Corporate Blogging
Rick Klau
published an evaluation
of his klog-experiment in his company, which makes a very interesting read.
Valuable lessons can be learned from this posting. He ran a pilot with 12 people
from the 125 in the company for a month. Interesting are the comments on how
blogs were used by these 12 people:
save URLs and provide his own commentary for others in his team.
snag snippets from other web sites to save to her own site.
sales people.
recaps of discussions at lunch - sharing the customers' interests and inquiries.
slate. There wasn't any there there (with apologies to Getrude Stein) - and this
gave several people pause. They didn't know what to put "there".
piece of information go into the intranet (i.e., via Radio), in the CRM
application (our own product, InterAction), or be sent by e-mail?
simply posting something wouldn't ensure people would read it - if it was really
important (a subjective assessment, to be sure), they were more comfortable
sending it by e-mail.
execs to share wisdom with others in the company. Oddly enough, those same
people were uncertain whether they as individuals would have information that
would be valuable outside of their team. Somewhat contradictory, however, was a
comment made by one user (and echoed by others) that it would be really nice to
learn what was going on "on the other side of the house."
lessons drawn from this pilot, lessons that have a familiar ring as they seem to
coincide with lessons learned from many different general management situations,
e.g. motivating your knowledge workers:
they don't know that there's a problem is tricky. As mentioned above, weblogs
are many things to many people. In our pilot, we started out by simply saying we
wanted to see if people found them useful. In other words - we weren't trying to
solve a problem.
working blogging into their daily routine - that they had a number of other
priorities competing for their time. Not surprisingly, they tended to gravitate
to things for which they received recognition. A successful deployment of a
k-log will need effective rewards to help reinforce the desirability of
participation.
think it's important enough to discuss on its own. I was surprised at the number
of people who understood conceptually what the weblog did but who were still
unclear on what they could contribute. People are very used to a fairly formal
communications format - and weblogs are highly unstructured. Without a focus,
inertia seemed to dominate.
most difficult to achieve. When a program like this is supported from the top
down, people are more likely going to appreciate the importance of the project -
and appreciate the connection between the project and the company's overall
success. If we are to increase the k-log's success, we will need to involve more
of the senior management team.
about the feasability of such an experiment in my own company. I have been
keeping this blog for three weeks now, and I have found it to be a somewhat
addictive and most certainly worthwile activity. This is probably due to the
fact that I had no inhibitions regarding "what to post", as I am used to jotting
down comments and notes for private purposes. The blog puts that in the public
domain. And that to me is where the reward is: My personal notetaking has
surprisingly become a way of establishing new relationships with people. Readers
comments, referral linking etc, create a whole new network of people around me,
and this I find hugely stimulating. An effect which Andrea
Janssen also commented on when she said that [meeting other k-bloggers ...]
"creates something of an European network". Other descriptions of rewards were
given in the discussion
on KnowledgeBoard.com that made me start my blogging experiment in the first
place. This leaves the question as to what rewards others in my company might
want from blogging wide open. Something clearly to put some thoughts into,
before expanding the blog-thing into our company. A first step probably is
bringing my blog to the attention of my colleagues, and let them see what it is
I do with it. Or better yet, I might set up an internal blog, where I give
insight into my activities as knowledge manager. This because to too many
colleagues this often still is somewhat obscure, and an issue I need to address
anyway.
Weblog by 
Lilia Efimova *
Gary Murphy
Sebastian Fiedler *
Thomas Burg *
Terry Frazier
Dina Mehta *
Stuart Henshall *
Spike Hall
Phil Wolff *
Jim McGee
David Gurteen *
Elmine Wijnia *
Julian Elvé
Denham Grey
Ian Glendinning
Paul Goodison
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