Those of us that go back a few years will doubtless recognize the culturally positive approach in many companies to openly acknowledge mistakes by a friendly, open “pranny of the week award” – or something similar.

These are normally awarded during some kind of Friday beer bust, and predictably seem to always go to any senior manager on hand, who always deserve it, or the marvelous vivacious girl in admin that everyone loves and obviously a long way from being a twit…

We were at an intranet project kick off meeting today with a new client and they have a great idea – once a month the pass around a toy duck that the recipient for the silly mistake of that month then has to have on their desk for the duration. A physical recognition of a daft moment that doubtless is delivered in a humorous and positive way.

In delivering collaboration platforms that increasingly look to promote interaction through tools like micro-blogging I have been interested as to how some basic concepts do or do not translate from real physical collaboration and interaction to their virtual equivalents – and “pranny of the month” might well be one of them!

I cannot imagine that any Claromentis client will look for a place on the intranet to actually promote the person in the company that made a mistake. How ridiculous that would be! The cultural wrapping, the openness, and the humor would of course all be lost – destroying the whole point of the concept.

What concerns me is how the lack of real physical interaction might sometimes lead to a serious misinterpretation of a shout/ post/corporate tweet or whatever approach is used in corporate web 2.0. Some things clearly don’t make the migration to the virtual world of the intranet at all – more worryingly perhaps there is a middle ground where we really have to be careful about our interpretation of pithy, succinct comments without the emotional framing that real life gives us.

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