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Intranet Blogging: More On Impacting Organizational Culture

Intranet blogging (see earlier 21Publish whitepaper here [PDF file]) seems to be gaining momentum by companies that are looking to imbue and discuss culture in private settings. In a prior post, I mentioned how a major US bank is using blogs by 21Publish to discuss leadership and company culture.

Today, I learned from Shel Holtz's blog that McDonald's now has an intranet blog. According to Shel, Steve Wilson, the burger company?s senior director of web communications, addressed a crowd at Blog On:

"If your task is to move the culture of a company, you?re not going to move it by the flip of a switch,? Wilson said. ?You have to show that an open dialogue can occur, and create an ongoing dialogue to move from point A to point B."

Culture change is something that I've not heard explicitly discussed in mainstream corporate settings since the mid 90s, but it seems to be coming back into vogue. Blogs could be the internal desktop memo of days past.

Other very recent news in the blog intranet space ... the NewPR Wiki just started a CEO Intranet Blogs list.

CorporateBlogging.Info also has a very recent post on using intranet blogs for knowledge management in a corporation. Just last week I had a discussion with a major telecom company about using blogs in the context of KM. Perfect use-case just coming of age. I suspect it has to do in part with the fact that blogging has been legitimized if only for the medium's impact in organizing discussions more effectively than email. Additionally, some companies just aren't ready organizationally (culturally) to handle the external messaging aspects of blogging, but they are more than ready to try things in a private/secure environment.

To change gears a bit, some things we have found at 21Publish is that customers like the ability to have hosted blogging intranets that support the following:

• dedicated server integrated with company's specific firewall considerations
• workflows restricted by blog community manager to prevent confidential posts from going public
• shared server, secure blog intranet (not custom integrated with organization's firewall)
• restricted admin of reader groups
• traceable conversations and comment tracking within the community
• automated sign-up and administration of bloggers with varying levels of control and which permit registrations only from certain domain names (e.g., companyxyz.com).

So I am seeing more momentum on intranet blogging than I have seen in the past. What are you seeing?

Technorati Tags: intranets, blogs, blogcommunity, blog

Learnings On Facilitating A Blog Community

I happened to virtually connect up with Beth Kanter after noticing some referral traffic from her post related to blog communities and non-profits. Beth poses a very interesting question as to whether there are some principles of design or good practice for facilitating blog communities.

Of course, as a vendor of turnkey group & branded blog communities, 21Publish tries to build enabling capabilities into its products that facilitate community and group blogs. That said, technology is only one piece, and I really think that there are some things about good communities that can be segmented into organizational, technology, and sector-specific (e.g., non-profit, church, education) areas.

Note that the following lists are just off-the-top of my head. Beth asks some great questions, and I'm trying to step back from what I've seen and talked about with people from all walks of life in corporate, non-profit, fun, etc. communities.

Organizational Observations

1. Ideally, the first bloggers in a community should have a clue about blogging. I have seen a number of communities die because the first bloggers authoring in a community or group blog setting think that blogging is an editorial-grade communications channel. Consider coming down a level and communicating with people as normal human beings. On the flip side, I have seen some early bloggers come into a community with their first post along the lines of "hi everyone, just watching to see what happens. what do I do?". Nothing wrong with that, but wihtout something else there, the community has nowhere to go.
2. 90%+ of the time, the early bloggers in a community do not have a clue. No fault of their own. Despite all of the info that bloggers follow on the growth of the blogosphere doubling hand over fist, blogging is still new to the majority of folks. By having a community manager or others in the community that welcome new people as they join ... this provides positive reinforcement. New people look to others for role models and/or people they can adopt some new "blog skills from". Compare that to an individual blog on an island. When that blog starts up, who helps that person? I can hear the crickets chirping over the silence ...
3. Blogging is not rocket science, but people need feedback and tips. Despite the basic nature of blogging, there are many times that I need to explain to someone what the purpose a title portion of a blog post serves. Sometimes the conversation might get as advanced as talking about what a trackback is. Whatever the case may be, the community manager should be certain that there is a nurturing structure for new bloggers, whether that be turning to other bloggers, help text, newsletter, support community, community manager, or a moderator/facilitator (as with bulletin boards).

