Employee Generated Content

Doing my daily blog crawl (I love my google reader), a new term popped up on a few different blogs - Employee Generated Content (EGC) - or as some call it Employee Generated Media (EGM). Now I am all over User Generated Content (UGC), User Generated Ads (UGA), or my preferred User Created Ads (UCA) – I think this makes users feel less like tools and puppets of the corporate machine.

Although I have read a bit about Employee Generated Content – it’s nice now that we have a nice little term for it. Check out the couple of references on the blogs I read this morning, Brand Autopsy, Search Engine Guide and Brand Autopsy again.

In my opinion, I think we can probably refine EGC down a little further, possibly 2 ways, dictated by its intent.

1. Internal EGC. A key use of EGC is to foster improved employee engagement, employment efficiency and productivity. These are inward, internal focused outcomes for an organisation. Having an internal corporate blog, employee productivity competitions are great examples of engagement. Corporate and knowledge-based wiki’s and shared document spaces are areas where EGC can help improve business efficiency by promoting greater sharing, accessibility and volume of employee held knowledge.
2. External EGC. The other main use of EGC is to utilise it as a tool to engage with customers. These are outward focused outcomes that use internal EGC tools. Things like using employee blogs, employee created videos and employee buying tips, which are generated by the employees, for the consumption purposes of consumers. These messages can provide an authentic voice in a businesses conversation with customers.
   
   Bacn! Oh, and on new buzz words, seems like Bacn, which refers to "electronic messages which have been subscribed to and are therefore not unsolicited but are often unread by the recipient for a long period of time". Bacn is email you want but not right now . So it’s not as annoying as spam but still annoying. Like all the facebook messages telling you who has written on you wall or sent you a message.
   Check out Seth Godin’s views on this.