The topic is employees creating "pirate sites."
Pirates of the Internet - Simply Communicate
Here's some of what they say about browncafe:
Pirates of the Internet - Simply Communicate
Here's some of what they say about browncafe:
Losing the radio station
In the meantime some other, far more successful, examples have become established. A good example is www.browncafe.com which is the site run by and featuring the comments of the many thousand employees of the parcel delivery company UPS.
Browncafe was established in 1999 and now boasts thousands of threads and hundreds of thousands of posts. They contain the obvious comments such as those about pay and conditions, disciplinary procedures and unpopular management initiatives. But the site is also home to a great deal of best practice advice as well as engaging humour.
The content is mostly from North America but it shows a healthy range of subjects (including tackling racism at work) that any intranet editor would be proud to have on their own site. But when I asked the corporate PR team at UPS what they thought about the site they pleaded a lack of resources to engage with it:
“Although we occasionally look at browncafe.com to see what's on there, it's not a UPS sponsored site so there isn't any interaction for us to discuss.”
Yet if you look at a word cloud of issues on browncafe then you will see that the most popular tag by far is “management”. It seems the internal team are in denial about where their audience is getting much of their information about the company where they work. Ignoring such rich and extensive content is not just short-sighted, it’s ceding communication power to a channel where the company has neither control nor influence.