Two great weekly Twitter chats on social media and internal communications: #icchat and #behindthefirewall

Two Twitter chats—a scheduled hour on Twitter using a specific hashtag usually moderated or kicked off with a question—have sprung up in recent weeks on social media and internal communication. If you have an interest and/or expertise on this topic, I think you can contribute and learn in both of these chats:

#icchat: Started by Susan Cellura (@susancellura), this chat runs every Wednesday at 12 noon CST/1 pm EST. The 7/8/09 chat, for instance, discussed the role of a communicator as an internal community manager. More info on this series on Susan’s blog. Susan also often recaps the discussion on her blog, such as last week’s post on communicators as community managers.

#behindthefirewall: Started by Arik Hanson (@arikhanson) and Rick Mahn (@rickmahn), this chat also covers social media inside the company and how it relates to communications. Behind the Firewall now occurs on Thursdays at 8 p.m. CST. I’m trying to confirm this change and will update this post when I find out. Details and history on Arik’s blog.

One caveat on #behindthefirewall: Twitter doesn’t like hashtags longer than 15 characters, but if you search on “behindthefirewall” without the #, it works fine.

One tool I’ve found useful for chats is Tweetgrid. Here’s a sample page that I’ve set up for myself.. I’ve had better luck with the Tweetgrid site versus Tweetdeck, which is my usual Twitter client of choice.

I hope to see you join the discussion!

UPDATE: #behindthefirewall is confirmed on Thursdays at 8 p.m. CST.

How I ended up at the IABC world conference

I wrote the following post on my intranet blog, where I titled it, “How social media can supercharge your professional development.” I got some really great feedback from colleagues, so I thought it would be worth sharing here:

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So, everybody’s telling you that you need to get active on LinkedIn, jump into Twitter, and write a blog. Yeah right, when do I have time to do that?

I can’t answer that question, but I can illustrate what it can do for you.

Starting early this year, I decided that I wanted to get more serious about my personal development as a communications professional and I would start building out a more consistent presence online by:

• Writing a personal blog about my work [you're here!]
• Consistently reading, commenting, and cross-linking my favorite intranet- and communications-related blogs
• Beefing up my presence on LinkedIn by participating in groups
• Continuing to build my mini-community on Twitter
• Joining a professional association

So far, I’ve done 4 of 5 well; my blog has mostly languished.

Through this work, I’ve exploded my online network and I’ve created (and taken advantage of) opportunities that simply would not have otherwise happened.

A quick example: last week, I spoke on two panels at the world conference for International Association of Business Communicators (IABC). Other speakers included the COO/soon-to-be-CEO of Best Buy, several well-known authors, and the VP of all things communication at Cisco. And me.

If it weren’t for my participation in those online forums, none of it would have happened. Here’s how things went:

• March: I join IABC and the associated LinkedIn group
• Late April: An IABC member, Debbie Moore, posts a question in LinkedIn asking, What are you doing with social media on the intranet for communications? “Ha, what are we not doing?” I answered.
• Early May: Debbie asks if I want to be on a panel about social media for internal communications at the world conference in San Francisco in June. Sure, sounds like fun!
• Friday, June 5: I arrive in San Francisco, and I get a tweet from Steve Crescenzo, an industry legend: Jeremy, do you want to be on my expert panel on employee communication? Sure, sounds like fun!
• Sunday, Monday: Attend conference sessions, attend mixers, and meet dozens and dozens of brilliant folk, via Twitter and face-to-face.
• Tuesday: Speak on the early panel with Steve, and then the main, big panel that I was originally invited for. 200 people show up! What a rush.
• Wednesday: Finish up the conference, head home, and start saving all these new connections on LinkedIn and Twitter. What a flood!

I realize that this is a bit of an unusual case. But you can’t connect if you don’t show up.

At first, I took the opportunity to speak on the panel for granted. I had no idea what I was getting into, but I soon found out that it’s an honor and privilege to do so. I learned a ton during the conference, but better yet, I created an invaluable number of new connections. And it all started with just a little time online.

This is just the tip of the iceberg for me. I can say that my participation in blogs and forums internally got me my current job. But that’s another story.

Have you made similar, never-before-so-easy, life-changing connections via social media?

P.S. You can catch me, Chuck Gose, Paul Barton, and Dave Meyer on Steve’s employee communications panel on Paula Cassin’s Cut Through Communications blog. Thanks Paula!

