Blogging and social media forum 2007

IWR Blog is at the Blogs and Social Media Forum 2 today, a conference organised by Incisive Media, which IWR is part of.

The conference will be discussing a wide range of blogging and social media issues including its impact on the media, advertising, content generation, business issues and social networking.

Amongst the organisations discussing the technology and its impact are broadcasters the BBC, content management specialists Jadu and private healthcare provider Bupa.

The BBC open up the debate early on in a conversation panel discussing how social media is affecting how people perceive it as an organisation, hosted by social media expert and former BBC employee Euan Semple. "Back in the 90s we bough H2G2, a version of Wikipedia, we've done blogging in areas like the Highlands of Scotland, but that approach of having to come to .co.uk will not apply any more," Jem Stone, a BBC executive producer New Media and Technology admits.

"The BBC should be using the web as a canvas, not just BBC.co.uk.  The BBC doesn't need to be on the internet, it has to become part of the internet and that is now coming to be. We need to integrate, we need to be on del.ic.ious. We ask people to submit to the BBC. We will reflect this, we ask people to share with us."

"What we need to get better at is monitoring the conversations, we need to do that better and we need to reflect that better on the BBC.co.uk site and we have tools that start that."

"What we are very bad at is engaging with those conversations in those spaces, and it is hard work. The perception of the BBC, it is interesting to note that Semple's perception of the BBC online is from the bloggers he knows, that is not necessarily accurate."

"Internally we need to shift the perception of what the BBC is doing. You need to have your staff and colleagues out there in these spaces." Semple adds, this is affecting all sorts of organisations.