2gether08: going outside to reach back inside the .org

It's my third day in my new job as a Social Media Consultant at Headshift and already I find myself giving a presentation at a conference, 2gether08. The panel I'm on, Inside Out - How Social Technologies are Influencing Work, is being moderated by Lloyd Davis. He's written a great post about his personal experiences of moving from working for an organisation to working for himself - and finding that, although he works from home, he is far from alone because social media tools allow him to socialise, learn, share and collaborate.

Here's the notes for my contribution. They're very rough. I don't plan to read them but, instead, will simply try to chat informally around the points outlined below:

I've just left the BBC - days ago - after over six years.

One observation I have from my time at the BBC is that, despite the best efforts of various stakeholders and the availability of wiki's, blogs, discussion forums, training materials, etc., quite a lot of my colleagues, myself included, almost completely ignored the intranet unless we had expenses to do. That's not to say people didn't use it, only that it reached some people, but not others.

In my final year at the BBC, I organised for a team of consultants from Headshift (where I now work) to conduct interviews with a range of high level BBC people, including various Heads of Service, Senior Editors, and a couple of directors. Similarly, I organised access to a similar set of people for a team of academic researchers from the University of Cardiff; got many of them to attend a blogging workshop; and managed to help quite a few students get interviews with people working at the BBC. Some of this was done by email although, in many instances, I found my initial attempts at using email to contact these people were being filtered out by "helpful" team assistants and PAs.

So I switched tack and went outside, using facebook and, to a lesser extent, flickr and twitter, to get people involved. Just as I'd been using my external blog to circulate ideas and have conversations with BBC people for years.

Somehow, because communication taking place outside the firewall cuts across both work and personal, I was able to slice through layers of beauracracy.

When Facebook opened up to users outside academic instituations, BBC staff were amongst the most enthusiastic adopters. Perhaps because much of the workforce is online all day and within Facebook's target audience. But it might also be because the workplace environment, and internal systems, aren't sufficient for helping staff socialise and - indeed - work more efficiently.

I've kept track of, learned about, and communicated with greater ease with BBC colleagues - now my ex-colleagues - using social media tools outside the organisation than I have using the tools provided by the organisation.

One useful measure of the usefulness of any social media tool is whether it gets you a free coffee or a beer. In my personal experience, participating outside the firewall during my time at the BBC brought far greater rewards than participating inside - not just because I was able to benefit from conversations and ideas shared by people outside the organisation, but because I was actually able to reach far more people INSIDE the BBC by blogging, tweeting, facebooking, flickring and all the other stuff I was doing on the internet, not the intranet. And I've landed quite a few free coffees and beers...

So what will the organisation look like in ten years? Well, if I was trying to bring people working in an organisation together online, I'd use a mix of tools - I'd have discussions, blogs, wiki's or whatever is appropriate behind the firewall but, in the same space, I'd also aggregate and editorialise the activities of staff that take place outside the firewall. Pull it together. Give people who like to participate behind the firewall a reason to explore and engage with those who only participate outside, and give those outside a reason to come in and see what's there. What's both exciting and potentially worrysome about this is the way boundaries between public and private, personal and work will be blurred.