Welcome to the Melcrum Social Media Newsletter

One of the popular reasons for looking at a corporate blog is to engage in two-way dialogue with employees, customers or both. But why should you limit such an idea to just a corporate blog?

At World Bank, an organization with 10,000 employees in 180 countries, the internal communication team have recently implemented a corporate blogging program with comments allowed. But, using their in-house designed software, they’ve also gone one step further and added a comment feature on many more pages of the intranet, including certain articles.

“We’re still at the early stage of our blogging program,” said Michele Egan of the World Bank’s corporate communication team. “But we felt adding the ability to comment on some of the published articles in addition to the blogs would elicit more conversation and get people into the habit of leaving comments.”

In response to the blogs and comments feature on articles, page views have increased from a ratio of 1:1 to multiple views per visit and the number of comments left per article has been anything up to 70 so far. “The blogs and articles with comments enabled have become very well-trafficked pages.”

Have there been any problems? “We allow anonymous comments and there’s no moderation to speak of,” continues Michele Egan.  “With a brief set of guidelines in place, in the two months we’ve been running this program I’ve only had to remove one comment. It wasn’t offensive, more off-topic, and the reasons for removing it were explained in a subsequent comment. We wanted to be completely transparent and after 18 months of pursing this project, it’s hugely gratifying to see people acting responsibly.”

Best wishes,

Alex Manchester,
Editor
alex.manchester@melcrum.com

Melcrum's social media survey results
New research shows that social media is proving a big hit for global corporations, but risks remain.

The majority of respondents to Melcrum's survey on social media usage (55%) were already using blogs or planning to start in the next 12 months, but even more popular was online video (63%) through video sharing services like You Tube. Also increasingly popular were podcasts (43%), RSS/webfeeds (51%) and social networking sites. However, risks still remain for corporations using social media tools.

Read the full press release here

Further FREE reading from Melcrum:

• Social Media usage on the rise, but risks remain
  
  
• Day 1: Social Media Forum
  
  
• Should you be worried about "disintermediation?"