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How the BBC uses blogs and wikis

Published by Glen on Thursday 31-May-2007

I was very interested in how similar the BBC usage of social software tools maps to the feature-set of Lotus Connections. In the case of the BBC, they were ahead of the curve and so they “rolled there own”.

Euan Semple talked about his experiences implementing wikis and social software at the BBC. The forum is now used by 18,500 of 23,000 employees … 89 bloggers collaborated to produce a corporate blogging policy. There are now around 3,000 wikis in use in a variety of scenarios from creating corporate policy to developing programmes. They have a social networking tool to bring together like minded individuals. Euan favours separate tools, loosely joined rather than trying to tackle the problem with one corporate combined approach. Source: Euan Semple speaking at the London Wiki Wednesday (21-Feb-2007)

One obvious message from how the BBC leveraged the various aspects of social software is:

  1. adopt one feature at a time; make it effective for your organization; get people using it
  2. determine what problem you are trying to solve; determine what tool you will use; document a single way to use the tool; educate (turns out I interjected my own opinion on this one. Thanks Euan for correcting me.)
  3. don’t go overboard - blogs, wikis, etc. are not the solution to all problems; proper use of the tools is key (reflects back to #2)

Related tangests ...   An open source social software offering   ... another blog time waister (but fun all the same)   Twitter is dead - at least for now for me

Posted in BBC, Blogs, Content Management, Lotus Connections, Social Software, Wikis |

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3 Responses to “How the BBC uses blogs and wikis”

  1. Euan Says:
    June 8th, 2007 at 14:53

    Actually it’s the opposite on your second point I am afraid! We had no preconceptions of what people should use the tools for - I didn’t care so long as they used them. Thanks for picking up on the story though.

    Cheers

    Euan

  2. Glen Says:
    June 8th, 2007 at 15:45

    sorry about that Euan - I did not mean to place words in your mouth. I corrected the post.

    With that said, I do feel there is great benefit when companies “determine what problem they are trying to solve; determine what tool they will use; document a single way to use the tool; educate”. I have seen many instances where a single tool is assumed to solve all the world’s problems and it gets twisted around in an attempt to make it work ubiquitously.

  3. Euan Says:
    June 11th, 2007 at 15:15

    The trick is in not “making it work”