Thursday March 31, 2005

Benefits Blogging Brings to Business
I was talking to a friend of a friend who works at a company that does not yet promote employee blogging a la blogs.sun.com.

This conversation made me wonder - if you work for a company that doesn't yet encourage employee blogging, and you're wondering about whether you should influence your company to start blogging, where do you go from there?  How do you go from wondering about whether to encourage blogging to articulating the benefits to the business to assessing cultural compatibility to persuading key influencers - and finally, to working the logistics?

Tim Bray recently wrote an articulate list of Ten Reasons why Blogging is good for your career that garnered lots of attention, and I particularly like Jim Grisanzio's addition to the list - that Blogging is fun.  But still, these (albeit excellent) writeups primarily focus on the benefits to the individual. 

What about the benefits to the company?  The first book I read when I started directing the OpenSolaris effort back in the fall of 2003 was the cluetrain manifesto (arguably I should have read it before I was asked to lead the effort, but I suppose I must have had other redeeming qualities.)   Cluetrain's opening paragraph captures the compelling attraction of "authentic voice" and the benefits of allowing individuals to speak in unvarnished fashion:

"These markets are conversations.  Their members communicate in language that is natural, open, honest, direct, funny and often shocking.  Whether explaining or complaining, joking or serious, the human voice is unmistakably genuine.  It can't be faked."

"Most corporations, on the other hand, only know how to talk in the soothing, humorless monotone of the mission statement, marketing brochure and your-call-is-important-to-us busy signal."

A talented program manager once told me a story about a friend of hers in startup land, who proudly forwarded their first press release after being in stealth mode.  Being a good friend, she read it, with the intention of emailing back congratulations and some kind of witty indication that she'd read the press release.  She read it, and re-reread it, then re-read it again, and again.  It made no sense.  She finally emailed her friend with congrats - and a sheepish "but what exactly have you announced? I don't get it."  Even well-written press-releases (which was not the case in this case) require a filter to interpret.  Some companies now recognize this, and realize that blogs and authentic voice can help them reach more customers, more easily (since not everyone is willing to employ a filter to figure out what something means.)

Wade Roush recently profiled Sun's blogging efforts in a MIT Technology Review article titled Sun Microsystems: Blog Heaven and expounded a bit on the benefits to the business.  From the article (link to Simon's SunMink blog is all mine):

"Sun’s Simon Phipps, whose job title is chief technology evangelist, says that researchers and developers can swap more ideas, build better software, and meet customers’ needs faster if they are active in online communities, where blogs play the dual role of soap- and suggestion-box. "In a world where you must speak with an authentic voice," says Phipps, "the obvious way is to let the people you most trust—your employees—speak directly to the -people you most want to appeal to—your customers.""

and further down in Roush's article:

"consumer-oriented companies that abjure the blogosphere are missing out on opportunities to generate buzz, monitor customer concerns, and—perhaps most importantly—show their human side."

The Economist, king of the witty subtitle, recently profiled Robert Scoble with an article titled Chief  humanising officer.  From the Economist:

"[Scoble] has also succeeded where small armies of more conventional public-relations types have been failing abjectly for years:  he has made Microsoft, with its history of monopolistic bullying, appear marginally but noticeably less evil to the outside world, and especially to the independent software developers that are his core audience.  Bosses and PR people at other companies are taking note."

Consistent with the sentiment in the Economist, but more colourful  (yellow bricks come to mind), is an excerpt from Jason Theodor's blog:

"Robert Scoble has done the unthinkable with me: he has humanized Microsoft. He has convinced me of something that I always knew but was afraid to admit: companies, especially huge ones like Microsoft, General Motors, Nike, etc, are made up of individuals. It is far harder to hate individuals than it is to hate a faceless corporate monolith. Our world works because of people like you and me doing our jobs, often behind an iron curtain. If people knew what was really going on they would… what? Perhaps sympathize with you! When did Dorothy and the Tin Man and the gang really get the most out of their Oz experience? When they looked behind the curtain, when they realized that the Great Oz was a falible human being, and that the real power lay in their own abilities…"

