Corporate Blog Strategies: Spontaneous Blogging

We’ve discussed blogging by executives, blogs authored by subject matter experts and 5 types of enterprise blogging, we look at the most ambitious internal blog strategy – spontaneous blogging by just about any employee.

When reviewing analysts’ comments on the attitude of millennial employees, you quickly encounter the view that this new generation of workers grew up with the internet. Blogging is just part of what they do; part of how they live. Frankly, we at non-linear creations remain to be convinced. Studies of user generated content on the public internet make it clear that more than 90% of internet users are lurkers – they read social media content but don’t contribute. One percent of users generate the vast majority of content. We’ll be surprised if this figure differs dramatically in the corporation.

But we could be wrong.

Certainly we know of organizations that are encouraging any employee – regardless of their level of expertise or ability to articulate a thought - to author a blog and publish it for consumption by other employees. This ambitious strategy relies on spontaneous participation by a broad range of employees.

Business Benefits

Broad participation by employees in a blogging strategy is perceived to deliver two significant benefits:

• Reinforce corporate culture
  Corporate culture is a delicate phenomenon. It is thought by some that encouraging expression of ideas and interests by a broad group of employees supports the emergence of a true, integrated corporate culture (as opposed to a mandated, top-down culture.)
• Make it easier to attract – and retain – millennial employees
  Giving new employees the tools they expect – including blogging – it is thought to be useful in attracting new employees. The ability to quickly locate employees with who share common interests – scuba diving, ping pong, wine tasting – through their blogs may help new employees integrate quickly into the corporate fabric.

Authors

Everyone. In its broadest articulation, this truly means all employees. Executives, programmers, janitors, program officers, assistants: everyone.

Risks Associated with Employee Blogging

A successful spontaneous blogging strategy faces three sources of risk:

• Dumbing Down the Conversation
  Not all employees are created equal. Not all ideas are good. In flooding the intranet with discussions by all employees, you risk burying the key corporate information that drives success.
• Reduced Employee Productivity
  Employee distraction is a secondary risk. While you might argue that the corporation profits when thought leaders set aside time to blog, it’s hard to see how everyone using corporate time to express their concerns and interests can improve corporate productivity.
• Slanderous, Offensive, Inappropriate or Otherwise Litigation-Provoking Blog Posts
  This is the big concern. Employee litigation is a very real risk. We don’t pretend to be lawyers, but it strikes us as a bad idea to do anything that might be interpreted as creating a hostile work environment. Sexist, inappropriate or angry comments in employee blog posts could be interpreted as contributing to a poisonous workplace and may open the door to litigation. Make sure that you’ve thought through clear policies on employee blogging, monitoring of employee blogs and enforcement of policies.

Additional Thoughts

You can probably tell by the tone of this blog that we’re not convinced everyone in a company should have a voice. We think the signal to noise ratio in the world is already way, way too low. We think corporations benefit from blog strategies that produce more signal and less noise.

But we won’t be surprised if we’re wrong. This whole web 2.0 inside the firewall experiment is evolving daily. There are no best practices. Everyone is making it up as they go. We’re interested in your thoughts.

Our series of blog posts on the five types of corporate blogs has looked at executive blogs and blogs written by subject matter experts. This post introduces the concept of facilitated blogging – the use of designated employees to extract tacit knowledge from hands-on employees and publish this as a blog.

In many organizations, the employees who are most knowledgeable about how work actually gets done are among the least likely to write blogs. This may be due to limited computer access, temperament, linguistic skills or job responsibilities. A classic example is the oil worker who understands in great detail the tactic knowledge required to operate an oil rig but spends zero time in an office. He or she is also probably approaching retirement age. How can this tacit knowledge be captured and passed on to new employees?

Facilitated blogging is one approach. It’s simple in concept: assign an inexpensive resource to interview hands-on workers about the key activities involved in their job. Publish the results as informal blogs on the corporate intranet.

