Jul 1st, 2008 | Corporate Blogging, Delta, Johnson & Johnson, Marriott, Screencast, Style, Visualization | No Comments
Just because the subject came up in several contexts recently, I decided to make a screencast of me explaining the concept of f-score and applying it to some data from my corpus of company blogs. I tried to embed it in a blog post, but that caused several problems because the clip would neither fit nor scale for some reason.
Click here to view the screencast in a separate window. You can also download (right-click, save) and watch it in your favorite video player, which gives the additional luxury of being able to pause.
The three blogs I look at in the clip are Marriott on the Move, JNJ BTW and Delta Air Lines. Here’s the link to the cited article and to the presentation with the example.
And apologies for my lapse of memory towards the end (which blogs am I comparing again?), but it was a long day and organizing a conference occupies a lot of brain cells. I hope it’s still informative.
Jun 17th, 2008 | Corporate Blogging, Style | No Comments
From a recent post on JNJ BTW:
When I started JNJBTW, I thought my audience would be pretty much those who write about the business of healthcare — reporters, editors, healthcare bloggers — those folks. What I’ve found, after doing this for a year, is that the people reading this are, well, er, people. Doctors, nurses, consumers — employees and retirees — people who hate the company and people who support what we do — friends, neighbors, my father-in-law… well, you get the idea.
Now those who have been blogging for a while may think, “well, duh!?” but for me it was an important point — particularly since I’m often asked “who is your audience?” My answer, which many people scoff at, is that it is everybody — that I don’t define my audience, but that the audience defines itself.
From my recent post about style and audience design in corporate blogs:
Blogs are a part of the Internet and the Internet provides virtually anyone with near-universal access to information. This may seem like a truism, but it has significant implications. Whereas before groups of stakeholder would be targeted individually and the flow of information was highly controlled, this is no longer the case in a networked world. A careful examination of the Google-Sicko story reveals a case of audience underfitting, i.e. a company employee addressing a specific audience but effectively reaching a much broader readership (and, in this case, not with a positive result).
The problem encountered is the extreme reach and transparency of online publishing. Because we are used to addressing either individuals or select communities of people, suddenly reaching a diffuse, invisible and potentially vast audience is not always easy to handle. This is especially problematic when you talk about people who are also your readers (see the Google example).
As the author of a corporate blog, one thing to never forget is that your audience defines itself (well said, Marc!) and that you need to write accordingly. Forget all the cozy rhetoric about blogs being “personal” and “open” and so forth for a moment. The key thing to keep in mind is that the word you identifies the person(s) whom you are addressing and that words like they, users, consumers, the public etc denotes those people whom you are not addressing. You are talking to the first group and about the second group. The unique aspect of blogs is that all those people that you conceptualize as being in the second group are also in the first, since anyone can potentially be a reader of your blog. The Google-Sicko example illustrates what happens in such a case: talking about someone who is part of the discourse is generally regarded as highly antisocial. In terms of language, we split the world into three parties: ourselves and those “with us” (I/we), our discourse partners (you) and everyone else (he/she/<name>). Making your reader feel treated as a third party is a mistake you don’t want to make.
Jun 16th, 2008 | Corporate Blogging, Research, Visualization | 2 Comments
Sometimes a picture says more than a thousand words - especially when the picture is rather fussy and complicated. I’ve created a map of corporate blog subtypes, the functions they realize and the audiences they address. It’s clearly idealized, but I think it captures the essentials reasonably well.
Have a look at it here. I couldn’t fit it into a blog entry because, as you can see, it takes up quite a bit of screen space.
Thoughts?
Edit: don’t miss the comments.
Jun 2nd, 2008 | Corporate Blogging, Definitions, Google, Research, Style | 1 Comment
I’ve just skimmed over this interesting post by Ron Ploof about the challenges of corporate blogging.
Here’s one point in the piece that caught my attention in particular:
3. Being conversational is unnatural:
Being conversational is unnatural in business communications because we’ve been taught NOT to do it. Communication specialists are used to writing “Press Releases” and marketing web pages. The good news is that outside of work, employees are very good conversationalists, so they already know how to do it, they just need to break some of their Old Media habits. Training works very well in this area. Lastly, companies cannot forget the most important ingredient of a corporate blog — transparency. Corporate blogs are conversational and transparent, and therefore should NEVER be used to spew traditional marcom drivel.
