just in giving everyone in an organisation a level playing field for airing their views – is so disruptive that it is hard for corporate cultures to change.

There is so much of the world of work that is very deeply rooted in assumptions about command and control that just isn’t going to go away over night.

….What we can do is to engage with this new world as it emerges in business and help it to happen a little quicker and a lot less painfully.

Spot on, Mr Semple.

: : Before I moved to Spannerworks I had some fascinating conversations with Kevin Murray, Chairman of Bell Pottinger Group, about the growing importance of internal communications. He described it as the "sleeping giant" of PR, and rightly so. (See the report, Reputation Management, he published with Dr John White of the Henley Management College a few months ago.)

Communicating within organisations often has a low priority compared with investor relations, marketing and outward facing PR. But in an age of networks, it’s every bit as important everyone who works for a company is part of the communications mix.

A lot of corporate communicators, putting a premium on control in communications find this frankly terrifying. They approach social media and their people as a major risk area ("Which of the buggers is blogging about us when they shouldn’t be?") when in fact it can be viewed as a major opportunity ("We are living in an age of networks and I’ve got X thousand nodes in that network who could be helping us communicate!").

Sounds obvious? Yes,  but it’s easier said than done…