From A-Z to Organization2.0: B - Blogging examples and success factors

July 2, 2008

A B C D E F G H I J K L M N O P Q R S T U V W X Y Z

Blogging, next to Wikis, is the most popular instrument of new social software in an organization. A blog itself is quite a simple application. The value of blogging comes by the engagement of its authors and readers. Implementing blogs in an organization is not an easy task and needs time, resources and patience. I have worked with blogs within an organization for over three years and this pretty much summarizes my key experiences (I previously posted this on one blogging project).

Blogging examples
Blogs can be used in different contexts and for different purposes. Once again, they are just a tool, which has to be embedded in the organizational culture. So, for example, if a blog is just an add-on to existing tools, then will you quickly hear the information overload argument. These are some ways to use blogs:

  • Project management: A project history with milestones, document references and discussions.
  • Public relations: An external blog to engage to different audiences.
  • Stakeholder management: A blog to keep a network together and communicate on transparent on peer-to-peer basis.
  • Employee: Let the experts in your organization speak on their behalf and create their own audiences or spheres of interests.
  • Department: A channel to communicate relevant information. A supply for all those emails and a forum to get together. Who knows what is happening three doors away?
  • Thematic: An overlapping blog for specific theme. It involves all employees who are interested or working on that particular theme.
  • Process: Use it for quality control to involve all employees in certain processes, to highlight problems and elaborate solutions.
  • Customer-relationship-management: Let your internal customers, for example of the accountancy department, engage openly, to send feedback and discuss with them potential improvements.
  • Do you know of any others? I am sure there are more additional examples.

Blogging success factors
Each of the above listed examples need a slightly different approach, but I want to highlight general success factors, which I separated into four different phases: preparation, marketing, engagement, sustainability. I have put in some vague percentage to show the kind of effort (time and resources), which have to be taken into consideration. Do you agree with this figures?

Preparation (30%)

  • In essence, to set up a blog is technically easy.
  • Emphasis on design: It is important that your authors and readers like the look of the blog.
  • Do not use the standard blog templates. Blogs are flexible applications, so design or adapt them to your specific needs. Embed carefully additional widgets (different information boxes).
  • The front-page is key to set incentives for engagement: Focus on well elaborated categories for orientation or offer tagging, highlight the recent comments, offer a search field and different ways for subscription.
  • Do not plan too much and wait too long! I know it is a contradiction to the points above. Most things shall be changed through feedback from your audience. Blogging is an ongoing experiment.
  • Think about a policy or some points for motivation to set a framework. IBM and Sun have some good examples.
  • From the start up leave the blog open to as many authors as possible and of course for any reader to comment.
  • Calculate long term resources (at least two years) for bloggers and to facilitate the endeavour.
  • Do not be afraid of user administration. It is very easy to do.
  • Elaborate how you can reduce other communication channels such as email for blogging.
  • Discuss with the management, what could be the incentives and obligations to engage.

Marketing (20%)

  • Get together a critical mass of motivated bloggers. These are the ones that bring your blog alive, particularly in the starting phase — best are multipliers. You should have at least 5 dedicated bloggers.
  • Create a little vision or story about why you create this blog and focus on the benefit for its users. For example, highlight synergy effects and public personal knowledge sharing.
  • Do a little road show in your organization to bring employees on board. Although word by mouth propaganda is in my experience the strongest success factor for this community driven endeavour.
  • Include, when possible, short trainings. We often use already existing frequent meetings for a half hour presentation. That was in most cases enough to start.
  • Establish a little help section with frequently asked questions and if possible a screencast of how to use the blog.

Engagement (30%)

  • Particularly in the beginning, it is important to motivate people to join. Comment on blog posts. Propose to publish content only sent by email.
  • Practice an open style of writing and set incentives for different writing styles to lower the barrier for participation. For example, formal announcement next to personal stories.
  • Think about the best way to let readers be notified about a blog post. Best would be a RSS (feed) option, but consider also classical email notification.
  • Give answers in blog post through emails instead and send only links to the post.
  • Encourage for discussions and pick up interesting developments happening on other communication channels.
  • Leave the blog content development open to discussion and the audience as an incentive.
  • Technical difficulties were mostly around missing tags or categories, file upload and large size photos.

Sustainability (20%)

  • Do not underestimate the facilitation throughout the blog life span.
  • Think about regular evaluation to get detail feedback. Why are users participation and why not?
  • Fluctuation is often high, so scheduled regular presentations or trainings are necessary.
  • Answer user requests and registrations as quickly as possible.
  • Integrate your blog into other existing web tools (e.g. Intranet) for example, though feeds.
  • Include other wanted features such as document folder, event calendar, etc.

