We talk about intranet permissioned news systems and blogs a great deal – internal Marcomms so often have a strong interest in efficient, relevant news systems on global intranets.

It occurred to me that we as a solution provider never actually discuss the content! we just provide a great permissioned news system for our clients to use – yet of course the company is thinking all the time of how they would use it – we all know that it works.

Once I took on this perspective I thought I would look for the use of reporting and distributing news to suit an end goal. I obviously did not look around our confidential client intranets – I just went out to the public internet to compare side by side reporting of the same news stories – looking for examples of spin.

I have to say this has been made so easy with aggregators – I just flipped through some relevant stories on side by side news channels :  I found the results absolutely shocking – call me innocent but I had never realized that even in the most dry, factual events the amount of comparative spin  – and therefore what you walk away with as ‘content’ – is awesome in its power.

I could have chosen much more dramatic events, like the BP oil spill and the discovery today of PhotoShop alterations to the images – but I thought that was in a way not so disturbing – this after all is a very opinionated and passionate space. So I chose instead the rather dull and factual release today by the “Committee of European Banking Supervisors” of the stress test results on European banks. Basically a bunch of numbers, very factual and very informative – if you like that kind of thing.

Totally different perspectives

So basically here are two reports of exactly the same publication.

This, I repeat, is simultaneous ( same day ) reporting of a very dry, factual summary by a relatively obscure financial organization. Fortune, as reported by money.cnn.com – side by side with the same data as presented by Reuters.

So I am no longer surprised by our client’s interest in News systems, and the power they have to provide on message communications. I am also equally understanding of our clients concerns about our corporate social networking application, Innovate, and it’s requirement to open up all communications and therefore lose all control of debates and discussions.

Intranet-Extranet, Prod-Intranet intranet software, news management