Martin Röll and Robert Basic point to an interview with Euan Semple, head of knowledge management solutions for the BBC (unfortunatly the link to the interview seems to be broken at the moment). Semple reports BBC is using bulletin boards, weblogs, wikis and some kind of social network tool.
The points raised by Martin and Robert deals with the loyality and motivation of employees to use these tools in effective and productive ways. Martin even points to a press release of Clearswift, a company that provides security solutions and content filtering applications, which suggests an eminent danger coming from weblogs in corporate context.
There is a danger that iloyal eployees start to send interna to the public. The german site dotcomtod.com is an example of a news site consisting to a large part of rumours from internal sources. Companies have good reason to consider options to stop this. But the BBC example shows that there may also be good reason to handle employees respectfully and trust in their loyality. The other side of this story: like the public relations offices of big companies in future will potentially need to by accompanied by an internal relations office, that deals with these issues and generates loyalty among unhappy employees (even though there is probably already an employment contract that demands this).
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