k-logs and other enterprise blogging

This page looks at corporate blogging: blogs as 'organisation memory' and as a bridge to corporate clients/contacts.

It covers -

• introduction
• blogging within organisations
• a question of corporate culture?
• competitor intelligence
• blogging as an organisation's public face
• a day in the life of product x?

     introduction

Mainstreaming of blogging - and reduced opportunities for digital gurus after the excesses of the 1990s boom - have been reflected in emergence of the corporate blog or enterprise blog.

It is a phenomenon that has arguably attracted more theorists and observers than actual practitioners, with a proliferation of academic seminars, self-promotion by corporate blogging enthusiasts and often uncritical reception by members of the blogosphere. Estimates of uptake by business and non-government organisations are problematical, as much is presumably taking place behind firewalls on corporate intranets.

Corporate blogging has essentially taken two forms.

The first is blogging within organisations, sometimes characterised as 'organisation memory', 'knowledge blogs' (aka k-logs or klogs) or 'competitor intelligence' blogs. It aims to capture an organisation's tacit knowledge, provide a readily accessible repository of expertise, facilitate project development, provide an annotated clipping service about developments outside the organisation or merely serve as a new communication mechanism across offices and divisions.

The second form is blogging directed outside the organisation, aimed at building a bridge between the organisation and its customers or other stakeholders. Such blogs have variously reported on a particular enterprise's activities or sought to engage the interest of consumers in a specific brand or product.

There are few accepted benchmarks for assessing the success of uptake by organisations. It is unclear whether corporate blogging delivers better results than traditional mechanisms for sharing information or, more broadly, for building a positive corporate culture.

     blogging within organisations

Inevitably, media hubbub about blogging has been exploited by the business consulting industry.

A range of pundits have accordingly explained how large organisations can -

• replace their tired internal newsletters (in print or electronic formats) and blizzard of memoranda with a corporate blog
• facilitate knowledge management (KM), organisation memory (OM) and collective activity across units/locations through group blogs published on the corporate intranet, supplementing or replacing information sharing through mechanisms such as Lotus Notes
• build teams ("the blog on your intranet is a club-house ... a tree-house for your people, where everyone can join in")
• enhance competitor intelligence, equipping executives and staff with a flow of news items or other information from outside the information and enabling those readers to 'value add' by commenting on such news feeds
• underpin marketing through a blog aimed at readers outside the organisation

The effectiveness of such prescriptions is uncertain. As we noted above, figures about intranet blogs and wikis are contentious, if only because most are protected by corporate firewalls. Few organisations disclose their existence; fewer still provide an indication of costs and outcomes.

In considering blogs aimed at employees it is unclear whether an intranet blog crafted in the internal public relations unit or by the CEO's executive assistant will be seen as more appetising, authentic or trustworthy than current offerings. Blogging as a mechanism for sharing expertise among staff may be attractive simply because most technical manuals are indigestible (although identifying the content and status of information in a manual may be easier).

There are few serious studies about work-group implementation and many of the statements about perceived benefits appear to have been adapted from problematical assertions about the value of blogging per se.

One "blog evangelist" for example argues that

Different voices can appear — In every workgroup there are those who are outspoken and comfortable expressing themselves in meetings, and there are those who aren't. When group conversations are limited to vocal interactions, the group often misses out on the opinions of those who are shy or quiet. With the weblog as an additional communication outlet, the voices that are rarely heard in meetings may open up through writing. People who aren't comfortable speaking on the spot may find the asynchronous nature of the blog more appealing. Someone loath to suggest an idea in a meeting may feel perfectly comfortable proposing it to the group via the blog. The removal of face-to-face conversation changes the dynamic of the interaction, and that results in different conversations.

We'd suggest that some voices might however be wary about going on record: a spoken comment during a meeting is unlikely to be as permanent as text that's accessible on the intranet of a national or international organisation. Having a keyboard - or a corporate treehouse - doesn't mean that everyone can write or wants to play.

Another calls on organisations to

Give everyone in your firm ways to speak online in public. Blogs, bulletin boards, wikis, whatever. Let them write about anything. They spend 2000 hours a year working for you so life at your company will bleed out into the world through a multitude of personal voices.

It has been claimed that

Knowledge blogs help encourage brain dumps, exploration, and think-aloud behaviour. They create connected content, break down silos, allow comments, and can also be treasured as useful searchable archives

Another advocate comments that

Blogs help write thought pieces to guide the organisation on a strategic path. Bloggers can collect and connect information and provide useful overlays of context.

