My fellow bloggers and I sat down the other day to talk at very high level about what we were actually going to write about on this blog. We’re all coming from different experiences with blogs and wikis and other “Web 2.0″ social media forums. Ron works in IT and has been implementing and pushing Open Source Software (OSS) for a number of years, gaining traction on Wikis as a tool for collaborative documentation. I’m a tinkerer, so I implement (and I obviously blog enough) but my interests coming from the education and training space have always been more “meta,” meaning I’m usually more interested in the “how” and “why” than the “what” of social media. That’s why I’m glad we have a partner on this venture in Michael, who is a veritable consumer of social media. This blog is Michael’s first foray as a contributor to social media, even though he facilitated and introduced our first corporate blog.

When we sat down the other day, Ron and I both got quite an education on the role of a Communications department when corporate leadership starts blogging. In our organization, the communications team does some clean up on the posts by one of our corporate leaders/bloggers. Ron and I, both having our own blogs, couldn’t understand why our senior leaders couldn’t just blog on their own. Michael then started talking to us about a post one of our leaders wrote about overcoming struggles to get things done. My recollection on the exact details isn’t all that important here, but he was tying his message to a story from his actual life, which is what all good bloggers should do (right?). His story involved his daughter learning how to waterski at the family lodge and the hard time she had learning how to stay up, but that she kept practicing and kept trying and eventually figured out how to waterski, eventually growing quite adept at the skill.

Now, on a blog like this, written for an audience that’s in the whole outside world, that’s a perfectly harmless post and writing style. But inside the enterprise, it can be a different matter — many people may well voice their thoughts about that “struggle” to learn how to waterski… on your boat.

As a corporate leader, when you’re blogging, you are speaking directly to the people who work for you — people who face struggles like figuring out how to pay their bills, or struggles like making time for that class after work so you can move up in the company while you’re raising your kids by yourself. When you’re blogging to an audience structured by power and authority, what would be an innocuous anecdote on your blog to the world can cause a tremendous amount of negative resonance in an enterprise that reads your blog a) because it adds meaning to their work; and b) because you’re their boss.

Michael told Ron and I about this example, and how their communications team helped our corporate leader think about other examples that would deliver the same message with a different resonance to our larger audience, and we were completely floored having never thought about the reverb of a blog post within a power structure.

This story helped me see a couple of things very clearly on the subject of becoming legitimate:

1. Corporate communications has an important role to play even when blogs are introduced internally, because corporate communications goes beyond the tactical writing of memos to the strategic shaping of corporate zeitgeist as they help leaders become stronger bloggers and communicators
2. Writing to a blog that’s for the world to see is much different than writing to a blog that’s nested inside an organization, because the audience is nested within a power structure, which affects the response to and acceptance of the actual message in any given post.

I’m looking forward to other “A-Ha” moments to come.

As someone who works in Internal Communications and has a passion for social media, I spend a lot of time trying to explain how we can use RSS. Before helping someone understand the value that RSS can bring inside our company, though, I often need to start by addressing the question of ‘What exactly is RSS?’ As result, I have often struggled with how to translate what RSS is into terms that people at my company can easily understand.

As I was about to board the train the other day to head to work, it flashed before my eyes in the form of a newspaper box. When I explained RSS to a coworker in the following way, I saw the fog clear from their eyes.

Every day I walk to the train, and my main purpose in doing so is to get on the train so I can get to work. As I head up the steps to the station, I pass by three newspaper boxes – one for the New York Times, one for the Chicago Tribune and one for the Wall Street Journal. Every paper has one propped up against the glass of the box so that people like me can see the headlines for the day. On most days I walk quickly by the boxes and merely glance at the headlines, because even if a headline catches my eye – such as ‘Microsoft profits plummet’, I don’t have time to stop and buy the paper. But the fact it caught my attention means I will probably look for that story on my smart phone or on my computer when I get to work. On days when a headline catches my eye and I am not in rush, I often buy the paper.

Now imagine if I go to the train station on a Monday and I notice that the newspaper boxes still have Sunday’s paper in them. On Tuesday if the Sunday paper is still there, I’m probably not going to even look at the headlines when I go to the train on Wednesday.

Now imagine that the newspapers at the train station represent the news on the front page of your company’s intranet. Are you now thinking that catchy headlines and relevant news won’t stop me in my tracks unless they are also consistent and timely?

Now let’s instead assume that the newspaper boxes do have Monday’s paper on Monday, but that when I go to the train on Tuesday the boxes are all gone. I notice a newspaper truck driving by, and I ask ‘Where did the newspaper boxes go?’ The reply I receive is ‘We moved them two blocks away’, and he drives away before I have a chance to ask ‘Two blocks in which direction?’ What if these newspaper boxes that I can’t find actually represent important news on your company’s benefits or payroll sites that many employees would find useful to know? How is anyone going to find out this information given most people don’t actively surf your intranet like they do the internet?

So you tell me - just get rid of all these newspaper boxes and instead have the newspapers sent to your house every day. The issue is that I don’t want to trip over three newspapers every morning on my way out the door. I’ll just end up recycling them and I won’t go back and read them. I only want news if it’s relevant to me and when I have the time to read it. Sound like your employees asking you not to send them any more electronic newsletters?

I have a better solution. Let’s build one newspaper box that’s filled with news that is relevant to me and that I get to choose. The Sports Section from the Chicago Tribune, the Technology Section from the New York Times and severe weather alerts from the Weather Channel. While we’re at it, let’s add news of when my favorite blogs contain new posts and news on anytime my company is mentioned in a newspaper…anywhere in the world. Wow, that would be great!

The great news is this box already exists. It’s called RSS. Using it allows your employees to subscribe to the things they care about – an executive blog, updates on benefits, the latest company podcast, mail server outages (try emailing those) and even outside news they want to keep updated on such as their favorite sports team.

So why aren’t many people using it? Well, while RSS does stand for Really Simple Syndication, maybe up ’til now it wasn’t deemed newsworthy by many.