Business Benefits

Facilitated blogging has one objective: capture the tacit knowledge of hands on workers and make it available to others in the organization. This need is increasingly urgent as baby boomers exit the work force and millennial employees are hired in their place. As noted in David Long’s book “Lost Knowledge”:

• By 2011, the median age of workers in Canada will be 41 years and 36.5 years in the US.
• The U.S. Department of Defense expects 75% of civilian employees to retire between 2002 and 2008
• One-third of all secondary school teachers in the U.S. are expected to retire by 2008
• More than 60 percent of employees in the oil and gas industry will retire by 2010

Successfully transferring tacit knowledge from boomers to millennial recruits will be a driver of success for corporations in all verticals.

Who Authors Blogs Capturing Tacit Knowledge?

Blog posts are written by articulate but junior employees assigned to the task. Think unemployed philosophy and English literature grads. Ideally they have sufficient understanding of the industry to ask hands on workers intelligent questions and convey answers effectively.

The Risks of Facilitated Blogging

Risks associated with this internal blogging strategy take two forms:

• Financial
  Effectively capturing tacit knowledge requires organizations to make an investment in interviewers and writers. If the strategy works, this investment will be recouped over the next decade as boomers retire. Some organizations may be uncomfortable with the risk associated with this lengthy pay back cycle.

• Veracity
  It is remarkably hard to really capture in words how individuals do hands on activities – as anyone who has struggled to learn a line of business application from the manual will attest. Incomplete or incorrect capture of tacit knowledge may be worse than not capturing this information at all. (But see comments below for ways to address this.)

Additional Thoughts on Facilitated Blogging

Some types of activities do not lend themselves to description in text. These can be relatively straight forward (packing groceries into a paper bag) or complicated (landing an aircraft). In other cases, employees may not be comfortable being interviewed about their positions, feeling challenged to articulate what they do and why they do it. In these cases, consider:

• Podcasts
• Quick and dirty video

These approaches have the advantage of capturing actual activities – and can overcome the veracity risk described above. Unfortunately, search engines do a poor job of indexing both video and audio, so significant efforts need to be made to wrap accurate meta-data around these digital assets. There’s no point in capturing knowledge if the result can’t be found.
So pay great attention to wrapping the digital assets with solid meta-data and then work hard to tune your search engine (whether it’s Google Search Appliance, Microsoft Search Server or something else).

In our first post on the five types of corporate blogs, we described executive blogs and discussed their objectives and risks. Today we examine a very different beast – blogs written by subject matter experts.

Subject matter experts (SME’s) are those really clever, knowledgeable, articulate people that everyone in a company turns to for advice when they face a problem. They are also the people that senior management is terrified will leave, retire or step in front of a bus. They own the knowledge that ensures a company is efficient, profitable and successful. They are particularly important in knowledge-based organizations such as software and technology corporations, NGOs, banking and finance, education, government etc. (In our next post we’ll discuss blogging as a way of capturing the tacit knowledge that is more important in manufacturing, mining, retail etc.)

Business Benefits of SME Blogs

The benefits of facilitating blogging by the most knowledgeable people in your company are clear:

• Their knowledge becomes a matter of corporate record. It can be found by others, remains after they leave, and improve the broad corporate knowledge base. This is knowledge management that actually works.
• Rather than sharing their knowledge with one employee at a time (by email, telephone or in person), they can share it with everyone who finds their blog post online.
• In large organizations, blogging by subject matter experts allows geographically distant employees to quickly locate internal sources of expertise. This can reduce outsourcing to external consultant and allow the company as a whole to make more informed decisions.

Authors

Ideally, SME’s recruited for blogging represent the breadth of functions within an organization. Formal titles are of limited use in identifying subject matter experts. Colleagues are frequently better positioned to identify subject matter experts than managers and executives. Particularly in large organizations, the org chart is a poor indicator of who holds the “getting it done” knowledge – although it does a fine job of illustrating who dictates what should be done. There are formal approaches for identifying these individuals (see social analysis below) – or you can simply ask a half dozen people who they would call with a problem.

Target Readership

Any employee trying to solve a problem or understand a process. These knowledge-based blogs are particularly useful for new employees trying to understand how the company actually operates.

