The death of internal communications?

Toby Ward writes in his blog that "internal communications is evolving, if not dying". His comment may be a bit melodramatic, but in general I agree with him. I've also found that Internal Comms are managing most of the intranet projects that we work on these days, and they're having to come to terms with a dramatically different way of looking at one of their key tools (the corporate intranet).

Social software (web 2.0) has been popular on the web for quite some time, but in my experience there has been a lag in seeing the social element appear on corporate intranets. One of the main reasons is that word - "corporate". Many see that as a justification for turning the intranet into a one way publishing tool. But in the same way that corporations have started talking (and listening) to their customers through the web, they are now finding that the intranet is the perfect platform to do the same with their employees.

This means that Internal Comms are losening their grip on the information that they are managing. Sure, there is still a need for the "official corporate view" - a company is not a democratic institution, and the views of the senior management are final (almost), and still need to be communicated. However, if these views are to be respected, there has to be an open conversation and weighing of the evidence/views of others (employees, ciustomers and shareholders) before any decision is made. Again, this is where the intranet helps. Some of our IC clients definitely get this evolution in roles, others are slightly behind, but catching up.

I'd be interested in hearing if any Internal Comms people out there feel that there is a change afoot, or am I just imagining it?

Has Google won the SAAS prize?

There's an article in the Economist this week that paints a convincing picture of outsourcing your email (and Office applications) to Google. The software as a service trend is no longer on the fringe, and with Googles agressive aquisitions they've got to be a real threat not just to Microsoft, but to anyone who is building software as a packaged product.

Do any of you have experience of GMail, salesforce.com or another SAAS, and if so how did it compare to your desktop experience?

User generated content

Peter Coffee at eWeek has some interesting thoughts on UGC. I particularly love the description of the schoolkid entering a competition to design a web page for his class: "It's blank," his sister observes. "Well, duh," he replies. "This is the era of Web 2.0. Users get to generate their own content. Let's say you want to know what the latest news is. All you have to do is type it out in this box that says 'News' and then you can read it."

Google - spreadsheet surprise

This should come as no surprise to anyone who's been following Google - they've created an online spreadsheet to complete their collection of Gmail, Writely and Google Calendar.

It will be interesting to see how popular it becomes, especially given the sweeping UI changes due with Office 2007.

Old school animated giffs

There's an interesting article on clickz about an AKQA designed advert for MSN Messenger. The ad that they've created is a single animated gif, with some very funky background music. Interesting to see that a technology that was innovative 10 years ago is making a comeback.

Windows Live slowly starts to make sense

If you've been as confused as I have about what Microsoft is trying to do with it's Live products, there are some interesting pointers in Redmondmag. The exciting thing is that MS really are creating a developer platform for the Live services. There's an example of this on Channel 9 - where they show some examples of applications built on the MSN Messenger API. During the interview they make reference to another interesting site - worlds best apps.

Interesting stuff - even if it isn't fully baked yet.

Net Promoter and Blogs

I've been thinking a bit more about the Guardian's Amazon Article. In particular I'm wondering how this links in with the work that we've been doing around the Net Promoter metric. The Net Promoter metric is based on a single question can (supposedly) tell you everything you need to know about your customers - " would you recommend us to a colleague". The idea is that word of mouth marketing can make or break a company - even in a B2B environment. It's not necesarily the word of mouth marketing that is causing the success, but it definitely acts as a barometer for the level of customer focus.

However, if blogging becomes as all pervasive as some think then it will definitely be the word of mouth marketing that is causing the success or, as Scoble points out, if your company isn't blogging then it will be seen with a level of suspicion.

Of course, it's still not the blogging that makes a company client focused, it's what the you do with the information that you learn - just the same with Net Promoter.