I learned a new buzz word this week: EGC or Employee Generated Content. while this term is new to me, it is not new to the industry pundits. EGC is the ability to easily create and distribute content to members of your company without transferring large files via email or file storage. Apparently this term has been bandied about for the past 2 or so years. While all of us are very familiar with the term UGC or user generated content, primiarly due to the pervasiveness of YouTube, the discussion of enterprise related content, generated and "broadcast" by employees within the firewall, is still somewhat new.
Vendors such as Qumu are jumping on this bandwagon. Recognizing that today's employees are familiar with the ability to upload video content to a video portal such as Youtube, means that companies need to start addresing the desire of employees to create and consume enterprise centric user generated content. Imagine a content expert with the Flip or Kodak z18 mini camcorder, able to create high quality video explaining new technology, educating colleagues or demonstrating a new HR system. Employee generated content can reduce production costs for enterprise business, attract innovative thinkers, create an alternate source for valuable content creation and increase employee participation in social collaboration, but it also creates new challenges. These challenges range from consistent metadata standards, to incoporating EGC into enterprise intranet searches for content, to integration with existing content management platforms.
As I mentioned in last week's blog, enterprises are broadcasting increasing volumes of content. They are utilizing platforms and services, originally designed for media broadcast, such as encoding, editing, video workflow, video storage, content management and more. It remains to be seen how EGC will be adopted by enterprise companies. EGC vendors are not only providing employers with a means to tap into the employee social mindset, they integreate Will they establish policies for EGC? Will they define target audiences for this content? Will they restrict the type of content employees can create? How will they manage this content? How will it integreate with existing systems and IT infrastructure? It's early days but exciting to think about how this can change the ways we connect, collaborate and communicate in business.
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