I spent yesteday at the Blogs and Social Media Forum. Turned out to be an interesting day. This was an event about blogging that had attracted a large audience of people from business who were clearly taking the whole thing seriously. Hmm, I thought to myself, this is different… less revolutionary, maybe blogging in the UK has crossed a threshold of credibility. Or as Ray Jordan of Johnson & Johnson put it, it’s gone from Cult to Culture.
Ray’s speech was funny and interesting, as he showed us what it’s like to try to start a blog in a large corporate. J&J has created a system for sanctioning websites that is awesome in its complexity. Ray was refreshingly honest about the challenges he faces trying to introuduce even the most inoffensive blog to the corporate culture.
Lee Bryant from Headshift and Ruth Ward from Allen & Overy gave an impressive case study showing how they were using internal blogs with great success inside a law firm.
Lloyd Davis ran a mini-Open Space late morning, and I lent a hand. Lloyd managed to strip the Open Space process to its bare essentials as we only had about an hour for the whole thing. No time to run through all the principles, timetabling and what-have-you that you’d do for a full OS event. And it worked… remarkably well. Lots of good conversations, on subjects that cleary engaged the audience and would not otherwise have made it onto the agenda. Well done Lloyd.
(And I had a much better time than Suw Charman did at the Beeb’s WeMedia shindig the other day…)