UPDATE: I just realized I owe a HUGE thank you to Debbie Moore, who found me on LinkedIn and invited me onto the panel. What a priceless experience to participate with Debbie and Karen Horn in a great discussion.

My schedule for the 2009 IABC World Conference

I’m in San Francisco for the next couple days attending the annual conference of the International Association of Business Communicators. Roughly 1,000 communicators from around the globe are converging to share best practices for communications on both sides of the firewall.

It’s been quite a rush already. I’m speaking on a panel Tuesday afternoon to talk about social computing for internal communication. Besides that, I’m going to cram in as much knowledge as I can.

My fellow communicator Linda Johannesson set the good example of posting her schedule on her blog, so I thought I’d follow suit. At the worst, it’ll serve as a handy reference for myself.

Sunday

• 1 p.m. – 2:15: Strategic communication planning and management: Fundamentals for success with Les Potter
• 2:30 – 3:45: The art of the high stakes presentation: A crash course on personal impact with Jim Endicott (geez, these are tough to choose, so many good sessions right off the bat!)
• 4 – 5:30: Leadership and innovation in a changing global business landscape with Ernest Gundling (4-5) and/or Tim Tam Tweetup with Linda and others (4:30-5:30)
• 5:20 – 6:30: Opening General Session and Keynote Address with Blair Christie from Cisco
• 7:30 – 10:00: Welcome Reception

Monday

• 8 a.m. – 9: Idea Jam on Employee Communication (we use jams pretty frequently internally; nice way to harvest a huge number of ideas or direct feedback and an easy, time-boxed way for leaders to dip their toes in social computing)
• 9:15 – 10:15: General Session with IABC’s 2009 EXCEL Award Winner with Best Buy President, COO, and soon-to-be CEO Brian Dunn
• 11:15 – 12:30 p.m.: Stop the world, I want to communicate, a panel
• 2 – 4:30: Measuring the success of your communication with Angela Sinickas
• 5:30 – 7: Mixer with regional communicators

Tuesday

• 8:15 a.m. – 9:15: Expert panel on Employee Communication: Looks like I’ll be on this panel, led by Steve Crescenzo and with Paul Barton, Chuck Gose, …. Whatever happens, this will be fun.
• 9:30 – 10:30: Sustainable leadership with Robert Swan
• 11:15 – 12:30 p.m.: The best get better: How IBM uses global research
• 2 – 3:15: MY PANEL! Web 2.0 and internal communication: A worldview of best practices, led by Debbie Moore who will grill Karen Horn and yours truly. Sure to be the most riveting discussion of the entire event.
• 3:30 – 4:45: All-Star Sessions. This is a three way coin toss, but I’m leaning towards Steve Crescenzo on Executive communication 2.0: Helping today’s leaders communicate with today’s employees
• 5:30 – 6:45: Networking reception
• 7:45: Dine-around at Foreign Cinema

Wednesday

• 8:30 a.m. – 9:45: All-star Sessions. Another toss up, led by Communicating to collaborate with Kare Anderson
• 10 – 11: Closing session, Finding your passion changes everything with Sir Ken Robinson
• Rest of day: hitch my way back to San Jose, hopefully with enough time to visit the Mother Ship before hopping back to Hillsboro

Needless to say, I’m going to learn a lot this week.

I’m going with “social computing”

Russel recently asked, “What should we call ‘Intranet Social Media’?”

The commenters came to no conclusion. I don’t have the answer.

For now on, however, I’m going with Social Computing. Why? It’s what our IT group is calling it (Laurie, who wrote that post, is the program manager for social computing tools in IT.)

Simple as that. I don’t know why they decided to use it, but it works for me. I like the fact that it’s open ended; enterprise 2.0, for instance, suggests you know what the end looks like.

So, I won’t talk about our “intranet social media plan,” or driving enterprise 2.0 as a communicator. I won’t talk about a socialist revolution. I’ll stick with social computing, and how I use it as a communicator, to reach employees worldwide.

Building an intranet social media usage plan for communications

My colleague Nisha and I are building what we’re calling a Social Media Usage Plan for our global employee communications department. The plan has three main goals:

• Define and drive usage of social computing tools by our department as both a communications channel and a way to better collaborate within our organization
• Drive employee adoption and appropriate use of social tools to better collaborate, share, and discover colleagues and information
• Influence senior leaders on the value of social tools for their personal communications plans and to strengthen their organizations

To get there, we’ve started to define where we are now, and where we want to go.