Associated Risks

There are three types of risk associated with introducing this form of blogging:

• Distraction
  When successful, subject matter blogging approaches have the most knowledgeable employees dedicating part of each day to writing a blog. This means less time to do their current job. (Although – if they are spending much of every day answering questions of employees one on one there might actually be a net productivity increase).
• Poor SME Selection
  If you pick the wrong people as subject matter experts – and the blogs they write don’t ring true to other employees – the credibility of the project is undermined. Quickly.
• Abandonment
  Unless blogging is made a formal part of the job description of recruited employees, regular writing will be sacrificed the first time an urgent project comes along. This can negate the entire project if there is not a plan in place to help these SME’s balance their priorities.

Additional Thoughts on Finding Subject Matter Experts

Social network analysis is a brilliantly effective mechanism for quickly locating the most influential subject matter experts in an organization. In its simplest form, social network analysis entails having employees complete a one question survey that asks “Who do you turn to when you have questions at work.” Graphing the results will quickly identify those people employees turn to for answers. More advanced approaches may look at patterns of email messages between employees. (Our upcoming whitepaper discusses the importance of social network analysis in more detail).

Our next post considers facilitated blogging as a means of capturing tacit knowledge.

As we noted earlier, we consider there to be five types of corporate blogs, each with its own benefits and risks. This post considers Executive blogging. This is frequently the first wave of internal blogging. Sometimes these are intended for internal use, sometimes external and sometimes both. In all cases they face the same barrier to success – the busy schedule of the executive team.

Business Benefits of Executive Blogging

Executive blogs have three potential business benefits:

1. Senior executives can reinforce corporate vision, mission and priorities on a regular basis
2. Corporate news – good and bad – can be communicated quickly and in more detail than an email allows
3. Effective executive blogs can support corporate culture development, reinforcing positive trends and discouraging negative behaviours.

Authors

Sometimes the CEO wants to share their corporate vision. Sometimes a junior vice president wants to make a name for them self. This is top down, command and control blogging.

Target Readership

The people that report to the author. For the CEO, that’s everyone. For other executives, it’s those in their department (and ideally the leaders of other departments as well)

Risks Associated with Executive Blogging Strategies

The biggest risk? Executives start blogging enthusiastically. Then lose their enthusiasm. And stop. In many cases, external consultants position the blog as “an experiment” designed to build internal knowledge of web 2.0. When executives stop updating the blog, readers get the very real impression that the executive doesn’t care, isn’t working, doesn’t “get it.” This is not good.

Additional Thoughts on Executive Blogs

Analyst Rachel Happe has a really useful blog post describing ways to lower the barrier for executive blogging. Making it easy is the best way to minimize the risk of blog-abandonment.Our next post will describe a very different kind of corporate blog – those written by Subject Matter Experts.

There is broad confusion around web 2.0 initiatives inside the firewall, as demonstrated by the squishiness of the terms used to describe the trends – enterprise 2.0, intranet 2.0, social computing, “The Corporate Facebook” etc.

Regardless of the term you use, blogs tend to be a component of this renewed attention to intranets. Adding to this terminology confusion is that people use one term - “blogging” - to describe several very different activities.

We differentiate between five types of internal blogging initiatives:

• Executive Blogs – senior executives write blogs hoping employees will pay attention
• Blogs by Subject Matter Experts – the most knowledgeable employees in the company are recruited to record their knowledge for posterity
• Facilitated Blogging – designated writers interview hand-on employees on how they do their jobs in an attempt to capture the tacit knowledge that is going to disappear when the boomers retire.
• Spontaneous Blogs – corporations encourage anyone with any interest, level of expertise or ability to articulate a thought to author a blog and publish it for consumption by other employees
• Repatriated External Blogs – most organizations find (sometimes to their horror) that employees are already blogging. Out there. On the internet. In public. Some executives sleep better if these blogs are brought behind the firewall.

These blogs differ in:

• The business benefits they deliver
• The motivations of the authors
• The risks associated with their introduction

Over the next week or so, we’ll post discussions of each blog type, their advantages and disadvantages for business.