Arguably such a knowledge (and people) centric organisation will avail itself of alternative mechanisms, including f2f meetings and reports.

     a question of corporate culture?

Michael Herman perceptively notes that "for those that have been around long enough, blogging is another instance of the 'technology wheel of reincarnation'", commenting on scope for overplaying the analogy of corporate blogging and water cooler conversation.

The interaction is nothing like water cooler conversation. Blogging is inherently neither two-way nor conversational. Rather blogging is a high-tech version of bathroom graffiti that enables a person to:

a) scan (and optionally read) thousands of cubicle walls with little or no effort, and

b) during a moment of contemplation, add a few new scribbles to their stall wall

Nothing more.

One blogger reflected comments earlier in this profile, suggesting that

most companies don't see the value of having people document anything, much less their daily thoughts. Mostly this is an ROI problem (or a perceived one). Writing good documentation is hard; writing a weblog that is worth the company time it takes to write it (remember, most people won't write on their own time to benefit the company) is also hard ...

If somebody is a good writer, they're probably not going to be using that energy for the benefit of the company; they probably have their own weblog out there that talks about stuff they really care about, or some other creative project outside the company's control

Much of the hype about corporate blogging is an echo of misplaced enthusiasm for groupware (from which few organisations have secured the expected returns) and more broadly for knowledge management, highlighted in works such as The Knowledge Web (London: Kogon Page 2000), Working Knowledge (Boston: Harvard Business School Press 2000) by Thomas Davenport & Laurence Prusak, Knowledge & Communities (London: Butterworth 2000) by Eric Lesser, Michael Fontaine & Jason Slusher and Davenport's Information Ecology: Mastering the Information and Knowledge Environment (Oxford: Oxford Uni Press 19970.

It also assumes that all organisations are the same or - with a dash of klogging - could be. Many organisations are poorly equipped to launch and maintain work unit blogs or wikis because there are

• few precedents
• few champions within the organisation or its peers
• perceptions that blogging is not 'real work'
• an inability, in practice, to measure the return on investment in blogging
• uncertainties about the autonomy of authors
• concerns about responses if particular text is disputed or inappropriate
• often substantial existing investments in groupware (ie in licensing, hardware, training of users and management mechanisms) and content management systems
• a culture that doesn't support autonomous information collection and expression, particularly to readers outside the organisation.

Some intranet blogs, for example, have only come to public attention when particular posts have expunged or the organisation has belatedly developed a policy on internal and external blogging.

Such concerns have not deterred specialist businesses that offer to manage the corporate blogging process or even author a blog on behalf of a work group or the wider organisation. One of our more irreverent clients compares that process to 1970s experiments with poets in residence - creativity was apparently supposed to diffuse from "an unwashed zany longhair" and be absorbed by osmosis - and the adventure training found in organisations that fell victim to the paintball-&-chainsaw zeitgeist.

A blogging advocate asks

Imagine the internal individual blog of a charismatic CEO. Instead of (or in addition to) those Friday afternoon pep talks and the monthly e-mailing of the vision statement, what if the CEO was constantly communicating with the organization through her weblog? The informal tone and personal nature would move beyond the image of CEO as corporate figurehead, and reveal the CEO as a human being.

It's an attractive image. We wonder, however, whether reality might be more difficult.

Would the staff retrospectively savour the musings of the CEO about loneliness at the top - or the chairman's exhilaration about racing his 72 metre yacht - on hearing that a division is to be eliminated or offshored to Bangalore? What if they are all able to scribble on a cubicle wall ... and interact with members of the public or competitors who can read the digital graffiti?

And would bloggers within a government agency bother to put paws to keyboard if they knew that comment about the latest budget cuts or bold ministerial initiative would be identified and expunged by a corporate PR or IT unit that's never embraced the 'tree-house' model?

Those concerns - and anxieties about inappropriate disclosure of sensitive information, personal defamation, exposure to liability or misplaced criticism of competitors - are not restricted to blogs. They are the same issues that have inhibited a range of corporate media such as newsletters.

     competitor intelligence

Recurrent use of military metaphors within major enterprises has fostered interest in enterprise blogs as a tool for competitor intelligence (CI).

Proponents of CI blogging have suggested that it would replace traditional clipping services and media alerts provided by an entity within the organisation (typically the corporate library or public relations unit) or from an external information provider. Items would be abstracted by a specialist for presentation on a blog accessed through the corporate intranet. Readers of that blog would be able to comment on those items, providing assessments, pointing to other sources of data, identifying competitive opportunities and suggesting strategies.

