Looking forward to meet you at....

In the next coming months I will be speaking at several conferences and hope to meet some of you there.

Here's the list:

• October 29 - Brussels - Belgium: I'll be giving a full day Kluwer workshop in Dutch on "Web2.0 & External Communications. This is a training day focused on using social media for PR & Marketing efforts. You can find the details and registration form here.

• November 17 - Belgrado - Serbia: The regional EACD debate organiser for Serbia, Andrea Brbaklic,  invited me to speak at an event organised with the Serbian PR Society. I'll be talking about the impact of social media on the Public Relations profession. 

• November 24 - Antwerp - Belgium: I'll be speaking at a full day communications seminar for the communicators of the City of Antwerp on the use of social media for community relations. If you're from "'t Stad", do say hello.

• January 18/19 2010 - Amsterdam - The Netherlands: Marcus Evans is organising a conference of 2 days on PR & Media Relations Effectiveness. I'll be covering social media & media relations and am already looking forward to meet up again with Médard Schoenmaeckers from Syngenta.

Of course, I'll try to "liveblog" these conferences as much as possible and share my experiences there through Twitter updates or short videotweets.

Social Media Guidelines & Employees

I am currently writing the social media guidelines for the Van Marcke Group of Companies and the exercise takes me back to the time when I was working at IBM and part of the "New Media Team"...

Must have been end 2004, beginning 2005 when the draft guidelines at IBM where put on a wiki and opened up for "review" by the employees.

I still think this was a very good idea and definitely added to the human voice in which the guidelines are written.

For the guidelines I am currently writing I have done some research online because let's face it, since 2005 a lot of things have changed...

So here are a couple of resources which I think are very valuable if one day you need to do the same exercise for your company or organisation:

• The IBM Social Media Guidelines - I always go back to them because I do think they were one of the first and one of the best and still are...
• The by now famous "Laurel Papworth List" - Laurel did a great job collecting about 40 corporate guidelines in one list.
• And then there is another reference I always turn to; the "blogging policy" list on the New PR Wiki. The title of the wiki page shows that time goes by fast - in 2005 it was all about "blogs"...

The aspects I took into consideration while writing ?

Well, the guidelines need to be clear, straightforward and direct. They also need to be written for the employees in the first place...

Avoid any legal terminology and above all else I tried to use "common sense" (we say "boerenverstand" here in Dutch) wherever possible.

Employees are sensible, intelligent people otherwise you wouldn't have hired them, so don't get all paranoid about these things.

But still, this week I did a quick 3 day poll via Twitter and got the following results when I asked;

"Do you think employees should be involved in the development & drafting of the social media guidelines of the company ?"

What do you think...?

The impact of social media on corporate information management ?

These last couple of days have been hectic....

Caroline Van Marcke (middle) at IOD2009I officialy left IBM last Friday and started to work for Van Marcke Group as their Chief Social Media Officer on Tuesday... Just on time to immediately fly to Berlin for... an IBM conference of 3 days on the topic of information management !

The interesting sessions on information management (from a business perspective for me) and hearing some very good speakers - author Frans Johansson has definitely some passion going there - were definitely worth the 3 days in Berlin.

But what struck me right from the beginning was the incredible, and largely underestimated, impact social media will have on corporate information management.

Imagine an organisation which truly uses social media to connect with employees, business partners and clients...

Not just a company that sets up a blog because it is fashionable but an organisation that really wants to engage with its constituents and gain insight from it.

Frans Johansson - AuthorThen think how all these data streams, conversations and connections could interact with existing infrastructure.

Example; the Twitter updates used by customer support of company X, integrated with its CRM system, its stock management system, the monitoring system of its PR department and so on...

All that information could then be data mined, classified, analysed etc.. in order to improve customer relations, customer support, product developments and so on.

Because to me that's the real use of social media on an enterprise level.

Real Time Twitter Feed at IOD2009Enabling employees to respond correctly and quickly to client questions by connecting with them in a transparent and direct way.

Enabling diverse teams (think development, creatives, research) to work together on a same problem through the use of wikis, blogs, and social networking in order to find a better solution than the standard one.

How will all these data streams be managed ? Can they be managed ? Are organisations even thinking about this already ?

During the Information On Demand conference the subject popped up... but not as a clearly defined topic on the agenda.

I do think this area of "social media impacting information management" is really challenging and interesting to research as it will impact more and more organisations in the near future.

What do you think ?