This is a blog post series about my experiences on web2.0 in an organization, consisting of at least 26 different blog posts highlighting potentials and challenges and focusing on success factors. Please feel free to comment, contact me for further information and/or let me know which other topics within this context you would be interested on.

A B C D E F G H I J K L M N O P Q R S T U V W X Y Z

The difficulty of saying good bye to top-down communication

November 15, 2007

Last Tuesday I took part on a discussion round in Düsseldorf, Germany. It was about the changing of the communication of enterprises due to web2.0. Reflecting the evening, I find it quite interesting what it might have meant in terms of the new web and its potential users in Germany. To put ahead, I share the opinion that web2.0 has reached Germany quite late – especially if you take a look at the enterprise sector. This event was mainly directed towards external communication or public relation experts, and not so focused on knowledge sharing approaches. Next to me sat Thomas Knüwer, a journalist from the the German Handelsblatt and Marc Pohlmann, who eagerly talked about direct one to one marketing and Wieland Stützel from Frankfurt airport.

dialoq Less people, than originally registered, showed up — I even had my doubts the visitors were interested in knowledge sharing. My basic statement was that German companies underestimate the potential of web2.0 even though web2.0 offers new incentives for knowledge sharing, opens new ways of participation and questions hierarchies. The technology is secondary; the communication and exchange sets the dynamic.

Maybe it was the rain, maybe they had already heard enough of web2.0, or they simply did not find it interesting enough. As I am following closely a lot of reportages in the old media, I think not so much has been reported, and when so, it is often reduced to the usual sites (wikipedia, youtube). It was interesting to see and hear that for many communication experts, knowledge sharing is of minor interest.
Unfortunately, in my opinion, most people wanted to get a guideline or solution: How can I influence this community? How can I get my message to the client? And lastly, how to make money with it?

But on the podium were four people arguing in favour of the authentic conversation about the web and how deeply it will change communications. Sadly, that seemed to bored the public relation audience. So, is it the companies or the employees who are not ready for web2.0? Can top-down internal and external communication specialists really have any benefit from it? Right then I had my doubts. But again, It showed me how far the participatory web is from mainstream or normal life organizations. It also showed me that there is a big skepticism about “just another web tool”. It is definitely still too far away from everyday practice within organizations.

Not surprisingly, first remarks from the audience were how to apply it and what will it change? My points about open source collaboration and open networking of organizations did not seem to make them curious. However I found the following quotes nice:

  • Marc Pohlmann: “This web shift is not about coverage, it is about one’s niche audience and about having a conversation with it.”
  • Thomas Knüwer: “There is not more trash in the Internet it is just so much easier to find it.”
  • Wieland Stützel: “Nowadays structured organizations are so much in an internal competition between departments - how shall they possible work together and collaborate and go outside.”

I found it all quite interesting, but it did not seem to engage the audience. I guess we did not achieve the conversation. However, this was not my first time in this kind of events, and still, I am often struck about people’s desire for a road-map of how to deal with it and to influence it, rather than just say ‘that sounds interesting let’s check it out and experiment with it.’

Open public relation - a contradiction?

August 23, 2007

The authors of the book wikinomics left the last chapter open to be written by the interested community. This experiment worked very good and proved the authors main thesis: we are entering the era of mass collaboration. With great results, their experiment got extended. Now various authors write together on different themes. Recently, they wrote about open public relations, and the result was quite interesting.

Traditionally the role of the public relations department was to control the flow and angle of information that went to company stakeholders. Making that process open and transparent involves rethinking the relationships with all your stakeholders, including the companies own employees.

Traditional approaches are grounded in the assumptions of a broadcast world: that the media environment can be controlled and that corporate messages can be pushed out to consumers who will believe and internalize them. In a pervasive computing environment, these one-way conversations fail to build credibility.

The premise of open PR is that information will leak out eventually so it’s better to join the conversation early than to put out fires after the fact.

Other interesting points discussed in the article are about the important benefit of feedback through openness. But, it is also clear that such a change needs a certain culture within the organization, otherwise there is a risk of failing. It would be interesting to discuss about what are the conditions for such an open approach. Examples showed that second mover have an advantage. Personally, I find very interesting that with this open approach, public relation and knowledge management overlap more and more.

Next week they are going to write about collaboration for culture…


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