• by Joe Mandese  @mp_joemandese, June 10, 2008

Tech savvy media shop Universal McCann is practicing what it preaches to its clients and is embracing social networking on a major scale, both internally and externally. Internally, the Interpublic unit Monday revealed plans to retrofit its corporate Intranet with new, state-of-the-art networking technologies that will enable the 2,800-person UM organization to seamlessly share information on a new platform traversing 90 offices operating in 66 countries. The system, which utilizes Microsoft's (a UM client) Office SharePoint Server 2007, will deploy a Facebook-like social computing platform that also utilizes NewsGator Social Sites enabling every UM staffer to have their own page for posting content, blogs, and other information, while sharing public folders related to clients, projects and various agency workflow.

The new platform will utilize RSS technology to feed both external and internal news, information and important updates to individuals throughout the UM organization, as well as to key outside contacts such as clients and trading partners.

The technologies may not be new, but Quentin George, worldwide officer for digital strategy & market innovation at UM, says he believes it is the first time a major media agency has deployed them company-wide as part of a global intranet.

"It really streamlines the process of discovery," he says. "Once you've been bitten by the RSS bug, it really becomes an indispensable way for you to get content."

George, a veteran of a number of pure play digital shops, says he was always frustrated by the inability of organizations to integrate such social networking tools into their corporate infrastructures in a way that was as authentic as what takes place organically through online social networks and by individuals utilizing Web 2.0 applications.

"I've seen my fair share of failed enterprise wikis, and before that failed CMS ventures. What we wanted was to develop something that works the way modern consumers perceive tags or things like Delicious," he says, referring to the popular social bookmarking application that enables users to rate and rank information based on its personal relevance to a user.

The challenge, he says, was to implement a system like that within UM's intranet that was also secure, ensuring that only the right people got access to the authorized content, while also enabling the open source spirit of the social Web.

George says the new system accomplishes that, and will give the entire UM organization the ability to adopt their own personal workflow in the process. Individuals will have community access to relevant corporate information, and aggregated news and information, but they will also be able to take feeds on content they deem personally relevant and to share that with others.

George says UM hopes to accomplish several things via the new platform. One is to improve the efficiency of the exchange of time-sensitive information.

"If you were to sit inside a big organization today and look at the amount of needless emails that go out saying, 'Hey, I've just uploaded this thing,' you'd realize how RSS can really streamline that process," he explains.

Perhaps most importantly, he says, the system will enable all members of the UM organization to live, breath and personally experience the changes social networking are having on our society.

"Digital is not something you can do from awareness alone, you have to experience it," he says. "We want people to eat our own dog food and experience digital in a way that is really meaningful."