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Welcome to Melcrum's Social Media Newsletter.
In 2007 there were terabytes of coverage and discussion around social network sites such as Facebook and MySpace – especially their place in business.
When you look at their utility, however, these social networking sites aren’t all that different from something your organization probably has already – the staff directory (also often called a Yellow Pages).
It’s safe to say in the coming incarnations of staff directories we’ll start to see features that bear more than a passing resemblance to the Facebooks of the world, including “friends in common” notifications, status updates and feeds, tags, degrees of separation, membership of networks, plug-in applications and a whole lot more besides.
The future is now
Think this is science fiction? For some organizations this isn’t the future, it’s the now. For example, in the new Melcrum report How to communicate with a global workforce, Ethan McCarty, editor-in-chief of IBM’s intranet, describes the organization’s staff directory called “BluePages”.
BluePages lists around 365,000 full- and part-time employees and is accessed six million times a day by IBMers (that’s an average of 16 requests per day, per IBM employee).
The system lists basic information about an employee, from their HR records – job title, phone number, location and e-mail – to their function’s location within the organizational structure.
Adding personality to the details
But, along with the basics, BluePages has further functionality. It can list more detailed information about employees – their interests, teams and specializations, for example. And, when an employee clicks on the name of a colleague, the options are there to send an instant message, or view the tags that the person has created. “In the new version of BluePages, other people can tag you and you can tag yourself,” says McCarty. “This is all about expertise location. Whenever anybody’s name is mentioned in a piece of content – at the bottom of a blog entry, or whenever – if you mouse over it, it will pull in their ‘BlueCard’ – with their picture, e-mail address and so on.”
Making it about the user
IBM also has an alternate version of BluePages running.
Called “Fringe” it’s a “social network aggregator”, which pulls in all kinds of information from blog post feeds and regular RSS feeds, social networks joined, wikis recently involved with and more. The system ties in all the user-generated information that surrounds the individual. “If you think of the phases of the intranet and even internet communication, first it’s about access to information, then it’s about transacting with it – like e-business – and now it’s more about the people,” adds McCarty.
Best regards,
Alex Manchester
Editor
alex.manchester@melcrum.com
P.S. Read more on IBM’s BluePages in the new Melcrum research report, How to communicate with a global workforce.
How to deliver a high-performing intranet Transforming your intranet is the most authoritative research report yet on how to turn your organization's intranet into the time-saving, value-creating tool it was always meant to be. You'll find out how to take your intranet to the next level by integrating the latest strategies, technologies and metrics, ensuring people can get to the right information when they want it and, ultimately, delivering business value. |
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About
Melcrum
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