I have been thinking about the style of blogs and corporate blogs in particular for almost two years now. The persistent chant ‘blogs are conversations’ and ‘conversational good, business-speak bad’ has a tendency to drive the professional linguist in me nuts, not because I don’t agree with these popular ideas, but because I keep wondering what exactly conversational means and why it is unequivocally regarded as ‘better’.
Now, as I am gradually approaching the completion of my thesis, I think can give a carefully weighed answer to that question.
Blogs are conversations? Partly yes, partly no
Firstly, when bloggers talk about ‘conversational’ what exactly do they mean?
Real-life conversations between human beings use many expressions that depend on the situational context to be understood. Things like that guy standing right there (so-called deictic expressions), false starts (And I was…. we didn’t go… No, Sue and I didn’t go to the meeting) and fillers (We need to… umm… discuss this in more detail) abound in face-to-face talk. Conversations also typically contains a lot of signals that serve purely to confirm and validate what your communicative partner is saying (things like yeah, okay, gotcha, right, uh-huh, nodding etc) and indicate your stance and social relationship. While conversations in TV shows, plays, novels and so forth are fast, witty and fluent, real conversations are often anything but - it’s just that we’re very good at ignoring all the noise they contain. We subconsciously filter out most of the static.
Blogs are obviously different in that blog entries are planned and not spontaneous (forget all the cutesy rhetoric associated with the word spontaneous for a moment - I use it to simply mean ‘instantly expressed’). Many bloggers, and most certainly the majority of corporate bloggers will read a post they have written thoroughly before publishing it. In the case of marketing and PR-oriented blogs and with executive blogs such as that of Jonathan Schwartz it is safe to assume that an entire team of communications professionals reads, discusses and edits posts collaboratively before they are published. There is planning and polishing involved, none of which is possible in real-time conversation.
So it’s not that aspect of blogs that makes us think of face-to-face conversations. What we associate with interpersonal communication is the interactive nature of blogs - in other words, that they enable a dialog between blogger and reader. Our reasoning goes: ‘I can respond to what someone writes in their blog, so it is basically like a conversation’. The other aspect is language; the content and style of writing that is associated with blogs. Note that point - blogs are written, not spoken language, which means that none of the ‘noise’ described above in occurs in them. Many things characteristic for spoken language never occur in blogs, especially not corporate ones.
Subjective as conversational
So apart from interactivity, what else is conversation-like about (corporate) blogs?
Have a look at this excerpt from One Louder, the blog of Microsoft staffing manager Heather Hamilton:
I’m not sure what has gotten into me other than the fact that I am happier than I have been for a VERY long time. It’s funny how sometimes things can just fall into place. The changes that I wanted to have happen at work happened without me doing much about it (other than saying “this is what I want”). I have finally started to spend some weekend time relaxing (and hanging with friends). And I am starting to believe what Eckhart Tolle says about coincidences not happening; it’s all for a reason (and with most of my life, I get the reasons for even some of the unpleasant things happening). Example: last week my manager and I were talking about me needing to travel to one of our dev centers. She recommended Ireland (oh yeah, I am totally doing that!) and I said “why don’t we have a dev center in Amsterdam? I really want to go there.” Then this week, I got an e-mail inviting me to speak at a conference in Amsterdam. How ’bout that? I’ve decided not to question what forces (if any) could be invovled with things like that happening. I’m just going to enjoy it.
In addition to business-related topics, Heather frequently writes about her personal feelings, thoughts and experiences in her blog, something that I’ve found to be typical of what I call ‘personal company blogs’. Such blogs are written by just one person, have a clearly visible reference to the blogger on the front page (name, photo) and are often part of a larger company blog hub (MSDN, in this case). In contrast to personal company blogs, team company blogs are usually about a specific product, issue or segment of the company and have several authors. I’ve found that writing about personal thoughts and feelings is less common in team blogs, largely because the topical focus of the blog tends to override personal concerns. By contrast, personal company blogs tend to be understood by their owners as diaries or journals where work-related subjects are integrated with personal thoughts.
Now, keep in mind how Heather writes and then have a look at this very interesting research on business English, conducted by Mike Nelson, an applied linguist at the University of Turku. Read Mike’s short article in the Guardian for a summary of his findings.
