Back from the Online Information 2005 Conference in London

Yesterday I was speaking at the Online Information 2005 conference in London. I was asked for the "Wikis and blogs in corporate and academic institutions" panel and later, in the afternoon, again for the "Content syndication - supply and demand" part.

First of all, as with all these events and conferences, it was a pleasure to meet and debate with so many interesting people like Loic Le Meur (Six Apart), Adriana Cronin Lukas (tBBC), John Dale (Warwick University), Neil McIntosh (The Guardian),  Peter Scott (RSS Compendium) and Fergus Burns (Nooked). In fact we found out that we will all meet again on Monday at the Les Blogs 2 conference in Paris..

What I take back from speaking at this conference is the multiple recurrence of the word "control" from within the audience. When you talk about internal and external blogs and the use of wikis, podcasts and RSS feeds in a large corporation people immediately go for the "where's the control" question... It happened at the L'Echangeur conference, at the first Belgian Blogger conference and I am sure this will go on for a long time.

As a PR person I then ask myself (and sometimes the public) "what control ?". Do we communicators really believe we have this powerful control of the information at all times ? Maybe we do in part when the information is created but after that, once it is set on a medium, it is gone, it's free... especially in an online world.

From a corporate point of view it is all about trusting your employees and creating (or having them create - even better) corporate blogging/podcasting guidelines. Yes you have to protect confidential information, yes you have to make sure intellectual property is respected but not by cutting the internet connection or issuing them a warning that if they blog they get fired. It simply doesn't work... Chances are that some of them already blog about their work anyway.

The best part of the conference to me was seeing and hearing the students of Warwick University explain why and how they blog.... They completely get it, and you know why ? They don't even ask these questions that we professionals do, they just blog and voice their opinion. They interact online, question almost everything but at the same time find answers to their questions. Keywords here were "authentic", "real", true", "fun", "interesting"... not "control". As I said, they get it.

Comments

[Dennis McDonald]

I sure would like to know where to find more discussions of this "control" question. A while back on Linkedin Bloggers I started a thread on "use of blogs for damage control" in light of the Sony spyware debacle. The discussion was quite productive, and the consensus was (not surprisingly) "every corporation should have a blog." But in a crisis situation, when it is critical to get accurate and consistent information out, can you afford NOT to control what gets communicated to the public via all your communication channels, including blogs?

Dennis D. McDonald (http://ddmcd.squarespace.com)

[Philippe Borremans]

Hi Dennis,

True, in a crisis situation it is important to have a certain amount of control on your communications.

That's why guidelines need to be crafted and employees need to be informed about the blogosphere and how it works.

On the other hand, I would be the first to set up a blog in case of certain types of crisis because it is fast, easy, cheap and has RSS... best way for the media to keep up to date.

Thanks for your comment.