Fredrik Wackå posted an entry related to the rise of blog consultancies that are appearing in the marketplace. In "Internal Blogging More In Focus - Blog Consultants Beware", Wackå makes the following statement about the dangers of pushing for the introduction of corporate weblogs.
It's one thing to for example build a personal brand with blogging for an individual. It's an entirely different thing to try to change corporate culture, working methods and so on with blogging as one of many tools. Where a good writer and decent businessman can build a blog consultancy to do the first, it takes strategic organizational and communicative competence to do the other.
I'm going to go out on a limb and agree with him here, although I'm sure everyone in the professional blogging consultancy market will disagree. Fredrik's point here, I think, is that weblogging is not just a technology that's introduced into the information ecology. There are aspects about weblog publishing that are directly related to how one views there place in the company and its culture. The point is well made in a comment left by Agile:
My experience is that corporate employees exhibit risk-averse behaviour in word and deed. In spite of the fact that the upper management will exhort iniative and outspokenness amongst staff. Because middle management will in turn punish such behaviour severely. Everybody knows that. So internal blogging will equally be a very sanitized version of what could and should be said.
Corporate blogs are effective and relevant when they're organically created out of a need to share from the grassroots, and not merely from a mandate chucked down from the C levels. It is, however, important to have the support of higher-ups for a weblogging culture to emerge. His point about lower-level employees avoiding the risk of stirring the waters or inviting criticism sounds acutely attuned to the type of behavior that tends to exist in large corporations. Because of lack of support or fear of reprisal for openness, people may tend to do as little as possible to keep their job and as much as possible to maintain the status quo. If the status quo has not included openly sharing/publishing information, then the shift to blogging will be pretty significant.
I'll reiterate again a point I made in past presentations about the importance of diversity and decentralization in the information ecology. For blogging to be useful, it has to grow out of one's own expressed needs to share. This keeps ownership close to the blogger and makes the probability of sustainability and success greater. I don't think you can effectively incentivize blogging from above. You can create policy to support an open environment for communication. You can create a technology platform to ease people into the tools to publish. But the real incentives to publish what one knows must come from the author. For the blog author to communicate genuinely and directly, they have to be willing and able to do so. This is the tipping point you are looking for. When the culture exists to allow people to feel comfortable to blog, probability exists that blogging may succeed in the company. If a consultant sells you on a technology platform, but fails to discuss users, the ecology of prospective corporate bloggers and their culture, they're selling you snake oil. The only up side to buying into a technology such as weblogging without having these discussions, however, is that you won't have to pay the huge pricetags that we saw with KM packages in the last 5 years.
I'm saying all of this above because I think the emergence of the business blogging industry is very much directed by the writing of those who are keenly attuned to the possibilities afforded to companies by this format. On the buying side, there are many high level management folks within companies that are buying the "blogs will help your company" sales pitches. But consultancies and prospective corporate customers should be aware that in your needs assessment and discovery process, the aspect of culture cannot be overlooked. Otherwise, all we are doing is packaging corporate messages, rather than allowing true conversations (in the spirit of the ClueTrain) to emerge.
Comments
01/26/05 @ 09:05
Something from this post just reminded me of a comment I heard a KM solution vendor offer at a knowledge management round table I attended about 4 years ago. The vendor was a sponsor of the roundtable, so they got to elevator pitch us their product.
Basically, the guy, an executive at the company, tells us all that they have a truly great product that will revolutionize the way we do knowledge management, but that for it to work we have to build incentives into the process. The examples he gave included directly correlating bonuses with participation in the knowledge sharing process.
I have to say that this is one of the worse ideas I've ever heard of and is so focussed on near term goals that while it effectively guarantees participation, it probably also guarantees problems in terms of genuineness of information and sustainability of the process. I liken it to the reward system used on children. If you give people something they want now, they are likely to show you how fast they can perform to get the reward. But over time, their ability to perform for the reward will become more important than the deeper understanding and gratification of the performing the tasks of their job. In the case of knowledge workers, the result may be that these people become automatons, working by rote and pushing innovation aside. All for some immediate monetary reward.
I think this is a tricky proposition. We're talking about possible damages to innovation in a company. It would be better, in many ways, to do nothing than to insert an information sharing process into the organization and mandate it without first undersatnding the needs of employees and getting them to buy into the idea. It's necessary, therefore, to evangelize an important idea such as information sharing, to openly communicate why you believe in it, and to let people respond to you. Then, in my opinion, to be effective in the long term you can only make policies that support openness and lead by example.
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