Casey’s Blog

Mostly Internal Communications & Food

Social Capital & Knowledge Exchange: Blogging Inside the Enterprise

You may think I’ve been unusually quiet recently, but I’ve been diverting my energies into other channels, including a guest spot at Simply Communicate a site that collates advice, toolkits and templates covering every aspect of internal communication inside organisations.

Here is a taster:

Internal blogging can give us:

  • The ability to get to know our colleagues as people and individuals encouraging give and take.
  • An easier way of building networks of like-minded or useful people.
  • An easy way to find out what colleagues are working on (and joining the dots with our own work).
  • An easier way of finding out what people extracurricular interests and skills are (and harnessing them).
  • The ability to scan the internal environment, take a reading of the organisation’s mood, and spot and pre-empt issues.
  • An easy way to get a rounded sounding on ideas and test out theories or approaches – both by yourself by beginning to articulate ideas for the first time, and with others as a community of interest which helps to test and build the idea.

Read the full article.

Filed under: Blogging, Blogging About Blogs, Engagement, Higher Education, Internal Communications, Internet, Warwick , ,

Twitter: is it too limited?

This is a bookmark to Mat Mannion’s post:

Twitter is not fit for (my) purpose(s)

following this twitter conversation (as best as I can recreate it):

@mathewjm Having this sort of interaction 140 characters at a time is sub-optimal, for example!!!
@mathewjm Or is it that people see a service and try and use it for something slightly different, and that’s when it doesn’t work?
@caseyleaver Which is what separating work and play would prevent, of course. The problem is getting people to start when they don’t get it.
@mathewjm & @steverumsby That’s what I mean. Ideally colleagues could get to know each other as rounded people and :. work better together.
@steverumsby When I’m not so lazy :) Mainly, it needs tags but nobody can be arsed (and multi-accounts is NOT the answer)
@steverumsby Whether I am here or not doesn’t change the fact that Twitter is fundamentally flawed
@mathewjm I’m not sure. I’d love to feature microblogging as part of a staff profile/directory effort. “Casey is (working on)…”
@steverumsby I know that – but lots of people don’t. Plus I am geekily committed to what I do for a living.
@caseyleaver Unfortunately there’s no way around it, think Twitter will die off when people realise they don’t care what celebs are doing
Worrying about how to use social media when people want to distinguish between work and play. Maybe Yammer is the answer?

Filed under: Blogging, Engagement, Internal Communications, Internet, Social Media, Web Geekery

Blogging Mojo

My blogging mojo has returned.  I lost it for quite a while there – but the important thing to remember is, it’s just like a diet, if you fall off the wagon, don’t give up altogether just start again….

A lot of colleagues used to ask me how I found the time to blog – and I always used to reply that it takes no longer than writing an email.

But actually, I’ve found the catch, the actual act of writing takes no longer than writing an email, but if you haven’t found the time for personal reflection then you have to factor that it – and that really is timeconsuming!

Firstly, I don’t make time for reflection when I’m stressed and secondly some topics of reflection are not suitable blog material.

Well, I have two new blog entry stumps to work on:

  1. Laura Dewis has asked me to film a vblog entry entitled “What I’ve learnt from You Tube.”
  2. I took part in a workshop on Tuesday about facilitation
    1. What is it?  How can it help the OU?  Should we train managers or offer a crack team for on-demand support?

More on these, and more in general later….

Filed under: Blogging, Blogging About Blogs, Higher Education, Internal Communications, Web Geekery, Work

The Spirit of Web 2.0

Writing about http://www.ucisa.ac.uk/groups/tlig/comms/feb08/prog.htm

Banging my head against a brick wall

I went to rather a depressing conference last Wednesday.  And it left me feeling like this <=

To cut a long story short I had not chosen wisely.  Whilst the topic seemed relevant and appropriate the audience at which it was pitched did not really include me.

The other attendees and the presenters were almost exclusively members of IT departments in universities.  They were concerned about things like being able to ‘market’ themselves to the rest of the institution and whether or not they should be allowed to use an internally-facing sub-brand.  They were also interested in proving value to customers and management stakeholders and setting up good basic internal communications.