Joshua Allen, the first Microsoft blogger, talks about corporate blogging here.  I like his analogy to having dinner, and to playing golf.  Blogging doesn't put buzzwords and a formal tone of voice in between you and the reader.  Rather, it's like having a conversation, and building a relationship.  And at the end of the day, it's our personal relationships that help drive all sorts of business opportunities, by connecting people to ideas and back to people.  From Joshua's blog:

"To me, a “blog” is a personal, unedited, and authentic journal of a single individual who you come to know over time.  Hosting a blog is like having dinner with some people you meet at a conference, friends, neighbors, or whoever.  While we encourage employees to be active in their communities and interact as much as possible with peers, customers, and so on -- and we selectively hire for such engaged people -- it's difficult to put a metric on “played golf with some customers”.  To me, blogs in the truest sense of the word are just like that."

Finally, Om Malik wrote a great article recently titled, How Yahoo Got Its Mojo Back, and spoke a bit about the impact of key bloggers:

And what it also has a couple of guys, I like to call them blog evangelists, who knowingly or not, have brought the right kind of attention to the company. Russell Beattie who recently joined Yahoo has been blogging furiously (much to my annoyance) about Yahoo and its wireless efforts. In normal course of events, Yahoo would have issued a press release, and many of us would have paid little or no attention. Jeremy Zawodny is the other and has helped the company focus on some of the newer social media trends. I have never met him, but if his blog is anything to go by, then perhaps he is spreading the open media religion at Yahoo."

Ok, enough quotes and links to give you background on the benefits blogging brings to business.  Let's move on.  If you're convinced that you want to start up a company blogging area, Tim Bray has written about the effort to get blogs.sun.com off the ground in his Making Sun Policy writeup.  And I highly recommend your company create a "blogging policy" to set the tone and try to avoid misunderstandings.  Tim also blogged about  Sun's Policy for Public Discourse - which includes his thoughts (and he is most certainly in a leadership position here) and a pointer to the official Sun policy. 

In recent weeks, many of us have watched the wonderfully transparent evolution of the blogging guidelines for Thomas Nelson Publishers.  The COO, Michael Hyatt, posted the initial Corporate Blogging Rules in his blog, and based on great feedback he received, he subsequently revised the rules because:

"Many readers were put off by the formality and legalese of the document. They felt it should be more conversational and less intimidating—after all, we are trying to promote blogging within our company not stifle it. ... Some even noted items that we had neglected to address, like who owns the content."

It's worth a peek to look at the much-improved second-draft on Michael Hyatt's Working Smart blog - now called Corporate Blogging Guidelines.

The next decision has to do with software and infrastructure.  A company can: 1) Host their own blog service, 2) Pay someone else to host the service, or 3) Setup a "blog aggregator page" and ask the employees to individually select their blog hosting services (there are free services and for-fee services available for individuals.)  Dave Johnson of Roller fame recently sent me the following on blogging software (thanks, Dave):

These seem to be the most popular options for hosting your own server:
- Movable Type (commercial, written in Perl)
- Wordpress (GPL, written in PHP)
      ...
- Roller (Apache license, written in Java)
    
MovableType users seem to be switching to Wordpress in droves since the MovableType licensing changes introduced last year. Roller is actually pretty far down the list, mostly due to the lack of ISP support for Java servers. ISPs that support Perl and PHP are a dime a dozen, but a good Java ISP is hard to find (they do exist).   I usually only recommend Roller for those who want to host a very large number of blogs and/or prefer a Java-J2EE based solution.

And the link above to the Thomas Nelson Corporate Blogging Guidelines includes a list of blogging services that individuals can choose. Owen of Asymptotic created a detailed breakdown of blogging software, coupled with a description of the blogging software choice that Owen made as a result. For those of you who are detail-oriented, well, have fun with this.  :-)

Finally, if blogs (and wikis) are still new to you and you want to know more, Lauren Wood recently published a Gilbane Report titled, Blogs & Wikis: Technologies for Enterprise Applications?  Enjoy...

(2005-03-31 13:24:16.0) Permalink Comments [5]