social networking at the BBC

Or the Beeb, as Canadian anglophiles might insist.

Euan Semple from the BBC keynoted the track on social networking. The BBC has created a gateway allowing its employees to use a number of social networking tools. The first is a forum with 11 different discussion groups, including Editorial, Production, What’s Going On, etc. Over 11,000 people use the forum to ask questions and get answers. One result of this platform is that trivial questions can turn into interesting issues; misinformation gets corrected, and lurkers (people who read but do not participate in the discussion) get the benefit of the discussion. Euan stressed that these types of systems must be sociable places where people will want to go to get their information, and it can be a challenge to get conversations started. Once the conversations begin, the statistics show that thousands of people may read posts, but only a few contribute comments or replies.

Other social networking tools that have been added to the BBC’s gateway are:
• Connect.gateway—used to identify and find other people in the organization. A search tool allows employees to find others with specific expertise (foreign language speakers, etc.)
• An internal blog has had a large impact on journalism processes. Over 250 people within the BBC are blogging, even senior managers. Blogs have started to replace “all hands” broadcast e-mail announcements from upper management.
• Wikis are used by over 1,500 people and have become a rich resource for all kinds of information. With their freely available editing capabilities, wikis are very different from traditional documents. For example, when new policies are proposed, employees are encouraged to comment and change the initial documents, and then they are considered for incorporation into the final policy.
• RSS software that runs and syndicates content for those interested.

as reported in InfoToday Blog - Social Networking at the BBC.
There is also an audio interview (WAV) with him.

He spoke on Day 3 of Online Information 2005.  The presentation doesn't seem to be available, err, online.

I've never seen a blog report that a link came from someone's bookmarks, so anyway... via Darlene Fichter's Furl bookmarks.

Comments

[Euan]

Yeah - sorry about the lack of an online version of the presentation. Two reasons. I use my browser rather than Powerpoint as most of the presentation involves showing web pages and secondly most of them include conversations between staff inside the firewall which wouldn't be fair to leave lying around!

:-)