This was interesting up to a point – since arriving at my current institution I’ve noticed a queue of people coming to me for internal ‘marketing’ advice.  They of course mean, and need, nothing of the sort – but it takes a while to persuade them of that.

But, while I was sat with half an ear on the presenters, and partly to stop myself picking a fight with an obnoxious chap sat in front (who, amongst other things, turned round to tell my colleague that the sound of his typing was irritating – hello?!  new technology conference!), I made a few notes about what I’d hoped the conference would be.

  1. What do technologists need to know about communications?
  2. What should communicators learn about technologies?
  3. Where does editorial responsibility/content ownership lie?
  4. Can communication be managed within interactive (web 2.0) channels?  If so, how?  In a top-down way or in a self-governing way?
  5. How do Facebook/Bebo/blogs/social bookmarking fit into a communications mix?  (The peer-to-peer benefits are clear, the organisation to member/customer dynamic is less clear…)

Prentiss McCabeMalcolm TuckerBasically, what I need to work out, and what I’d hoped to have the opportunity to discuss, is what do I do with the following list of tools?  Is there a clever way of piggybacking on them or using them that I am missing?  How on earth does crisis management work in these fora?  In fact how do you manage communications through them without looking like you are donning your Nazi jackboots and behaving in a completely inappropriate way?

(Of course, I do realise that most of the point of web 2.0 is the socialist, egalitarian, utilitarian vibe and that by seeking to manage things or use these tools I am proving myself to be a potential member of Prentiss McCabe or worse still Malcom Tucker…)

  • Blogs
  • Facebook/Bebo/MySpace
  • YouTube/ Google Video
  • Flash Meetings
  • Instant Messenging
  • Social bookmarking
  • Flickr
  • E-portfolios
  • VLEs/Moodle
  • Podcasts/ Videocasts
  • Digital mapping/ Mind Mapping etc.
  • Texts/ SMS
  • SecondLife
  • Wikis
  • Web forums
  • Email – are we really using it well enough?
  • PDA/ Blackberry – web for phones?  Still necessary now we have the iPhone?
  • Tiny URLS/ go redirects
  • RSS Feeds & Readers

I appreciate that some of these are in no way web 2.0 – but I thought I’d throw the lot into the mix.

So, that’s what’s bothering me at the moment.  How are you?

Filed under: Blogging, Blogging About Blogs, Branding, Conferences, Higher Education, IT, ITS, Internal Communications, Media, PR, Web Geekery

Graduate Skills Programme – Feedback

Follow-up to Web Publishing for Postgraduates – Downloads from Casey’s Blog

Feeling very proud of myself. I led my usual session on the Graduate
Skills Programme three day intensive course on Monday and the feedback
was quite good.

This course was for first year PhD students.

Writing for the Public Feedback

5 is very useful, 1 is not useful
(22 out of 24 students completed feedback forms)

5 (very useful) – 6 students
4 - 10 students
3 - 6 students
2 - 1 student
1 (not useful) - 0 students

Read the rest of this entry »

Filed under: Blogging, Internal Communications, PR

Web Publishing for Postgraduates – Downloads

Follow-up to Communicating Online from Casey’s Blog

Some of the handouts from Saturday’s Graduate School Programme session on Web Publishing for Postgraduates

Web Publishing for Postgraduates

Design Basics

Writing Process

More to follow…

Read the rest of this entry »

Filed under: Blogging, Internal Communications, PR

Cash Value

Writing about web page http://www.tnl.net/blog/entry/Doing_the_numbers_on_the_AOL-WeblogsInc_deal


My blog is worth $5,645.40.
How much is your blog worth?

I’d be lying if I said that I fully followed the logic and calculations…

But out of idle curiosity I thought I’d check how much the whole Warwick Blogs system is worth according to this theory:

$143,393.16.

that’s:

£80,962

From what I understand of the theory though this presupposes a commercial application.

Read the rest of this entry »

Filed under: About, Blogging, Blogs

Things I've bookmarked