Blogosphere Lessons Learned: Moving Beyond Control & Fear, Into Communication

Ross Mayfield, from the wiki firm SocialText, just wrote a good post about lessons learned from conflict in the blogosphere. The first step is being willing to enter into the conversation that is the blogosphere – many organizations are afraid to do that. They are afraid of inconsistent messages put out by anyone other than their official PR arm, they are afraid of nasty comments being posted by readers, I think they are afraid of the way that the low barrier to entry into blogging enables participation by parties other than the elite.

That said, more and more organizations are making that leap into being more open and engaging in dialogue. It is then from that perspective that Mayfield offers some good advice based on the experiences of companies who came through tumultuous times online and look great now. In particular he highlights some bullet points from Mena Trott, a founder of the blogging software company SixApart. Those points are:

  • Read what your customers have to say
  • Ignore the tone of nasty complaints, but pay attention to the underlying messages
  • Understand that the people giving feedback represent many who remain silent
  • Don’t spend too much energy on distractions
  • Don’t be afraid to communicate
  • Trust your customers

Mayfield concludes his summary of several similar cases with these words:

The common theme is that good communication and sharing the process provides a way for your community to be included in the outcome.

That’s great advice for engagement with the blogosphere, whether you are in crisis or not.

Mayfield’s discussion of SixApart and other examples is here, Trott’s original article with more in depth discussion of the above points is here.

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Static vs. Dynamic Sites for Organizations

Zentech Corp analyst Sarah Kittmer’s front cover story this month in the print magazine KM World offers a helpful explanation of the benefits of a dynamic intranet, or CMS portal. (Article online here.)

Does your organization have a web site that rarely changes and relies on email to transmit information to team members and supporters? Even adding sections for dynamic content and automated update delivery via RSS subscription may be less cost-effective and useful than recomposing your infrastructure from scratch. According the the article:

A hand-built site containing static HTML pages is the starting point for many organizations implementing an intranet. It might begin with departmental enthusiasts tinkering to create pages for colleagues. Eventually, the HR department realizes that they too can use the site to provide information to employees. Handy applications get added.

The site’s value to employees is demonstrated, but it can quickly become messy….Consequently, the ability of the site to provide information to the whole company at a low cost is undermined. A dynamic site based on Web content management (WCM) software is a good option, which can significantly improve the quality of the navigation and content.

The article goes on to discuss the following:

  • Online learning management systems as mission critical levers to change the direction of an organization.
  • The importance of data living in a portable format (e.g. the XML format of RSS)
  • Integrating learning features into the general online work environment
  • Long term savings poised to emerge from the predicted 15% annual growth between 2004 to 2009 in the $330 million global market for learning management and learning content management systems. (Numbers from Gartner VP Tom Eid in the article.)

Much, if not all, of what’s described here can be captured by a combination intranet and public web site built on blogging software with inbound and outbound RSS baked in. Organizations large and small should take note of such increasingly clear articulations of ideas already advocated for some time by early adopters. A static intranet or public web site is a huge lost opportunity in terms of learning and communication, both inside an organization and with the outside world.

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Google Base is Confusing

I’ve had 19 people visit this site in 2 hours after posting a profile to the new Google Base database service. All have come via a search for “non-profit” and almost none have stayed here for any time at all. I think that’s because the search results interface is confusing. Where do I click on an item to be taken to its Google Base page if the item is linked to another web site? I couldn’t even look at my own Google Base page from the search results, every click I tried brought me back to my blog. Not to mention that it was a nightmare to post the thing in the first place.

We’ll see how it works in the long run, but I thought it might be of interest to readers to hear about part of who was using it so far and how.

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RSS and the ROI of KM

The benefits of spending money on research and communication infrastructure and training can be understood more easily by examining intangible values and the roll of early adopters.

Paul Strassmann offers an interesting metric alluding to the ROI of KM (Return on Investment for Knowledge Management) in an article on Baselinemag.com. He argues that the difference between a company’s Financial Value, as determined by its own accountants, and it’s Market Value, as determined by the price its investors are willing to pay for its stock, is of key importance. Investors are willing to pay more for a good company than it’s tangible assets are worth because unlike accountants they recognize the value of intangibles. Strassmann argues that Knowledge Management makes up the bulk of those intangibles.

Why? Accountants don’t know how to explain the worth of employees’ knowledge, trademarks, accumulated software, customer loyalty and other intangibles—underscoring a major difference between the way CFOs and CIOs evaluate technology operations. CFOs look at I.T. strictly in terms of financial accounts; CIOs also look at intangible factors such as the worth of the knowledge held by the company’s workforce.

After eliminating companies with highly volatile stocks, Strassmann comes up with the following formula:

Market Value minus Financial Value equals Knowledge Value.

