RSS-P-E-C-T, Find Out What It Means To Me

posted by Jeff Moriarty on July 09, 2007

I’d have to say that overall, social media adoption is fairly low among the general Intel employee base. There are plenty of MySpace and LinkedIn users after hours, but not so many who are active blog readers or create their own content. This is the segment of people just past the early-adopters, who are intrigued and willing to give this “Web 2.0 stuff” a try. For example, in our internal blog environment, which is fully syndicated, a lot of people just bookmark their favorite blogs and come back every few days to see what is new. So how to move these people from casual readers, to being fully and actively engaged in the internal community?

To shift these people over to full-blown participants, we’re going after some foundational work, specifically trying to make an RSS reader available to every Intel employee. I’m not even talking about getting them to use it yet, just get it out there. This is trick enough when budgets are tight, the value can be challenging to explain, and the different solutions pull out some pretty passionate debates. Once we have the tools in place and start educating people on their use we should see much greater participation in our internal community, and a lot more individual exploration of all the crazy information out there. New ideas running amok!

In addition to increased participation, giving everyone an RSS reader is a critical piece in trying to syndicate our internal content. Intel creates huge fountains, nay, mighty rivers of email and status reports. It is a little know fact, but Intel only manufactures processors to fund our addiction to creating PowerPoint slides. The standard distribution for all this data are massive email distribution lists, which can be as hard to unsubscribe from as your favorite spam provider. The staggering volume helps prevent people from actually being able to spot useful information somewhere in the middle of the firehose. Shifting to syndication lets people seek the areas where they find value, and jump in and out of the threads as they see fit. The potential reduction in email alone makes me weep with joy.

I’m tackling the issue of increased Web 2.0 adoption on multiple fronts - this is just one of the most basic elements of it. I’d love to hear of any RSS deployment efforts and how they went, and I’ll share how this particular activity goes.

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tagged: blog, communities, email, rss, syndication, Web 2.0