HBS Tech Alumni Enterprise Blogging Event
Last night, I was luckily enough to be in San Francisco, (not out of town at a client site) and therefore as able to attend the Blogs, Wikis & Social Media - Are ‘Naked Conversations’ a Business Communication Revolution event.
Jeff Clavier did a great job of moderating the discussion. He began by saying
Blogging is about listening and producing. Companies can have a marketing blog, or not. But, companies can’t ignore blogs and bloggers.
I won’t cover everything that was mentioned on the panel, but here were some of the highlights for me:
Robert Scobble was on the panel. As an introductory comment, Robert said that the growth of blogs means that the word of mouth network is becoming more efficient. More efficient and more global. The value of writing a blog gives you a chance to create a conversation with a massive network. People provide criticism, ideas, suggestions, and a broad array of new ideas. That network also becomes a collective research engine.
Robert talked about all the people he has met through running his blog, and the amazing insights, leads on news stories and great ideas he has learnt from his audience.
While this blog does not have anything like the reach of Robert’s blog, I must say that I completely agree with him. Running a blog that relates to my career and career interests has been a fantastic experience. More and more, I benefit from the people who read Innovation Creators. As aside, I would just like to say “thank you” to everyone who reads the blog, and a special thank you to the people who take the time to leave comments or participate in one of my polls, or send me an email. It has been a great privilege for me to meet many of you and to learn so much about all the interesting things you are doing.
Now back to the recap…
Robert also said that as the PR industry grew to deal with newspapers, there has been a similar creation of PR teams to deal with the blogosphere.
Jeff Nolan was next up on the panel.
It was an amazing time to hear Jeff speak, as he had literally just finished his last day with SAP. Jeff did not reveal what he was moving on to next, through I heard a rumor about a planned career in NASCAR. OK … I’m kidding. I have no idea what he is up to next. But, I have always wanted to visit a pit in F1, so I’m trying to encourage him to move in that direction.
Jeff talked about the blog he wrote while at SAP. Jeff talked about being conscious of the benefits for talking with the network of other bloggers and blog readers, but also of being careful to not “talk out of school”; that he had to represent SAP well. He also found that writing a blog helped him to develop a huge internal network also.
Finally, Jeff also talked about the establishment of the Enterprise Irregulars.
Initially, Jeff arranged for SAP to fly the Enterprise Irregulars to a Sapphire event. The bloggers were given free reign at the event, and full facilities to cover the event. SAP asked only that they be given an opportunity to respond to posts.
The Enterprise Irregulars has grown from there into a full blown group of bloggers who are dedicated to championing innovation within enterprise IT, and improving the user experience of enterprise tools.
A Focus on PR: not New Productivity Tools
As most of the people who read this blog know, I am more interested in how the technology of the read/write web and the read/write intranet can be used within businesses, than I am in PR and marketing issues.
So, it was unfortunate for me that most of the conversation focused on marketing and PR issues, rather than on the revolution in productivity tools.
That being said, there were some very interesting comments on PR issues.
The Need for A Corporate Blogging Policy
There are two critical risks associated with employees blogging. The first is that people will deliberately, or inadvertently release private information on to the public Internet. The second is that employees will represent the brand poorly. What if, for example, an employee posts a picture of themselves mooning the camera on a social networking site like MySpace, and then mentions that they work for your company?
Robert pointed out that you have to enable what you can’t control. At least not direct control. He had some good ideas about how to monitor and encourage positive, or at least productive behavior from employee bloggers.
- All companies should have an employee blogging policy
- One way to encourage diversity of thought and not limit freedom of expression while simultaneously “protecting the brand” is to actually use the company bloggers collectively. If a co-worker is doing something that looks unprofessional, create a way for other bloggers within the company to suggest an improvement in behavior.
Jeff and Robert both talked about an an interesting way for a bigger company to develop a set of policies. For example they said that IBM’s policy was built on a wiki with employee bloggers, legal and PR all participating. That got the buy in from everyone.
Enterprise Blogs
All panelists insisted that internal enterprise use of both blogs and wikis was growing very quickly. They mentioned the following companies specifically:
- SAP
- Yahoo!
- GM Internal Blogs
They specifically described ”Competitive Intelligence” wikis as one non IT example of how these tools were being used to facilitate internal communication.
Parting Words of Advice
Robert Scobble suggested that in a high news flow crisis situation, PR departments go into a higher content medium such as video or podcasts to explain themselves.
That makes a lot of sense to me. Just as it is important to pick up the phone in certain situations, rather than continue a difficult conversation over email, it is also important to know when it is important use communication media that convey emotion and intent with body language or tone of voice.
Jeff Nolan suggested that in this new medium, it is not as important to get everything exactly perfect. Good enough is good enough, when the value comes from the conversation, rather than from any single blog post.
Great post Rod, I couldn’t agree more. I think within the blogging community we’d all agree that these tools (blogs, wikis) need to gain broader adoption within the enterprise. Where I’d like to see this conversation go, is into examining effective techniques for fostering adoption. Buy in from legal and PR are perfect examples.
Like you, Rod, I am interested in the use of social computing behind the firewall. Some measures of success and some new names would be good. Perhaps they’ll turn up at the Office 2.0 conference in San Francisco next month.
“All panelists insisted that internal enterprise use of both blogs and wikis was growing very quickly”. I am a UK-based journalist and it is very difficult to find organisations willing to discuss the internal usage of blogs and wikis. Apart, of course, from the usual suspects.
There is still massive resistance from both management and IT, either of which can be sidestepped for small departmental or community of practice activities. It would be terrific if there were more business people engaging in this conversation, providing a ‘corporate benefit’ perspective.
It’s inevitable in this industry that the majority of panellists are industry insiders who have a reason to feed the hype. Jeff Nolan is (or was - we don’t know) a notable exception. But, from your report, it looks as if it did Jeff a lot of good, but what about the organisation, as seen through the eyes of the management.
Finally, as a journalist, Scoble’s remark: “…in a high news flow crisis situation, PR departments go into a higher content medium such as video or podcasts…” provokes the thought “well, he would say that, wouldn’t he?” Given who he now works for.
As you say, this wasn’t particularly your focus, nor is it mine. But I would love to see this blog post (yours, not this comment) bring out of the woodwork a whole heap of ‘behind the firewall’ social computing success stories. Where success is determined from the organisation’s point of view.