The kind of language used in corporate contexts (pre-blogging) is fairly strictly focused on a fixed set of topics. To quote Mike:
The world of business found in real life language is a limited one made up of business people, companies, institutions, money, business events, places of business, time, modes of communication and vocabulary concerned with technology. The language found was surprisingly positive, with very few negative words featuring at all. It was also found to be dynamic and action-orientated and non-emotive.
What Mike found via his large database of language samples from real-life business settings was that corporate language largely centers on things associated with business, namely business people, companies, institutions, money, business events, places of business, time et cetera and that these things are generally presented positively (business is about getting things done, not about being self-reflexive or critical). Finally, the subjective emotions of stakeholders aren’t really very important - private matters don’t feature into corporate discourse in any significant way.
Now compare that to how Heather writes. It’s a world of difference.
In posts marked with the ‘personal blogging’ tag, Heather writes about aspects of everyday life that we are all familiar with: buying furniture and cleaning out the garage, cheering for a sports team and experiencing a blackout. Not everything is always positive - there are ups and downs. Heather’s language can certainly be described as ‘emotive’ or ‘involved’, not because it is necessarily always highly emotional, but because it is concerned with inner processes more than with actions. All of this is obviously in stark contrast to what language in most other corporate contexts looks like.
There are a number of reasons why a ‘conversational’ style in that sense of the word is typical for both non-corporate and personal company blogs and why I expect it to have an influence on how institutions communicate, present themselves and are perceived in the future. I’ll focus on three basic pillars: audience, content and style.
Who you talk to
Blogs are a part of the Internet and the Internet provides virtually anyone with near-universal access to information. This may seem like a truism, but it has significant implications. Whereas before groups of stakeholder would be targeted individually and the flow of information was highly controlled, this is no longer the case in a networked world. A careful examination of the Google-Sicko story reveals a case of audience underfitting, i.e. a company employee addressing a specific audience but effectively reaching a much broader readership (and, in this case, not with a positive result).
The problem encountered is the extreme reach and transparency of online publishing. Because we are used to addressing either individuals or select communities of people, suddenly reaching a diffuse, invisible and potentially vast audience is not always easy to handle. This is especially problematic when you talk about people who are also your readers (see the Google example).
What you talk about
One notable aspect of Heather’s blog (and many others like it) is how openly it presents personal thoughts, experiences and feelings to readers. This is not necessarily done just for the audience. It seems that many personal company bloggers, though quite aware that their blogs are public, write partly to record their thoughts for themselves much in the same way that diarists do. The blog is a chronicle of what the blogger has thought, felt and done over time, both personally and professionally. Not every personal detail imaginable is presented, but there is no strict (and artificial) separation of personal and professional topics. Independently of how bloggers conceptualize audience, the effect of sharing personal information is that it lays the foundation for relationship-building.
Being told the subjective impressions, thoughts and emotions of another human being is almost inevitably relevant to us because we value such social information very highly. Knowing personal aspects of someone’s life brings us closer to them and establishes ties which are the foundation of any interpersonal relationship. This is especially pivotal on the Internet where all voices are detached from the individuals who use them. Social information enables us to establish a relationship with someone whom we have never met, because what we know about someone allows us to draw an increasingly complete picture of what kind of person they are.
Social information as a universal currency is especially valuable in a globalized and networked world, because exchanging it builds trust and without trust the foundation for other interactions is lacking.
How you say it
There is a persistent belief that jargon, technical language and other forms of special purpose lingo exist purely to irritate those of us who don’t understand it. That’s not true quite true though - medical language or legalese may have that effect on people who aren’t doctors or lawyers, but among those who speak them these varieties are readily understood and used for plausible reasons. Jargon allows us to
- delineate membership in an expert community (techies, lawyers, bloggers…)
- describe aspects of our work/community/culture/shared experience with more perceived precision than ’standard’ language allows
In other words, we often feel that what we want to say is said more effectively when we use a specialized vocabulary developed to express it. While this is unproblematic as long as we are talking to others who share our knowledge, this instantly turns into an issue when we address a broader audience - which is inevitably the case with a blog. All of a sudden, use of a specialized terminology makes us aloof, arrogant and out of touch. Audience underfitting once again leads to problems, this time in stylistic terms.
