It’s captured a lot of imaginations and got off to a cracking start. When I signed up last week, there were about 250 members. Today, that number is over 500.

Also last week, London-based research and training firm Melcrum announced The Communicators’ Network, described as a business-grade professional networking community, that will be launching in June:

[…] It’s already in advanced stages of development, but we’re ironing out the kinks behind closed doors for now. We have been quietly researching what communicators from around the world want and are building something a little bit different. Not only does The Communicators’ Network have all the social networking functionality you’d expect, namely groups, blogs, photo uploads, custom RSS feeds and discussion forums, it also has some really interesting ratings and review features for user-generated content.

[…] We are not looking to replace existing communities we are looking to improve and enhance them and add some value through bolt-on features such as directory of knowledge and resources to help save time and facilitate better business decisions. The site should help bring Melcrum’s globally dispersed customer-base of more than 25,000 communication practitioners a little bit closer together.

Melcrum’s offering will also be free to join.

Ragan clearly has first-mover advantage, though, and CEO Mark Ragan has ambitious plans for MyRagan.com:

[…] The bigger news is that MyRagan.com is only a tiny part of a much bigger and NEW communication site we’re unveiling around the world on Sept. 1. It will be called Ragan.com, and it will include foreign correspondents, video news, both live and pre-taped, audio voice-posts on blogs, more blogs from experts around the globe, a 30,000-article database, a new consulting company and research institute, a new polling technology that drives dialogue between respondents, live video stand ups from London, Sydney, South Africa…..and much more. MyRagan will be linked to every story so that communicators can jump back forth between the journalist-driven piece and the chat in a MyRagan forum.

That sounds like a compelling offering.

Indeed, ‘compelling’ is the key word. With two of the communication profession’s most powerful and influential commercial players launching services that will compete for communicators’ attention, it’s hard to see right now whether there will be a market for two such services without some clear differentiation between them.

Time will tell.

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The study also found that over 40 percent of companies are using podcasts and social networks.

When it comes to blogging, a lot of firms say they plan to start a blog, while those that have existing blogs are used mainly for internal communications, as few companies have public blogs.

Socialtext tracks public blogging by Fortune 500 companies and Global 1000 firms. The ongoing study found that 8 percent of the Fortune 500 corporations had public blogs, while just 4 percent of the Global 1000 do.

Fortune 500 companies that publicly blog have actually doubled since April 2006 but does not indicate there has been strong growth in public blogging. While many firms use Web 2.0 for internal communications, most are reluctant to put company details in plain view.

Nearly half of the respondents in the Melcrum study said that employees discussing their firm online was a threat to the corporation’s reputation. Another 70 percent said they had no policies or guidelines for blogging or other social media tools, revealing that they were not prepared for public communications.

Communications professionals believe that social media is a good way to communicate internally and that it helps with employee engagement and internal collaboration.

Companies thinking about opening up dialogue with senior executives need to consider who they are willing to have participate in the conversation.

A note I received today from MD Robin Crumby said:

[…] We’ve so far sent the survey to over 20,000 subscribers to Melcrum’s e-newsletters for corporate and employee communicators and got over 1200 responses in 48 hours. This is likely to be the largest global survey of its kind and we’re keen to share the findings with your blog readers as soon as they’re complete.

Plus, once your readers have completed the 5 minute survey they can download a free Melcrum report titled: The Quick-Start Guide to Social Media for Internal Communicators.

The link to complete the survey is:
http://www.surveymonkey.com/s.asp?A=177956797E53247

If you’re a communicator, why not add your voice?

On a point of disclosure, the report Robin mentions includes contributions from me. It’s a good report running at 23 pages and worth having. Don’t let my disclosure influence your own view in any way, though

While you’re at Melcrum, take a look at The Melcrum Blog, a collaborative blog written by a group of Melcrum staffers with “thoughts and revelations on internal communication and beyond.” Worth subscribing to.

Ok, enough Melcrum plugs. No, wait, one more -

• Related (sort of): I’m participating in an upcoming conference organized by Melcrum – The Social Media Forum for Internal Communicators which takes place in London on March 21-22. I’m speaking on “Join the conversation: How to create and launch a social media strategy for your organisation.” You can register online.

