 I've written before about Blogs in Business
and the role I think they could play. But my idealism -- the desire to
have a better, simpler blog product with some better social networking
functionality before we try to sell it to business -- is giving way to
my impatience. A couple of business leaders have challenged me to
develop a pragmatic strategy for effectively introducing blogs into a
business today. Here's what I said.
First, the strategy for doing so must respect some fairly unorthodox
principles. If it doesn't, blogs will just end up being one more
awkward and confusing part of already unwieldy and underused corporate
Intranets. These principles are:
- Blogs are Personal:
Each individual blogger must retain control over the content in his or
her blog, and over decisions on what does and doesn't go into it. This
is its unique selling point to front-line workers who are used to
seeing all the knowledge they contribute disappear into an
undifferentiated massive corporate content architecture with no
personal ownership or responsibility for quality, currency or
completeness.
- The Taxonomy must also be Personal:
Asking people to organize their content into standard categories is a
square peg in round hole exercise. Don't let the CKO or the CIO presume
to tell individual knowledge workers how they should organize their
personal stuff.
- The Blogging Tool must be Simple:
Select the easiest possible blogging tool, and if necessary hide some
of the tricky bells and whistles. People have enough to learn without
having to master HTML and RSS.
- Involve KM, IT, Learning and Marketing in the Project Team:
All four departments will be needed to introduce blogs effectively into
the workplace. Make this a joint project where each of the four
departments shares in the work, and its success or failure. That may
take some advance selling but if one department tries to go it alone
they'll fail. And you need at least one Executive Sponsor on the
Project Team. For that, you'll need an Elevator Pitch for blogs in
business, which I'll talk about next week.
OK, on to the strategy. Here's a twelve-step plan I think could work in just about any organization, large or small:
- Educate the Project Team: Have a session where the KM, IT,
Learning and Marketing people learn about blogs hands-on. Set one up
for each member of the Project Team and let them play for a few days.
- Identify the Pilot Group: Don't try to introduce this to everyone
in a large organization at once. Pick a few cohesive groups that would
likely benefit most e.g. newsletter editors, subject matter experts and
others who are already 'publishing' stuff internally or externally.
Focus on those who care more about content than style, those who
produce a lot
of content, and
those who produce time-sensitive content often. Ask a sample of
front-line workers this question: "Whose filing cabinet contents would
be most useful to you in doing your job?" They're the people you want
in the Pilot Group. If you have eager and experienced blogging zealots
on staff, include them even if they don't otherwise qualify, but make
them promise not to customize their blogs for three months, until the Pilot Group is up on their feet.
- Develop a starting Personal Taxonomy for each
Pilot Group member:
This will be different for each person and should probably not have
more than 20 categories and sub-categories. Start with
the organization of their filing cabinets, or their My Documents
folder. If that doesn't work, go on to step 4 for that Piloter and see
if, once you know what the content is, a personal taxonomy suggests
itself. But don't constrain the Piloters -- this is their content and they need to be able to organize and categorize it the way it makes sense to them. The categories and sub-categories will usually be subjects, customers or company products, rather than knowledge types (best practices, stories, policies etc.) Keep the librarians in check: This is organization by what people do, not how taxonomists think about knowledge 'domains'.
- Develop a starting Personal Content Archive for each Pilot Group member, organized by their Personal Taxonomy. The
archive should cover all information, documents and links that the
Piloter thinks are useful or interesting and which he or she authored, customized or obtained from outside
the organization. The types of content that each Piloter should be
encouraged to include are shown in the top-right illustration above. If
Piloters are worried about confidentiality of some of this information,
tell them they will be able to restrict who has access to it.
- Select a Blogging Tool:
The tool you select must be easy to use but powerful enough to
accommodate the categories and content you have identified. If the
Project Team have been playing with different tools for a few days this
will help in the selection. Don't leave the decision up to experienced
bloggers. This will be hard for many users no matter what tool you choose.
- Get IT to convert all the Personal Content Archives to HTML:
This is not a job for amateurs. MS Office documents converted to HTML
can get huge and ugly. At the same time, if you're an MS Office
company, develop a standard process for converting documents to HTML
going forward -- this will be an ongoing challenge, and not one you
want to leave up to the Pilot Group.
- Get IT to 'bulk publish' all the Pilot Group's Personal Content Archives:
This one-time process will get your blogging project off with a bang,
with a bunch of pre-selected useful content that the Pilot Group will
be proud of and others in the company will want to see.
- Get IT to create a Table of Contents for each Pilot Group member:
While regular blog content may disappear into the archives without
consequence, business blog content has a longer shelf life, and readers
need to be able to browse the Table of Contents of each person's blog,
organized according to their Personal Taxonomy. Like step 6, keeping
this current will be an ongoing challenge, and will require developing
a standard process for adding each new post to the Table of Contents.
This may involve some work, but it's important.
- Get IT to develop a password protection scheme for the blogs:
Each Pilot Group member needs to be able to set who can and cannot view
their blog content. The password protection scheme needs to be able to
accommodate different needs for this, and include an e-mail based
authorization system that will allow those who are initially prohibited
from accessing a desired blog to get a password from the blog owner. Access
should not be limited to those inside the company -- if at all
possible, you should allow those outside the organization with the
appropriate password to access company blogs as well. This may
be tricky, but the potential benefits of exposing useful company blogs
to customers, associates and other personal network members outside the
organization are enormous.
- Get your Learning group to offer a short seminar to everyone in the company on how to publish and subscribe to blogs:
This will help the Pilot Group continue to publish new material
regularly, will create an appetite for others in the organization to
subscribe to Pilot Group blogs (and to other blogs outside the
organization), and will probably identify second wave blog volunteers
once your Pilot Group are on their feet. Having a blog should be voluntary,
and the fact that it is will create a viral market and curiosity about
blogs ("why are all these people setting up blogs when they don't have
to?"). Let the size of your company blogosphere grow organically at its
own pace.
- Get your Marketing group to talk up blogs outside the organization:
Create an appetite among customers and others outside the organization
to subscribe to the blogs of their personal contacts inside the
organization, as if this were a special 'channel' into the company. Let
them subscribe to a few showcase Pilot Group blogs (ideally those run
by people in Marketing) to see what they're missing.
- Set Up a Blog Help and Monitoring Group:
This cross-functional group could be just the Project Team, or a part
of the IT or KM Group, but one way or another you need a clearly
defined group to hold the hands of new bloggers, measure the volume and
assess the quality and sufficiency of publishing and subscription, and
handle the demand of the second wave of potential bloggers.
Although as I mentioned earlier I think you need an Elevator Pitch to
get at least one Executive Sponsor for your Blogs in Business project,
I don't think you need, or probably want, to do a lot of explaining and
marketing (other than to the Project Team and Pilot Group) about what
blogs are or what their value is. This project is likely to succeed
more if it's quietly demand-driven rather than supply-driven (imposed
or hyped). Think of it like Instant Messaging -- an application that
most businesses never thought would catch on, but which has become
ubiquitous and accepted in many businesses by viral marketing
(peer-to-peer word of mouth) and voluntary take-up. It's a much easier
way to sell a new technology, and as long as these 12 steps are taken,
blogging is tailor-made for it. For once, if you build it right, they will come.
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