The current state

I don’t think we’re bleeding edge in the adoption of social tools, but we’re not too shabby. Here’s what we have inside the firewall today, and we use each tool in communications:

• Blogs: Any employee can sign up and start their own blog, and we have several “group” blogs, used by programs and projects for status updates, etc. I think we have roughly 2000 active blogs. For communications, we have a blog that we use to capture comments for global intranet news stories. We also occasionally feature an employee blog on our main intranet site, from the CEO down to individual contributors.
• Forums: The blog site also contains forums, which are more active, and far more diverse than the blogs. Forums range from hobbies (cycling, gaming), to teams and organizations, to temporary campaigns. We use forums primarily for occasional web jams. Several organizations have conducted 2-3 day jams over the last couple years, with rich discussion and very positive results.
• Wikis: We have a central, anyone-can-edit wiki called Intelpedia, that is used pretty widely. It started as a carpet server project (as did blogs), and was eventually crowned “official” by IT. There are also several private, departmental wikis spread across the company. We use Intelpedia to capture the living information we write in news articles, and we frequently link to reference material there from within our stories.
• RSS: Besides the syndication offerings of the three aforementioned tools, RSS is spotty. We offer RSS of our news articles, and several departmental newsletters do, too. For better or worse, all of these also offer email. We have an IT-approved RSS reader, but it’s not automatically installed on all machines. In my experience so far, consumption of RSS is limited to those with at least a bit of IT geekiness.
• Microsharing, MOSS, IM, Flickr, Facebook…: A handful of other tools, with varying levels of social capabilities, exist across the company. A few biz groups have custom tools, we have a microsharing proof of concept underway, we have an employee group on Flickr, and we have quite a bit of folks on Facebook. The one of these we feature in our communications is an occasional top 5 employee Flickr photos story as a “Friday fun” kind of feature.

How can we more explicitly use social computing tools as a communications organization to connect with employees, fosters connections between employees, and inspire better cross-group innovation? That’s what we’re working to do.

In my next post, I’ll talk about what’s coming on the social computing roadmap, and how we can improve use of social tools by communications as a channel and as a collaboration tool.

Big press events: Do employees care?

I hope so! I’m asking this question as I head to the Consumer Electronics Show (CES) first thing in the morning Thursday.

Overall, I think there’s value in attending and getting our company’s story at events like this. It’s no guarantee that external press is going to take that angle (unless you are Google, Apple, or Microsoft). Plus, it’s exciting to see what Intel customers do with the silicon innovation that we make. It builds employee pride to see the end result of years of hard work playing out in the marketplace.

I’ve never been to CES, but I want to try something different than our news team has done before. I’m going to help produce, star in, and edit a quick video tour of Intel’s booth, highlighting what’s new from the employee’s perspective. The main things that I’ll be watching for are:

• Our new foray into technology for TV
• The new touchscreen classmate PC
• New personal-area-network technology called My Wi-Fi for Centrino 2
• The Small Things Challenge

What do you think? Do big trade shows and press events matter to employees?

More about me and what I do

As I wrote on my about page, I work in employee communications at Intel. My team is called Circuit News; we write global news stories for the central intranet site at Intel, which is called Circuit. (A quick search reveals that a few folks have improperly re-hosted some old articles—note the dropped-e logo—such as this one and that one.)

Our team sits within the employee communications department, which also includes benefits, rewards, manager, and executive communication; video production; events management; and several business group-specific communications. The department then rolls directly into HR.

I tell people that I’m sort of an internal reporter, but I like to do more than that. I’m a problem solver at heart (I was a software developer for 8 years before this job), and I have a thirst for learning that continually drives me to new opportunities. Since I’m responsible for global content, I get to play a part in tons of events and initiatives inside the company, so that helps keep work fresh for me.

I’m the main social media guru, if such a thing exists, on our team. I’ve been an active internal blogger since our blogs were run on a carpet server in a colleague’s cubicle back in 2003. I’ve also been a prominent user and advocate of our main wiki, Intelpedia, which was also started a carpet-server side project (by Josh Bancroft and a few others).

Why blog now? It’s now been just over a year since I moved from IT database engineering to corporate communications. It’s been a wild ride and I’m finally feeling like I have some traction—and things to share. Plus, there aren’t enough of us out here and I’d like to see more open sharing of what’s happening inside companies.

What to write about? Simply put, I want to write about my job. How we use blogs, to how and what we write, to social tools coming soon, to whatever else crosses my path.

Nice to meet you, too!