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I’m chairing ALIs corporate blogging and podcasting conference, which started Wednesday morning and ends this afternoon. The schedule conflicted with the schedule for recording For Immediate Release, especially given the eight-hour difference between the Bay Area and the UK, where Neville lives and works. So I set up my portable recording rig in the hallway outside the conference meeting room and recorded the podcast from there.

Neville had just returned from a Melcrum conference in London, so we hadn’t had our usual chat about the topics we’d discuss. During our news section, Neville referenced a post on the future of podcasting in investor relations on the blog IR Web Report. In the post, Dominic Jones wrote about the success IBM had experienced with its IR-produced podcast, “IBM and the Future Of...” Then, Jones wrote (and Neville cited): “Despite this apparent success, IBM has not produced a new podcast in the “Future of series” since April. If the podcasts were such a hit, why stop producing them?”

As Neville read that passage, I thought to myself, “Christopher Barger just presented at the conference.” Barger is IBM’s unofficial blogger-in-chief and one of the hosts of “The Future Of…” So I dashed into the meeting room and asked Christopher if he’d be willing to be on the show and answer that question. He agreed, and you can here the result on yesterday’s show. Sometimes things just work out.

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Shel Holtz is principal of Holtz Communication + Technology which focuses on helping organizations apply online communication capabilities to their strategic organizational communications.

As a professional communicator, Shel also writes the blog a shel of my former self.

I’m sitting in the audience at the Millennium Gloucester Hotel conference center – it’s a full house, a couple of hundred people at least – listening to the opening address by Euan Semple who’s currently talking about what was happening with employee online forums at the BBC when he was there.

I’m impressed with Melcrum’s organization of this event (kudos to Alex especially). Big room, impressive audio-visual setup. And everything works.

Equally impressive is the line-up of speakers today.

Back to listening to Euan. More later.

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So it’s a good time to start preparing for participating in some outstanding professional development events coming up in late summer/early autumn:

The Web of Tomorrow: Stockholm, Sweden, September 5-6, 2006. Delivering a keynote presentation “How to prepare for the communication of the future.” In addition, I’m leading a half-day pre-conference workshop “How to produce and use a podcast,” September 4.

Delivering The New PR: Edinburgh, Scotland, September 13, 2006. Fourth in the series of one-day conferences organized by the University of Sunderland (info here on the last one in London in May). Presenting on business podcasting.

Podcast and Portable Media Expo: Ontario, California, USA, September 29-30, 2006. Participant in panel discussion “Podcast Metrics: Gauging Success With Different Audience Segments,” September 30. Plus a big social get-together with all the podcaster geeks who will be there.

Strategic Communication Management Summit 2006: London, October 18-19, 2006. Organized by Melcrum. Presentation “Using new technologies to re-energize internal communications.” In addition, I’m leading a pre-conference half-day workshop “How to use social media to create genuine employee engagement,” October 17. Download the conference brochure (PDF) here.

Let me know if you’re planning to attend any of these events – it would be great to meet up.

I’ve just updated my Speaking Engagements page including more links and a better layout of all the info there.

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I got an email about it yesterday and my first thought was: yet another expensive report about intranets with the same old late-90s view about them and the org-chart approach on how to use them.

But then I read the synopsis (PDF). And then I looked at who the authors are. And I concluded: this one looks very different.

This is the first report of its type I’ve seen which includes a significant focus on social media such as blogs and delivery mechansims like RSS:

[] Helping you understand new technology such as RSS, wikis, blogs and social computing and whether you should include them on your organization’s intranet.

What you’ll take away:

* Expert advice on whether you should integrate new technology into your intranet, and if so, how to go about it.

* A weblog strategy used by a major consulting firm that interlinks five different types of blogs in order to disseminate employee, client and sales lead information much faster.

* Extensive lists of further resources – websites where you can download RSS, urls for best-practice CEO blogs or download and employee blogging guidelines that you can adapt for your own company.

