Intelliseek and Edelman have joined forces to publish The Rise of Employee Bloggers, a paper advising marketers and business professionals about the blogging phenomenon.

The paper lists the benefits of streamlining email communications through a group blog, recording and sharing experiences, and customer feedback among the advantages of employee blogging. The paper also stresses the value of introducing a Blogging Policy to protect companies and employees from potential problems caused by unthinking - or calculated - threats to brand.

An interesting panel met last Thursday at the Council of Public Relations Concerns Critical Issues Forum to discuss issues around harnessing the power of developments such as blogs, wikis and podcasts as part of a media relations strategy.

The panel was moderated by Jonah Bloom, executive editor, Advertising Age, with panelists Stephen Baker, senior writer for BusinessWeek and co-author of the Blogspotting blog; Richard Edelman, president and CEO of Edelman Public Relations, Ross Mayfield, CEO of SocialText, and Shel Holtz, principal, Holtz Communication + Technology. The discussion has now been published in this podcast.

One striking element to come up was the importance of building internal concensus within a company before publishing in formats such as blogs or wikis. With a move away from what was described as ‘monologue’ advertising deemed vital, it was seen as important to give genuine ownership to key stakeholders, ensuring support for a new approach is based on full understanding from across the company.

Ross Mayfield from Social Text organised London’s inaugural Wiki Wednesday last night.

It was a chance for enterprises using Wikis and specialists in blogging and corporate communication internal and external to get together over some cold drinks. Dresdner Kleinwort Wasserstein were the enlightened hosts. Ross Mayfield talked about how Social Text had parlayed their understanding of how enterprises needed to set up internal comms into a promising business and discussed how companies can be comfortable with open source technology solutions as long as they have enterprise-level support. Stuart Berwick from DrKW (a Social Text client and evangelist) talked about interesting applications of folksonomy in managing client relationships. We talked about TiddlyWikis, toasting Jeremy Ruston in his absence. Johnnie Moore talked about protecting brands from the impact of sustained negative blogging. Suw Charman talked about working with Danny O’Brien on her DRM initiative … and by that stage the evening was seriously but enjoyably off-topic.

The idea is to repeat the event on the first Wednesday of every month.