Last week I attended and spoke at the 2009 Ragan Employee Communications, PR and Social Media Summit in Redmond, Washington, at Microsoft’s campus. I continue to be impressed with the events produced by Mark Ragan (@MarkRaganCEO) and his team as they not only secured a world class venue, but the topics continue to be timely (Disclosure: We’re hosting two Ragan events at the exchange in Chicago next month, so if you plan to attend let me know.).

I’ve been asked by various people since last week to summarize the event and I can summarize it with one word: Mingle. Now, I don’t mean mingling in the network, business card trading sense of the word — I’ll get to that as well — but from a new technology coming from Microsoft to address social networks internally. How new is this offering from Microsoft? Try to Google (or Bing) Microsoft Mingle and see what you find. We were lucky enough to have Frank Shaw (@FXShaw), vice president of corporate communications, Microsoft, kick off the conference and demonstrate Mingle. So what is Mingle and why should you care? Seeing and reading about it are two different things, but here’s a quick rundown:

• Mingle is a collaboration initiative that will allow for a one-stop network for employees to come together.
• Essentially, Mingle is an organization’s internal Twitter,where employees can tag or annotate internal *and* external URLs & share with other employees.
• Mingle can allow for groups to be created among empmloyees based on key words or topics discussed in the live stream, which in turn can connect employees from various locations/departments to collaborate better.
• Like Twitter and other microblogging tools, Mingle allows employees to move conversations from e-mail to a secure internal community (one of the key distinctions as services like Yammer run outside an organization’s firewall). 
• Microsoft plans to build more awareness and use of Mingle internally through existing resources like Sharepoint.

Shaw summarized the purpose of developming a tool like Mingle by stating that Microsoft wanted to know where their employees are getting information and then optimizing that information across all employees. What struck me as the obvious throughout the demonstration of Mingle is the fact that Microsoft is getting ready to unleash social media for the masses, which means there will likely be changes to tools such as Outlook, SharePoint, PowerPoint, Excel and other products. When this happens it will be hard for employees to ignore the changes, and it will bring even further changes to how enterprise communicate with employees. How would your organization change if employees communicated more in real time and depended less on email? How will employee communications and human resources have to adapt to these changes? I would suggest you pay attention to Mingle as Microsoft discusses this platform more publicly.

In addition to the Mingle platform I was able to mingle in real time with some pretty amazing people, including:

 Shauna Causey (@ShaunaCausey) — One of the added benefits of attending this event was the opportunity to spend time with Shauna and she’s a professional I admire and look to for ideas. You should too. I connected with Shauna several months ago via Twitter and we immediately bonded. She’s a very sharp communicator who has taken on several cause-related initiatives in addition to her job with Comcast.

Jeff Willinger (@JWillie) and Charee Klimek ( @ChareeKlimek) — I met both Jeff and Charee via the Chicago Social Media Club earlier this year and the three of us seem to show up everywhere together. One of Jeff’s areas of expertise lies in SharePoint, so I know he was doing some serious networking on the Microsoft Campus. Charee is a consultant involved in helping organizations understand how to leverage social networking with employees, which means Mingle has some serious potential for her business. 

Tony Edwards (@TraderSmarts) — Tony is an independent trader who lives in Seattle and he and I were introduced only a few weeks ago randomly on Twitter. One of the tremendous benefits of using Twitter at the exchange (@CMEGroup) is meeting with so many customers face to face. I often talk about using social media as way to build a fan base of supporters who can support your oganization. Meeting with Tony and learning not just about how and what he trades, but getting to know him as a person, further helps to show the value of social media in a B2B environment. By the way, here was Tony’s tweet last Friday.

Tac Anderson (@tacanderson) and Nathan Misner (@NathanMisner) – Their presentation on influence was straightforward and filled with great ideas. You can view their presentation here.  I was able to spend some time with them before and after their presenation and they are a must follow if you are interested in the power of storytelling and engagement as public relations strategies. They also unveiled Twendz as a social monitoring tool that will track frequency, reach and the influence of people online.

There were many more conversations with the likes of Jeramie McPeek (@Sunswebaster), Shannon Paul (@ShannonPaul) and of course Mark Ragan. If you attended the conference what did you think about Mingle? If you are involved in employee communications how are you managing the change brought about internally by social media? Let us know your thoughts.