* Case studies on implementing RSS at Siemens, and social bookmarking and wikis at IBM.

I know two of the nine authors – Euan Semple and Dave Wallace – both of whom I’ve worked with before in presenting workshops that address internal communication and social media. While I haven’t read the report itself, if Euan and Dave are involved with it then that elevates its credibility to a high level in my eyes.

The report costs 255/$395/370. Is it pricey? Depends on how you look at it. If it gives you the knowledge that helps you make some smart decisions on what you can do with your intranet – the long list of blue-chip companies as case studies is impressive, too – then it would be a worthwhile investment.

(Disclosure: I have a relationship with Melcrum through presenting workshops for them. That relationship has zero influence on what I say in this post.)

Related posts:

• Social media drives greater employee engagement
• A promising future for intranets and social media

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Indeed, that was the first answer to the question “Why are you here?” that my co-presenter Dave Wallace and I asked our group in London last week. Although many different answers emerged from all the participants, that first answer really does capture the essence of what everyone was looking to gain from our one-day workshop “Enhancing your Intranet with New Technology: How to Make the Most of Social Media.”

Both workshops comprised groups of communicators who work for a wide range of different organization types. Big global corporations. Non profits. Public services. Different industries, from banking to pharmaceuticals to mainstream media; from energy to telecommunications. All with a common need and desire – to learn about social media, how it relates to traditional intranets and how to enable employees to more easily find, use and share information.

Dave and I decided the approach we’d take for the workshops would be one of explaining the traditional and the new and looking at how the two can gel, specifically from the communication point of view. So Dave led the first segment – creating an effective intranet and getting the fundamentals right – while I did the second: how to make the most of social media.

In this way, we set the foundational scene concerning intranets and how they are currently deployed in many organizations, and then examined how social media can be part of an intranet strategy that would get close to the first answer to the question we asked at the start of the workshops.

In the London workshop, our starting point in asking everyone to describe one thing about their own intranet they liked and disliked produced some great answers. None really surprising:

This roughly translates into issues that are all too common in many organizations:

• The intranet is big, unmanageable and out of date
• Disconnect between content and what employees are looking for
• Technology driving the agenda
• Lack of appreciation about how the intranet fits as a strategic tool
• The intranet acts as a mirror for organizations often reflecting the political structure rather than a useful structure

When we began the larger segment on social media, it was pleasing to note that everyone had a good general awareness of blogs and podcasting. Few of them read blogs, though, and only two wrote one (personal). Few understood what RSS can do. Some listen to podcasts, although none from a business point of view (which reflects the severe lack of worthwhile business podcasting in the UK in particular).

It was also good to not hear the control word (as in “how do we control?”), unlike Niall Cook’s experience in February when he presented on social media to a group of intranet (IT) managers.

The really interesting part began when we moved along from the broad presentation and definitions of blogs, wikis, podcasts, RSS and so forth, and into deeper discussion about how such tools can work inside organizations as part of a communication strategy where the intranet is the foundation.

We asked: What if you could

• Provide employees with the means to self-connect information
• Enable employees to apply conversational descriptions to information
• Connect formal taxonomies with informal folksonomies
• Give the organization the means to map trends and more effectively plan infrastructure development, based largely on employee-driven needs

This was a terrific way to introduce the concept of tagging. Given that public examples of what companies generally are doing internally in this area are so few and far between, we illustrated the concept by going online to look at del.icio.us and Digg as different but related examples of how people organize things that interest them, bookmarking and sharing that information in unstructured and informal ways. We looked at Tech Memeorandum as an example of how computers can do this rather than people.

You could see the light bulbs going on as everyone began to see how such a concept could address that first answer to our first question.

(Now there are some tremendous examples where you can see precisely what some companies are doing with social media, courtesy of Shel Holtz last week – McDonalds, Disney ABC Cable Networks Group and Siemens.)

It also set the scene nicely for a practical exercise we asked the group to do as teams, about a fictional organization who wants to redesign its intranet and invest in a new technology platform. The group’s task was to produce an outline work plan for such a redesign and how social media can be part of the plan.