Finally, ‘conversational’ in stylistic terms also implies the use of colloquialisms, figures of speech and other expressive elements which are typically found in spoken conversation. The effect of such devices is again that they allow blogger and audience to conceptualize the blog as a speech situation, amplifying feelings of solidarity and familiarity.
What ‘conversational’ can mean
To summarize, ‘conversational’ can mean a range of things when applied to blogs. Among them are:
- interactivity - it can describe the dialogic structure of blogs and the possibility to respond to contributions
- speaker and audience - it can describe the discourse situation that the blog creates on a technical level and the resulting possibility for the blogger to refer to himself/herself (”I”) and address his/her readers (”you”)
- content - it can describe a focus on personal and everyday topics which are familiar to a broad audience and create a feeling of solidarity and familiarity with the blogger
- style - it can describe the avoidance of jargon and technical language (due to its audience-restrictiveness) in favor of expressions that evoke spoken language and real-life conversation
As always, feedback is appreciated.
Mar 11th, 2008 | Corporate Blogging, Pronouns | 1 Comment
I’m currently working on a paper on pronominal use in corporate blogs and I thought it would make sense to blog a compressed version here.
Personal pronouns, specifically those of the first and second person, are characteristic for any kind of language use that can be described as ‘involved’, i.e. in which some sort of discourse situation between a speaker and one or more addressees exists. A frequent mistake is to assume that use of ‘I’ and ‘you’ necessarily makes a text ‘less formal’, more ‘personal’, or that, by contrast, texts in which the third person is preferred are more formal, ‘objective’, or serious.
But this is not quite accurate. Imagine that you want to tell your colleague that you’ve just spoken on the phone with a client. You might say something like “I just spoke to X and he canceled our meeting next week”. You could also use such an expression in an E-Mail, only that you might specify a time and date instead of writing that you “just” spoke to X. Or perhaps you’ll decide to speak of yourself as part of a team and write that “we” spoke to X. But in no plausible scenario would you refer to yourself in the third person, whether with a full noun (your name) or a third person pronoun (he/she). Such a behavior would not just be unusual or somewhat inappropriate - it would cause people to worry about your mental health in a serious way.
The same applies to the use of the second person. Imagine that you are having a conversation with Bob and he makes a suggestion that you don’t agree with. While you are facing and clearly addressing him, you say “Does Bob think that this is a good idea?”. It is very unlikely that any addressee would appreciate this kind of behavior. Or, imagine you are talking to Sue while Bob is also present and you consistently address her as “you” and him as “he”. Your behavior would be interpreted as impossibly rude and just by using the wrong pronoun you would be sending an extremely strong and unequivocally negative message.
In other words, when you are actively involved in a conversation you must use the pronoun of the second person, just as use of the first person pronoun to refer to yourself is the default.
Why is this important and what does it have to do with blogs?
While face-to-face communication has been around longer than man has been capable of using language, written communication is still a pretty recent innovation. As long as they were stored on paper and therefore costly to produce, the primary function of written texts was to archive information. Public records, historical documents, religious texts and learning materials all had the purpose of overcoming the key limitation of speech: that it is ephemeral, transient and inaccessible unless one happens to be in the right place at the right time.
Speech is shaped by the situation it takes place in. ‘I’, ‘you’, ‘here’, ‘there’, ‘now’ and ‘then’ are all clear and unambiguous in their reference as long as all participants have access to the context to which all these words are anchored. Now think about the kinds of things written down in the abovementioned documents and it becomes clear that these are largely independent from a specific context. Why is that? Because the person who puts down something on paper assumes that it will be read by people unknown to him, possibly in a distant future. It simply makes no sense to refer to the reader as ‘you’, his location as ‘here’ and the time of writing as ‘now. And beyond that it is not plausible to refer to oneself a whole lot either, since the fate of one individual hardly seems relevant to the world at large when publishing in such an expensive medium. Diaries and personal letters obviously differ in that respect, the former genre being primarily concerned with the writer himself (therefore inevitably having an ‘I’) while the latter clearly addresses a specific person (and consequently has a ‘you’).
But what really stirred things up when it comes to interpreting writing as a form of communication was the Internet.
Firstly, the Net makes lightning fast, cheap and unlimited communication possible. Secondly, because hyperlinks allow people to causally connect one piece of writing with another, an expression and its context no longer exist in the kind of separation from one another that was characteristic for pre-digital writing.
