By Joaquim P. Menezes -
Yesterday, my colleague at IT World Canada, Tina - in a fabulous presentation to our editorial staff - talked about strategies for effectively using Web 2.0 tools, and some practical steps we could immediately take to implement these ideas.
Tina is herself an avid user of a range of social networking apps - from del.icio.us, Flickr, YouTube and FaceBook, to the more business-oriented sites such as LinkedIn.
So she could speak from personal experience, when offering up practical suggestions on how us editorial types could use these apps to more effectively interact with our "audiences."
In this context, Tina made a crucial point:
External stakeholder interaction via Web 2.0 tools, she said, is most effective when the same tools are also used to foster a culture of interaction inhouse.
In other words, in the world of online corporate social networking, internal collaboration is a pre-requisite – even the foundation – for meaningful and impactful external interaction.
Other experts in social networking technologies also make the same point.
It was a key theme in the presentation of Michael O’Connor Clarke, vice-president at Thornley Fallis Communications, at the IT360 event in Toronto a few months ago,
Clarke cited instances of companies that have been hugely successful in communicating with their external stakeholders.
These same firms, he said, are also using tools such as blogging software and wikis to transform internal communications.
For instance, Clarke said his own company (Thornley Fallis) has already replaced its corporate intranet with a wiki that "everybody uses, every day."
Likewise, he said at his previous firm Marqui, a content management and marketing automation software developer, all product management is run internally on a wiki.
"Whenever we updated a new build of a product, or tracked bugs, or wanted to go through the latest release notes, or to feature polling – we put this all up on the wiki. People could subscribe to changes on the wiki and it would notify them when there was new content. We didn't have to push stuff out to people."
What’s more – wikis, blogs and some of the video sharing technologies are also great tools to capture and institutionalize the corporate knowledge that's walking out of the doors every night.