In their team presentations, we saw some great thinking and ideas illustrating that the group clearly understand the facts, ideas and concepts addressed and discussed throughout the day that connect intranets and social media in order to address communication needs.

If our two workshops are any indicator, then the future is bright indeed.

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The first one in this series was in Manchester last week.

That workshop was very interesting indeed. I’m expecting the one on Thursday to be equally so. A post likely on both next week.

Speaking of events, Blogging 4 Business took place in London yesterday. I was due to participate as a presenter but, early last week, I had to make the uncomfortable decision to withdraw (conflicting commitments, couldn’t be in two places at once: a real collision) and let co-organizer Matthew Yeomans know. From reading the conference blog and seeing the Flickr pics, it looks like it was a pretty good event.

Two great news items to leave you with:

Amazon in the US has started a podcast. Amazon Wire is a podcast about books, music, movies, and those who create them. The first edition has just come out. (Via Todd Cochrane.)

Three UK travel agents have started blogs and one of them is also podcasting. Via Niall Cook: “Lastminute, Thomson and Cheapflights are all making pre-emptive strikes in the battle against bloggers by establishing their own staff-written blogs and encouraging customer feedback.” Thomson is the one with the podcasts, with 10 travel guides (think of Virgin Atlantic’s guides).

Light blogging until the weekend.

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Not long after the panel was over, Niall Cook posted a commentary to The Plenary Panel Weblog asking whether the conversation was over or was only just starting. We’d set that blog up at the beginning of November to serve as a focus for some of our thinking to perhaps stimulate some pre-event conversation with conference participants and anyone else who wanted to join in.

Niall’s question is an excellent one, and the answer isn’t as obvious as it may appear. Naturally, I believe the conversation is only just beginning – but that’s only true if we are able to engage in actual conversation with others than ourselves (the panel: Niall Cook, Elizabeth Albrycht, Loic Le Meur and me). Without other conversationalists, there is no real conversation – it will almost be a bit incestuous otherwise.

So I hope we see more people joining the discussion in The Plenary Panel Weblog in the coming weeks. I see a primary job we have as a panel as creating the environment that will stimulate a continuation of the conversation.

As for the conversation itself, it’s very clear to me from the discussion this morning that the conversation which involves communicators as participants (rather, conversationalists) is now rapidly changing, evolving. I also saw this at the Melcrum workshop I did in London on Tuesday.

It’s no longer the “what is a blog?” type of conversation that was prevalent during the first half of this year. It’s now well into the “how do we measure ROI?” and “the risks of allowing my CEO to blog are enormous” types of conversation focus, clearly indicating that broad basic awareness of blogs and what they are is penetrating the consciousness of organizations.

It’s also producing some healthy skepticism about blogs as an organizational communication tool, which is an excellent situation – a perfect one for stimulating some truly great conversation and dialogue. And as we as communicators all know, conversation and dialogue are critical elements along the road that lead to understanding.

I can’t wait to get more into this evolving conversation.

Niall, Elizabeth and Loic are tremendous conversationalists (I won’t use the word ‘panelists’ – it’s meaningless) and I want to thank them for their selfless contribution to the success of this. Not just the panel discussion but also contributing to the conversation on the blog.

Speaking of the panel, we had one last-minute change to it. We were missing one of us – Glenn Manoff, the communications director at O2 UK. Glenn had advised me earlier in the week that his work plate was very full indeed and it was unlikely that he’d make it to Paris. That turned out to be the case; if you’ve been following business events in the UK in recent weeks, you’ll know that O2 was acquired by Telefonica of Spain, so it’s easy to see why Glenn’s plate is full at the moment. We missed you, Glenn!

And finally, it was just great to see so many people I haven’t seen in a long time, years in some cases, and even if all too briefly. Connections that will make re-connecting, so to speak, more likely.

That’s the magic of events like this – face-to-face. It beats blogs every time.

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Neville Hobson is the author of the popular NevilleHobson.com blog which focuses on business communication and technology.

Neville is currentlly the VP of New Marketing at Crayon. Visit Neville Hobson’s blog: NevilleHobson.com.