Take this blog. The header states that it is written by “Cornelius Puschmann” and concerned with “corporate and institutional blogging, linguistics, open access and other things that interest him”. Since this post is published in Cornelius Puschmann’s blog you have every reason to believe that “I”, when used in a post, refers to me. If I refer to to a point in time called “now” you could further deduct that I’m talking about the time of writing and figure out when exactly that was by looking at the post’s time stamp.
In other words, a blog provides some of the context that is accessible in a conversation and that was previously not accessible in written texts. For that reason, some of the linguistic strategies of spoken language are used: bloggers refer to themselves via the first person pronoun and to their reader via the second person.
But now comes the decisive part. Self-reference is not just plausible because bloggers like to write about themselves, but also because it is an essential part of any ordinary conversation. Think about the last time you had a chat with anyone that went on for more than a few moments and you’ll find with almost complete certainty that your referred to yourself at some point.
Now think about advertising. Think about brochures, instruction manuals, news, or about your average company website. These text types generally don’t have self-reference because arguably they are not about the writer but concerned with third parties (newspaper articles, history book, encyclopedias). But in those genres where ‘you’ is addressed all the time (ads, corporate websites and many others) we encounter a paradox: someone is talking to us but we have no clue who it is, because there is no self-reference. Someone wants me to buy something, but I can’t say who it is.
Blogs solve this problem by mandating a speaker. Any blogging software or platform requires at least one user and his name is credited each time he publishes something. Blogs are customized by their owners and reflect the likes and dislikes of the blogger. Without a blogger, no blog.
Human beings are highly sensitive to relevant social-contextual information and when that information is withheld it seems implausible and fake to us. But exactly this is an everyday practice in advertising: addressing the reader/listener/viewer is common practice, even when there is nobody there who could plausibly be addressing him.
(Part 2 will follow soon)
Nov 29th, 2007 | Corporate Blogging, Fake Blogs, Research | 1 Comment
This morning over coffee, I discussed my thesis project with a colleague. At some point I described last year’s Wal-Mart flog incident to him and I came up with several plausible reasons why certain criteria have to be met in order for a blog to be accepted as “authentic” by the blogosphere, especially if it’s a company blog. Alex, who does incredibly interesting research on the semantics of Web 2.0 metaphors, had a very sensible suggestion in spite of my ideas: I could just ask people for their opinion.
So that’s what I’ll do. Whether you’re a company blogger, PR pro, consultant, or just someone who reads company blogs, I would be grateful for your response to the following question:
Under what circumstances would you describe a corporate blog as fake?
This is not just a random opinion poll. I am writing a research article at the moment and one of my central questions is what expectations people have towards blogs, why companies find blogs attractive for public-facing communication and what exactly happens when a company is accused of “faking” a blog. So your responses have a very real chance of benefiting my research and being cited.
You can either post a comment here, ping me through your own blog or send me an email - whatever works best for you.
Thanks a lot in advance and do pass this on!
Nov 26th, 2007 | Corporate Blogging, McDonald's, Unsanctioned Employee Blogging | No Comments
People love to share experiences and thoughts with one another and blogging is arguably a very fast, cheap and simple way of doing that. Work is an especially popular subject for many people, partly because we spend so much time working and partly because it entails enough complexities, challenges and noteworthy events for us to describe, decry or inquire about. We especially like to share our joy and grief with others who are in a similar situation. That is one way how a community can come into existence.
However, if you’re a company employing such an ad-hoc community of unsanctioned employee bloggers, you might not be entirely enthusiastic about the whole thing. When the foot soldiers of multinational commerce speak their mind, the result isn’t always carefully-worded, balanced and diplomatic. But you can bet that it’s honest.
An excellent example for such an unofficial blog hub community is McDonald’s Talk, a non-sanctioned employee blog on LiveJournal. It contains gossip, rants, advice, criticism and anything else under the sun that the authors (most of them employed at McDonald’s) find relevant. It has effectively become a virtual water cooler for those toiling under the Golden Arches, with over 300 registered members in the McDonald’s Talk community and dozens of comments under some of the many posts.
