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Personal Good News: Using Blog Community Intranets To Imbue Culture

Today I got an update that one of the 21Publish blog platform users (one of the major banks in the US) is having success using the blog community intranet features to discuss leadership and culture issues across a pilot of fiftyish employees. They are also using the platform to create working assignments for their new employees. I suspect we may see more uses of blogging like this because the real organizational value-add in this case is to be able to try to disseminate culture interactively (but privately) across a very geographically-spread organization.

More Thoughts On Having An Online Presence And Negotiating

During a recent deal negotiation,  I found interesting to reflect on two points in the book, "The Virtual Handshake". From the book, the points are (brackets added by me for clarity):

• "... several academic studies have found that people like each other better when they first meet virtually than when they meet face to face." (Source A)
• "Participants [in remote negotiating scenarios] who were members of the same business school were much less likely to hit a dead end than people who were negotiating across business schools (Stanford versus Kellogg)." (Source B)

The above two items are counterposing effects of doing business virtually or online.

Instinctively, I always try to make my blog very visible to clients, prospects, and partners. With clients, I have found that people tend to know a little bit more about me before I go into a situation via my blog. This can be especially good if I am walking into an adverse business environment or management situation.

What happens when I negotiate against someone though? Am I afraid they will find out about tricks that I use or where my weak points might be via my blog?

The short answer is that one has to know enough tricks to keep people on their toes.

More seriously though, most business development relationships that I work in are multi-issue negotiations. I think it generally makes sense to take a principle-centered negotiating stance in these situations. It's about crafting a total deal, not about playing an ego card to win every deal point. One can convey one's principles in an informative way through blog writings.

That said, in a recent negotiating scenario with a Columbia MBA, I had to think hard about that second bullet point above. When the negotiation was a little rocky, I sent my counterpart a snip from the second bullet point. She ignored it.

Fortunately, I think we'll both be able to look back at these times and laugh (in a good way). 

Source A - "Can you see the real me? Activation and expression of the "true self" on the Internet" by J. A. Bargh et. al.)
Source B - Carnegie Mellon professor Don Moore et. al. in "Long and Short Routes to Success in Electronically Mediated Negotiations: Group Affiliations and Good Vibrations").

Why Call It Web 2.0?

Via Alexander Muse at the Texas Venture Capital Blog. BusinessWeek posts (boldface added by me):

But Tim O'Reilly, whose publishing company runs the Web 2.0 conference, makes an impassioned defense that goes beyond mere self-interest. He notes that the term has helped define a new generation of technologies whose social nature differs qualitatively from the broadcast-oriented first generation of Web technologies.

I think that BusinessWeek captures it nicely. But as Alexander point out in his post, some should be concerned that many people have no idea what others are talking about when referring to "Web 2.0". This new generation of technologies gives new meaning to the term "generation gap".

And yes, I do (personally) consider 21Publish a Web 2.0 company.

Quality Or Quantity (Of Contacts) From The Virtual Handshake (Internet Stop 1)

I'm about a third of the way through the book, "The Virtual Handshake" (see blog) by David Teten and Scott Allen, and I find myself bookmarking practically every other page because the book is full of practitioner info, research studies in universities, stories, and unique perspectives from different walks of life.

The topic of the book is opening doors and closing deals online. The book is not targeted at programmers. In the words of the authors:

Our book is particularly relevant to people in roles that depend on relationships: professional investors seeking deals, CEOs seeking business partners, investment bankers seeking capital, salespeople seeking customers, and jobseekers searching for their dream job.

"Quality or Quantity?" is the title of a section in the book concerning personal relationships and networks. This section captures a key value proposition to online technology use. The closing paragraph of the section reads:

"Technology now allows social networks to make a quantum leap forward in breaking the old trade-off between quality and quantity - you can now increase both, without compromising either one," says Contact Network Corporation CEO Geoffrey Hyatt. Learning to write more effective e-mails will help you increase the Strength of your ties, without spending too much time on those relationships. Building a large mailing list similarly allows you to increase the Number without spending significant additional time. Using technology to expand your number of weak ties is a theme we will return to repeatedly in the book.

Does it sound unbelieveable? To be frank, it does on the surface. How one get more of both quality and quantity?

Although not a perfect analogy, I liken the virtual handshake concept to a virtual marble concept that engineers used when inventing the concept of error correcting codes (e.g., Reed Solomon codes) for encoding compact disk information. Fill up a container, say a jar, with marbles. There will be a limit to the number of marbles that can get into the jar. There will be spaces in-between the marbles that constitute deadloss space. One can get more virtual marbles into the space by mathematically allowing the marbles to merge, blend and overlap given certain rules. As it turns out, under certain conditions, there is not a tradeoff between space limitations and the number of marbles one can get into the space (there is a new mathematical bound of course). You can get more of everything by eliminating and better understanding the structure of deadloss space. The rules have changed in some sense.

Concepts are remotely similar (but much more tangible) in the book "The Virtual Handshake". How can you increase quality and quantity of contacts? Though technology. The email concept above is just one of the concepts that may work for you. Or if one is not comfortable with that concept, perhaps there may be twist of the concept or another concept in the book that works for you.

I'll be blogging more about this great book. As a person who hates blogging and email to some extent (this may be a surprise to people), my next topic (Internet Stop 2) will likely highlight some differences between offline and online networking. Stay tuned.