Blogs provide the double-edged sword of direct contact with employees who may have been previously walled off, protected by
public-relations handlers. At Northern Voice, a recent Canadian blogging conference, keynote speakers Tim Bray of Sun Microsystems
and Microsoft’s Scoble discussed how blogging allows them to speak directly with users, thereby giving them a clearer picture
of what customers want. But putting John from engineering or Jane from programming in front of the public can potentially
backfire. Will John and Jane be able to walk the fine line between frankness and saying just a bit too much?
“I believe that companies will soon start assigning specific people with good communication skills to public blogs intended
for specific audiences, so you’ll have one person communicating with customers through a blog, another dialoguing with the
press, another providing information for investors,” Bluebill’s Gilbane says. “And companies who haven’t already developed
a clear policy on employee blogging will soon have to do so.”
On his own blog, Sun’s Bray lays out a logical corporate blogging policy for Sun employees. His suggestions read in part:
“It’s perfectly OK to talk about your work and have a dialog with the community, but it’s not OK to publish the recipe for
one of our secret sauces. … Talking about revenue, future product ship dates, road maps, or our share price is apt to get
you, or the company, or both, into legal trouble. … Using your Weblog to trash or embarrass the company, our customers, or
your co-workers is not only dangerous but stupid.”
Corporate blogs don’t have to be public. IBM has several outward-facing blogs for communicating with customers, but the company
also has BlogCentral, an internal IBM pilot program that enables employees to keep personal blogs. As of March 2005, BlogCentral
has nearly 8,000 registered users and almost 3,000 active Weblogs with a total of 20,000 posts made, according to Dan Gruen,
researcher at IBM.
“Because BlogCentral is searchable and because you can easily see the latest postings across BlogCentral as a whole, it can
help you discover colleagues throughout the company with interests similar to your own,” Gruen says. “We’ve seen people using
blogs to diary their daily experiences using a new technology or building a new kind of system, monitored by others as a sort
of real-time virtual apprenticeship, which lets them observe events as they unfold and see the issues that arise and how they
are addressed.”
Wiki while you work
A blog is like a presentation. It’s a one-to-many form of communication: a single person speaking to an audience who can comment
on, but not change, the content. By comparison, wikis are a many-to-many collaborative tool. Anyone with access can add to,
change, or delete information contained in a wiki. Think of it as a huge whiteboard, one where everyone has a marker and is
welcome to scribble.
IBM’s Gruen agrees that wikis are great tools both for providing information and gathering feedback. “Unlike blogs, wikis
are designed for continual editing of a set of documents, making them very suitable for developing a knowledge base,” he says,
adding that wikis “provide an easy-to-access method for groups or teams to collaboratively construct content, particularly
in situations where it is important to aggregate input from multiple people.”
Wikis develop to suit the needs of their users. Unlike a blog, where users would just be pushing content, a wiki pulls out
the best information from a wide pool of users.
Collaboration or chaos?
The free-form nature of wikis -- and to a lesser extent blogs -- can be a benefit, but this lack of control over content causes
some companies to wonder whether these tools might prove detrimental to business. Many struggle with the issue of how much
autonomy to allow employees when they blog.
Sun Microsystems’ employee bloggers must agree to a strict company policy before they set up their corporate blogs. But there
is no further vetting process for content; whatever employees write is posted without review.
Still, public-relations professionals worry that too-candid blogs may result in branding meltdowns. This fear results in some
odd restrictions. For example, Microsoft bloggers generally refuse to respond directly to press requests asking for comment
on their own blog posts, instead passing such requests along to Microsoft’s PR agency, Waggener Edstrom.
The smart business blogger accepts the fact that anything put in writing and transmitted over the Internet is about as private
as a postcard. Recently, posts from Intel President Paul Otellini’s blog were made public. Otellini’s very open comments,
intended to be viewed only by Intel employees, presented a candid view of the challenges Intel faces, including praise for
competitor AMD.
But Otellini couldn’t have been surprised to see the contents of his blog leaked. As he wrote in his first post: “While this
is intended as an internal blog, I recognize that it will become public -- welcome to the Internet! As a result, please recognize
that I may be a bit limited in my comments and responses, to protect Intel.’’
Stressing user accountability and regular review of postings is critical when wikis are used to share important information,
such as security data. Bluebill’s Gilbane believes that enterprise wikis will soon become more like blogs, with permission-based
features that allow greater control over posted content.
“The more useful a wiki is to the enterprise, the more you need some sort of control over who can edit and add content,” Gilbane
says. “You need to define the fine line between collaboration and a complete free-for-all or it can become a real mess. That
said, we’ve had a difficult time finding a skeptic to include in our upcoming panel on enterprise use of wikis and blogs --
everyone we speak to is very enthusiastic about the benefits of this technology.”
E-mail
Printer Friendly
Reprints
(InfoWorld) - In the litigious world we live in, deploying a unified communications platform in your enterprise could...