While it’s clear that McDonald’s Talk is a place where frustrated employees can vent and disgruntled customers can complain (the slogan on the LiveJournal community account is We love to see (or rather, hear) you gripe) it may come as a surprise to some that there are also quite positive comments, for example about working with friendly colleagues or dressing up for Halloween.
Perhaps the most interesting dimension of the blog is how it very effectively provides information on virtually every aspect of working at a fast food restaurant. Anything from sauce dispensers to what treatment is appropriate for pregnant co-workers is debated and discussed. Interestingly enough, the focus is not really on McDonald’s as a corporate entity, but on those who work there and their every-day concerns.
It seems plausible that the corporate entity is keeping a watchful eye on McDonald’s Talk. Many of the bloggers provide enough information about themselves to allow identification and the site under the verbose banner I’m hatin’ it would probably prove quite vulnerable to a legal attack from the pundits’ employer.
Still, it demonstrates good instinct that the upper echelons of the company have not tried to suppress the blog. Not only is there no way to effectively stop your employees from complaining - ever -, but to gripe in the 21st century means to gripe on the Net, whether legal departments like it or not. Secondly, McDonald’s Talk is quite a lot less of a flamefest than one might assume and fairly little of the criticism is actually directly levelled at the company as such (impossible-to-please customers, annoying co-workers and arcane regulations are another thing). Instead, the blog is a valuable source of insider information and it no doubt plays an important role for the community that is flourishing around it.
How should companies deal with unauthorized blogs? Most importantly, they should be aware of their existence. Watch, observe and learn should be the motto - as I assume McDonald’s is doing. After all, the company has shown to value blogs as part of its communications strategy before.
More on McD Talk at Foodfacts and The Employee Factor.
Nov 1st, 2007 | Chrysler, Corporate Blogging, Johnson & Johnson, Many Eyes, Marriott, Palm Inc, Visualization | 1 Comment
If blogs were people, this would be a little bit like a beauty pageant. I’ve taken four blogs from my corpus of company blogs and analyzed them using IBM’s Many Eyes. Many Eyes is a hosted software tool for quick and simple data visualization - you should try it out if you ever have something statistical to present.
Here are the four (randomly picked) candidates.
1. JNJ BTW
Posts: 52
Words: 17077
Sentences: 729
Average Word Length (AWL): 4.8
Average Sentence Length (ASL): 23.4
Average Words per Post (AWpP): 328.4
Word Cloud:
Word Tree:
2. Chrysler Blog
Posts: 59
Words: 13341
Sentences: 780
Average Word Length (AWL): 4.6
Average Sentence Length (ASL): 17.1
Average Words per Post (AWpP): 226.1
Word Cloud:
Word Tree:
3. The Official Palm Blog
Posts: 46
Words: 9262
Sentences: 446
Average Word Length (AWL): 4.5
Average Sentence Length (ASL): 20.8
Average Words per Post (AWpP): 201.3
Word Cloud:
Word Tree:
4. Marriott on the Move
Posts: 60
Words: 4937
Sentences: 305
Average Word Length (AWL): 4.5
Average Sentence Length (ASL): 16.2
Average Words per Post (AWpP): 82.3
Word Cloud:
Word Tree:
All four candidates have around 50 entries, with word counts ranging from roughly 5,000 (Marriot on the Move) to about 17,000 (JNJ BTW). I’ve picked different starting terms for the word trees, depending on the the respective company’s industry, but you can easily search inside a tree for any word that occurs in the blog.
Nov 1st, 2007 | Corporate Blogging, ROI of Blogging | 1 Comment
A while back, I posted about commercial speech and blogging - a hot topic in terms of what risks are associated with the institutional use of blogs. Complementing the risk question is the discussion of what benefits blogging has in a corporate context, apart from “me too” pressure associated with the social media craze. The return issue is also brought up in this Computer World article, in which author Heather Havenstein describes the efforts of network performance support provider NetQoS (blog).
At such companies, executives or full-time in-house bloggers like Boyko are writing posts. Although the goal is still to raise the profile of a company, the new-style blogs often tackle unconventional topics that may not have an obvious effect on businesses’ bottom lines.