He goes further and recommends that the Knowledge Value then be divided by Number of Employees. It’s an interesting formula, isn’t it? The article also contains a table illustrating the Knowledge Value of several large corporations, primarily in the pharmaceutical industry. I think this analysis is worth pondering in almost any circumstance, though, even if only as a thinking process.

The ROI of KM is a very important issue, as it could, if quantified, be a key source of leverage in securing funding for things like training, research and communications infrastructure.

I think this could be of particular interest to the Web 2.0 community, as new tools begin to transition from early-adopter ephemera into marketed commodities. Where does a tool like RSS stand in the above equation today? Where will it stand in 6 months or 5 years? RSS may be a good example of an asset that stands in the shadows of even the intangible Market Values. Outside stakeholders are unlikely to place value on your organization’s utilizing a well-constructed suite of RSS feeds. But they are quite likely to place great value on the things that RSS enables. For example:

  • Rapid response to any off-site links to your organization’s web site
  • Your group-members being consistently informed about breaking news and hot topics in the field without inefficient manual “web surfing”
  • Your organization and its members developing longer-term relationships with other key players in the field, many of whom will be early adopters of RSS themselves and will thus be reading your feeds. Non-early adopters may not recognize the importance of Persons A, B and C being subscribed to your outgoing feeds, but they are more likely to recognize the importance of a well developed relationship with any of those people regardless of the technology that enables it.
  • A cohesive message from members across the team, as information is more effectively shared internally via RSS than by emails.

Perhaps then this points to the complication of such equations posed by emerging social technologies in general. When your organization makes the transition from having a few early adopters seruptitiously using RSS to magically be on top of the knowledge in their field into a scenario where instead your organization is paying for RSS services to acquire those intangible assets – that’s a shift in Strassmann’s equation that will be helpful to understand. The “investment” part of the ROI equation will really be an upgrade from partial adoption of emerging technolgies in the intangible column (or from being altogether invisible) and into the tangible costs column.

But the impact in the Knowledge Value column will shift from being of unknown causality (“group members are using RSS? what’s that?”) into an amplified impact caused by actual Financial investment. In simpler terms, purchasing emerging research services and tools won’t hopefully be something alltogether new with surprising consequences, but rather a formalization of a previously marginal investment leading to greater intanible assets. Recognizing Strassmann’s three values (Financial, Market and Knowledge Values) could be a helpful way to understand and thus explain the ROI of Web 2.0 enabled KM.

Strassman article found via Gary Price’s Resource Shelf

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Intranet Themed Blogs: They Only Come Out at Night

There’s certainly no shortage of things to talk about in the world of Knowledge Management and Intranets, as is evidenced by the packed 4-day schedule of workshops now winding up at the in San Jose, California. Why then are there so few people blogging about these topics on a regular basis?

The Aussie intranet guru James Robertson writes that he’s having a good time at the conference, but finds it distressing how few Intranet focused blogs he’s able to find. (Note, this is about intranets in particular. There are many blogs on KM in general.)

What these recent conferences have really highlighted to me is that there is actually a fair bit of intranet expertise about, within organisations or consulting firms…These intranet folk, however, are almost entirely invisible. In my news aggregator, for example, I have over a dozen CMS feeds, two dozen usability/IA feeds, but only only two (!) intranet-specific feeds…So this is my call to everyone working in the intranet space: make yourself more visible, as there’s a huge need to build a stronger community around intranets. A simple starting point would be to establish a blog, and to start posting on your day-to-day experiences. Even write a small article or two.

The KM and Intranets conference has a wonderful blog and wiki hosted by the wiki firm SocialText, including a wiki page for atendees to list their own blogs. A great idea, but so far only 6 people have added links to their blogs there!

The conference wiki is undoubtedly a great resource site, and will continue to be for a long time, but where can you find RSS feeds about Intranets? Here are some suggestions for more fruitful places to subscribe to:

Well, those are some pretty sparse resources! Robertson seems correct in bemoaning that the field he is a star in is not well represented in the blogosphere. Roberston’s own site and feed are amongst the best sources on the topic.

It may seem counterintuitive to blog about your experiences with intranets on the open internet, but what could be more useful than a number of blogs and feeds to chose from that adress lessons learned from internal communication? Hopefully the KM and Intranets Conference and the efforts of pathbreakers like James Robertson will help spur the launch of more resources like this.

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A Virtual Book Tour Through the Blogosphere

One of my clients, author Jennifer Lauck, is participating today in a “virtual book tour.” The idea is that instead of an author traveling around the country to speak to people able to attend physical events, a book is promoted by arranging for a number of bloggers to write posts about the book on a given day. It’s a neat idea, I think. This link will take you to see Jennifer’s participation in the virtual tour for the book “It’s A Boy: Women Writers on Raising Boys.” One of the things I did to help was to create the link that reads “click here to see who else is blogging about this book.” It’s a pop-up window that displays the search results for the title of the book from the blogsearch engine Feedster.

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