One advocate comments that

Klogs are also a useful, low-cost and flexible tool for competitive intelligence (CI) ... Well-designed CI blogs can help collect, analyse, package, and deliver current awareness and early warning of competitive and regulatory developments for sales staff and top managers ...

John Patrick, acclaimed as "one of ten masters of the Information Economy" and author of Net Attitude: What It Is, How to Get It, and Why Your Company Can't Survive Without It (New York: Perseus 2001), suggests that

Blogs can potentially deliver the grassroots discussions and knowledge-sharing that top-down, corporate-sponsored efforts never could ...

You could call it knowledge management, but that's sort of a hackneyed term, and a lot of people, as soon as they hear KM, they immediately tune out. Actually, I think KM is going to come back again. It never left, it really is important. It's just never been able to work very effectively. Some people have said it was overhyped, but I say it was underdelivered. Nobody argued with the potential of it, it's just that it didn't really happen. Why? For the most part, it was based on the idea of imposed collaboration: Making it work required centralized control over the knowledge and the sharing of it. It's a good theory, but it simply hasn't worked. A lot of companies made people fill out skills profiles, on the theory that when someone, say, needs help with a Linux server installation, they can go into the KM database and find out who the experts are in the company. The problem was that the best experts wouldn't cooperate and considered it beneath them, and at the other extreme, people who worried about getting laid off would be happy to expose their skills, which may or may not be that great.

We're unconvinced that blogging will change those attitudes.

     blogging as an organisation's public face?

What of blogging that is meant to embody a brand or engage with an organisation's constituents?

Claims about consumer cravings for 'authenticity' and - more credibly - wariness about corporate statements mean that suggestions for blogging as the public face of an organisation should be treated with care, particularly if the audience for such a blog does not comprise a client group or is composed of the converted.

The history of advertising suggests that

• few 'messages from the sponsor' are engaging
• consumers are often adept at deconstructing a text
• consumers may be suspicious about advertorial or infotainment texts
• regulatory environments inhibit both content and expression that would encourage a return visit by readers facing a surfeit of online content

As consultants to some publishing projects we've noted that there is nothing like editing by a corporate lawyer to wither every fruit on the vine ... and that such editing is often highly desirable.

Inc.com argued that

blogging is perfect for small businesses - a cheap and easy way to communicate directly with customers, partners, and clients, craft a strong, outspoken online personality, and escape the doldrums of static homepages.

It is perhaps more viable as a mechanism to escape consumer disquiet with more traditional online marketing - newsletters and misdirected email blizzards - that only few years earlier were being just as enthusiastically promoted by many of the same pundits.

Most promo blogs are published by small (or nano- ) businesses, rather than major enterprises. They are particularly associated with the 'creative industries' such as advertising, photography and other graphics services, and with the digerati.

In practice the blogging that offers insights into an organisation's culture and performance has instead been writing by bloggers who see themselves as individuals rather than employees, albeit done on company time, using corporate facilities and centred on 'water cooler conversations'. That has posed questions about ownership, supervision and surveillance.

As recent US cases indicate, some enterprises have sought to crimp comment made by employees on a personal basis - an issue that we've explored in discussing online free speech. Those efforts reflect community and judicial acceptance of limits on employee statements in newspapers, private newsletters and other fora. They are based on assumptions that staff have some obligations to the particular enterprise whether the blog bears that organisation's logo or not.

     a day in the life of product x?

Most brand or corporate blogs have been top-down, presenting a story but not featuring feedback by the consumer.

In that they are akin to advertorial tales in traditional womens' magazines, in which Janet Smith (or Betty Crocker) solved the problems of the world with the help of brand X cake mix or toilet cleanser. Such tales didn't feature reader complaints about the product's effectiveness, expressions of concerns about the cost of 'better living through modern chemicals' or questions about corporate social responsibility.

They are also akin to print and electronic diaries or 'invitations' into the lives of executive wives (eg the spouse of the Prime Minister, President or Governor-General) ... and often as artfully scripted.

Patrick notes that

Some have asked whether there's a role for customers, and there probably is a role for both intranet and extranet blogging. But I think there's a danger that companies might try to invoke some rules to try to edit them, overregulate, overcontrol or sanitize them. Imagine how unread something would be, for example, if Bill Jones, the vice president of consumer safety, writes a blog on something that admonishes people to be careful about something. First, it's corporate-speak more often than not, and second, everybody knows Bill Jones can't find the on-off button on his laptop, so you know there's no way he actually wrote the stuff himself. Blogs, to be credible, must not be overcontrolled, public relations documents. They're best if they're from the grassroots of the organization.

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