Technology Observations

1. Blog communities can get large, so there should be ways to optimize navigation into the community. One of the concepts we use at 21Publish is to highlight "big debates" or areas where there is either a lot of or recent commenting going on within blogs in the network. Although I don't have a lot of scientific information on the value of this yet, my post here
   seems to make a good case for having built-in community features like that because it reinforces activity. If the blog platform helps a community tailor and optimize web flow and real estate to the nature of the community, the better off the community will be.
2. Blog communities benefit when an organization has a choice between 1) open and closed enrollment and 2) public or private flavors to match the organizational need. Let's face it. Some conversations are better suited to closed groups or cases where registration is limited. Technology shouln't force things one way or the other. It should enable what an organization wants to achieve. I just finished a discussion with a couple of pastors. Say that a church wants to have a support group or a group that addresses addiction. Public blog communities provide a good support structure for conversation, but in this case a private blog community might be even better because it also protects individuals in need so that they can be helped.

Sector-Specific Observations

1. Still formulating my thoughts here, but I think I see communities that are organized around lifecycles of members work better than topic-only blog communities. For example, the BusinessWeek blog community is organized around prospective students, current students, and alumni. It seems to be working well because people from different phases of the b-school experience can help out one another (e.g., alums helping prospective students). In other communities I've seen, prospective purchasers of a product or class of products are helped by current users or addicts of a product. Alhtough it's hard for me to classify this as a sector-specific observation, I would say that some sectors are naturally aligned with continuous learning, ad-hoc and voluminous communications, helping others, and networking (e.g., nonprofits, education, churches). Regardless of sector, if one can twist the focus of the community so that things are self-reinforcing around lifecycle, I think this is one way where a community can be better off and healthier.
2. Many blog communities work better when authors can take comments head-on and when people within the community can hop into the conversation. Some sectors are better at this than others. It's no wonder that the political blogosphere becamse so prominent and well-developed. In general, communities that have commenting enabled seem to do better long run. Some platforms (like 21Publish) allow commenters to be restricted to authorized persons within an administrator-defined group. In most discussions with prospective customers I have taken the more conservative stance, i.e., if you are not ready to receive comments and/or are worried about malicious attacks, then turn comments off. That said, I just got off the phone with a prominent blogger in the church environment which is making me rethink my stance because his stance was stronger - that an organization has to (at some point) develop the fortitude to be able to take things head on. Clearly don't give up an ability to moderate or screen out comments, but put one's ideas out there if one truly has values and things that can be backed up. If such skills aren't there now in the blog community members, then it is something to work on.

Update (10/19/05): Beth has an update here. Feel free to join the discussion.

Update (10/21/05): Beth summarized and consolidated here. Thanks!

Technorati Tags: blog_communities, blogging, nptech

Nine Months And 300 Posts Versus One Month And 10 Posts

One month and 10 posts in a blog community won out (versus nine months and 300 posts on my individual blog). Read more here.  

Union Square Ventures Turns Website Into Blog

Fred Wilson posts that Union Square Ventures has turned its front webpage into a blog. Although Infectious Greed has some mixed feelings on the subject as to putting a blog on the front page, I think it's a great thing for small organizations. Aside from blog hype, etc., I suspect most people click by the blah, blah, blah on the front pages of many small org. websites anyway, especially venture capital websites. Why not make information on the main page fresh like a newsletter? So long as people can find out what you are about and who you are in one-click, I say just optimize the web flow to the audience. What will be interesting to see will be how Fred Wilson divides his posts between the firm's blog and his personal blog. The division will probably be far from representative of a typical corporate blogger, but I see it as a small test case of a prominent blogger moving to an organizational blog. We haven't seen many cases like this as to whether the shift can be successful. For Fred, it may be business as usual (as I suspect it will be), but who knows. For one thing, cross-posting in Web 2.0 is a pain in the neck. That's going to have some impact I'm sure on either the author or reader base. Make sure to check out Brad Burham's rationale for the switch to a blog.

Liquidity Event: Potentially First Market Price for Blog Network Being Set

Via Steve Rubel. Weblogs, Inc. is being sold to AOL.