AV Guy 2.0
AV Guy 1.0
For those old enough to remember, schools and offices used to employ the AV Guy -- as in audio visual guy. (It usually was a guy, but occasionally it was a woman.) His or her role was to oversee film projectors, film strips and the like.
In the late 1980s when I entered the workforce, companies were investing in elaborate video studios and leasing expensive satellite time to distribute video or host live interviews and press conferences.
My have things have changed.
From webcasts to podcasts, vlogs and Second Life press conferences, today’s AV 2.0 “guy” needs a much more extensive technical knowledge to help employees around the world with their growing social media needs.
Beyond this expertise, companies need a strategy to manage the growing number of easy-to-use low cost social media tools to help workers communicate with each other and the public-at-large. In the spirit of social media, we need to ask how these tools should be managed -- centralized under the IT, HR or PR departments or decentralized for product, customer, marketing and IT managers to execute their respective social media efforts on their own?
The answer comes down to how, as Mike Manuel calls it, the “messy middle” is managed.
“The messy middle is where several historically disparate business disciplines are intersecting; it's the place where marketers, communicators, product developers, customer support folks, and arguably other arms of an organization all meet and mix to maximize their efforts, thanks to the social web.
Enter Mike Mitchell. Mike is a director in corporate communications and leads up the Cisco Communications Center of Excellence (CCOE) effort. The Communications Center of Excellence is an internal, centralized knowledge base with self-service capabilities intended to clean up this messy middle. Housed under corporate communications, it is a "community" of communications and collaboration experts wishing to leverage social media.
Why a CCOE? Cisco is a big company with approximately 60,000 employees around the world. Its CEO John Chambers believes that Cisco is entering a second wave of boom times and has a pivotal role to play in helping unfold the social networking revolution.
The company’s communications needs are only growing. Two years ago, they did 400 videos a month and 50 live broadcasts. Today, they do 800 videos a month and 100 live broadcasts, and Mike assures me that his budget has not doubled.
For the increasing number of product launches, Cisco does not have the budget to rent out television studios and movie theaters to assemble the workforce in one place for briefings. Nor does it have the luxury of time to go around the world and make sure the sales force is up to speed. That process would take months for each product.
Less a cost center, the CCOE justifies itself my minimizing travel and reducing the time needed to get new products into the market. Mitchell's team sets up video operations and virtual company meetings using a blend video and telepresence. He is also working on a self service model that enables employees to leverage social media themselves.
How is success measured? Metrics are still under discussion, but at a high level, any social networking is an improvement.
Mitchell has some advice for companies wishing to create a CCOE.
- Don’t Be Afraid to Start
- Get Management Buy In
- Partner with IT
- Develop a Governance Policy
But at least in the early stages of the social media revolution, employees can benefit from a centralized managed clearinghouse of information and the expertise that corporate communications brings to the table. To flourish, corporate communications needs to understand the implications of the many-to-many communications between employees and the public at large. But as opposed to centralized clearinghouses in the past, today's CCOE equivalents need to allow for greater employee input and real time updates.
Let me get back to you.
Technorati Tags: Cisco; John Chambers; Social Media; Corporate Communications; Mike Manual; Mike Mitchell;