The ROI question (see discussion here and here) remains impossibly fuzzy, at least from where I’m standing*. Will we ever have a way of measuring hard return on something like trust, presence or influence? I doubt it. From my vantage point, however, blogs have fairly little impact on anything that’s short-term, because they rely on network effects to become influential. They also tend to be identified very strongly with the individual writer, usually more than with the theme or topic of the blog (though this varies). That’s why it’s so hard to launch a good marketing blog: they tend to have little topical breadth** because the focus is usually on the product and the author is either invisible or has no room for personal expression***.
* When talking about public-facing blogs. The ROI of internal knowledge blogs could be slightly easier to measure.
** Of course, this very much depends on your product.
*** In a blog such as this one.
Oct 28th, 2007 | Corporate Blogging, ROI of Blogging, Social Web | 6 Comments
Originally this was meant to be a response to my friend and personal muse Katherine Ferranti, but as it sometimes happens a brief email grew into something rather lengthy and bloggish and since I’ve neglected CorpBlawg far too long anyway, I decided to post here instead. Katherine pointed me to this piece on GigaOM about social productivity that is both a relatively low-key sales pitch for Jive Software’s Clearspace collaboration package and a general discussion of social software in organizational environments. The basis is an entry in Jive’s own blog that outlines what the company’s Sam Lawrence calls social productivity. Here’s a snippet:
Social Productivity is different […] it’s about getting work done outside the team of like-minded people you work with everyday. With social productivity, an idea is introduced and all sorts of people get to chime in on it. These could be people you work with a lot, people you’ve never worked with or even people outside your company. Now all of a sudden your idea has been developed openly by all sorts of people who bring their own, valuable perspective. You can evolve those ideas into all sorts of collaborative or locked content but thanks to the social whetstone, your original idea is much stronger now. This isn’t just true “behind the firewall” within companies. Look at Wikipedia, the content has been built, written and organized more relevantly than any single or traditional team of authors could have done.
First of all - while I’m a huge fan of Wikipedia, it is objectively impossible to judge how relevant its content is and your judgment very much depends on several factors (What kind of information are you looking for? What article are you looking at? Are you looking for expert knowledge or just a brief introduction into a topic?). But let’s forget about Wikipedia for a moment and focus on social productivity.
With social productivity, an idea is introduced and all sorts of people get to chime in on it. These could be people you work with a lot, people you’ve never worked with or even people outside your company.
Wait - people outside of my company? What motive would they have to support a company project, assuming they aren’t getting paid for it? People outside my company don’t have any incentive to chime in - at least I have significant trouble imagining why they should want to.
The trouble is that the goal of a company isn’t to benefit a social network or community, it is to make money. This places severe limitations on social productivity, unless you assume that people enjoy working for free. With slight cynicism, one could contend that this is what the concept implies - let’s not be so uptight about who is paying whom, after all we’re all collaborating on everything anyway, right? Work is such a old-fashioned concept. Let’s just call everything collaboration and get people to give away their productivity for free and tada - there you have your ROI of social software.
I’m not implying that this is what Lawrence means. Clearspace is meant to make communication across departments and hierarchies easier and anyone who has ever worked for a large organization knows what a serious issue that is. But I think it’s important to note where the structure and purpose of a corporate entity are incompatible (or at least in conflict) with those of a social network and why the metaphor “let’s be just like Wikipedia” just doesn’t work.
Wikipedia exists for the sole purpose of creating a resource from which everyone will benefit in the same way, with the added perk that those who contribute are rewarded with social prestige among their peers. Some contributors are in it simply to improve the resource, others are in it because they feel rewarded by playing a role in the Wikipedia community. But in contrast to a company, people always work for some kind of personal gain, be it prestige or a feeling of achievement and they know that everyone else befits in the same way. Of course the employees of a company also work for personal gain, but for a monetary one and one that is built on the premise that not everyone benefits in the same way. In return for a salary and the perspective that I might increase some day they work for the good of the company - which should eventually translate into personal gain (more money). They accept hierarchical structures and persistent pressure to turn corporate goals into reality because there is a payoff. That isn’t a bad thing - it’s how organizations with paid employees work. And undoubtedly a large percentage of people loves their job and aren’t in it purely for the money. But it’s not the same way Wikipedia works, for obvious reasons.
Only after resolving the conflict between personal and organizational goals can the introduction of social soctware into the corporate world be successful. As long as employees feel that they have more to gain by competing than by collaborating they will do just that. Sharing makes sense when the playing field is perfectly level. Which it hardly is, out there in the corporate world.
