When Should Blogging Be Mandatory?

After my post Make Blogging Mandatory for Knowledge Management, there has been a continuing flurry of thoughts about mandatory blogging floating around:

• Knowledge Management Made Mandatory? from Mary Abraham
• Going with the flow from Mark Gould
• Blogging Mandatory Or Voluntary? from Mike Gotta
• Unsocialable Uses of Social Media from Mary Abraham

When Jack Vinson made his knowledge management start blogging he used the term flogging.

I think that is how most people would interpret forced blogging.

Forced blogging would just be another bad KM system that is poorly populated with content and outside the flow of most people's work.

That being said, there are situations where blogging can be mandatory. If the team decides to manage a project through a blog (or wiki) then the team can decide to make blogging mandatory. In that case, the blog post is replacement for email. The team blog is not asking people to take the extra step of crafting a blog post. You are merely asking them to change the way the team communicates. You are just changing the process, not adding to it.

As Michael Idinopulos coined the phrase you are putting blogging "in the flow, not above the flow."

You are not asking people to take individual positions in individual blogs. You are asking them to contribute to the flow of information for a particular project or case. You are merely replacing email communication with blog communication. That is a great idea.

Enterprise 2.0 Progress Report

In early April we rolled out Sharepoint 2007, upgrading our intranet platform from SharePoint 2003. I have been keeping track of the number of wiki pages and wiki libraries.

As of today we have:

wiki libraries: 9
wiki pages: 313, which is a 50% increase over the past month's 205

Progress has been a bit slow as we deal with some issues. The notification system still has some problems and we want to get those fixed before we start pushing too hard.

We are still suffering from the wiki's failure to show the changes to the wiki page as part of the notification. [See Sharepoint Wiki Disaster.]

Connections in Context Replay

On June 20,  I was the moderator of a webinar: Connections in Context – The New Face of CRM sponsored by the Knowledge Management Peer Group of the International Legal Technology Association. The speaker was Oz Benamram the Director of Knowledge Management of Morrison & Foerster.

A replay of that webinar is now available on the ILTA website: Connections in Context - Who Mentioned CRM?

Enterprise search has become the standard for helping to make organizations’ information retrieval processes more efficient. Improving user access to data across the enterprise is key.  But effective search can do so much more than just improve existing business processes, it can transform your business network by exposing otherwise hidden expertise, customer relationships and cross-selling opportunities. In this session, Oz Benamram demonstrates how to transform your business development process with enterprise search by automatically sharing relationship connections and context throughout the enterprise and provide the benefits of a contextual, searchable network to your stakeholders to achieve maximum adoption and effectiveness.

Make Blogging Mandatory for Knowledge Management

At my panel on What Blogging Brings To Business at the Enterprise 2.0 Conference, there was some discussion about whether a company should make blogging mandatory. I sense the audience and the panel thought it was a bad idea.

Mary Abraham of Above and Beyond KM calls it Knowledge Management Made Easier and points to a story by Tim Leberecht:  The Writing Organization: Knowledge Management Made Easy. Mary seems to think mandatory blogging would be a good idea.

Dave Snowden points to a blog post from Stephen Holt [Mandatory employee blogs: one way to boost knowledge] which seeks to make blogging mandatory as a means of making tacit knowledge explicit. Dave's reaction:

"Aside from the perpetuation of the myth of tacit-explicit knowledge conversion (more on this tomorrow), the idea of compulsion flies in the face of all theory and practice in social computing.  Its a classic; find something which is working, then ruin it by compulsion."

I am in Dave Snowden's camp. I think mandatory blogging is a bad idea.

After reading Groundswell this weekend, the nature of participation in social media became more clear. Not everyone is a "creator" (as the authors of Groundswell would label them). If you are a blogger, you are a "creator."

Blogging is about consuming and commenting as much as it is about posting. I encourage people to become part of the conversation of social media. I read hundreds of blog posts for every post that I write. I make comments on others blogs.

One of  the powers of blogging (writing them, reading them and commenting on them) is that it reduces thoughts and knowledge to a place where they become findable.  That is great for knowledge management.

But there are lots of other ways to communicate using social media other than blogging.  These social media tools are also great for knowledge management.  The better move is to encourage communication through the platform communication tools of social media.  These web-based communication tools make it much easier to find the content than email based communication.

I would prefer that someone on  my client team update the wiki page for the client's matter more than that that person putting up a post on their own blog. I would prefer someone tagging a document as a good precedent. I would prefer someone commenting on one of my blog posts to point out an alternative approach.

The key is to realize that you can communicate with the web and that communication on the web can be better leveraged to capture knowledge and leverage it for reuse.

Why Does John McCain Hate Me?

John McCain's take on bloggers:



Thanks to John Husband of Wirearchy for pointing this out.

Book Review: Groundswell

After starting to read Groundswell, I devoured it over the last few days. Charlene Li and Josh Bernoff write a good book. If you are involved in social media you should definitely read this book.

I admit that I jumped ahead to chapter 11 of the book: The Groundswell Inside Your Company. That chapter seemed the most interesting to me since I am mostly interested in the impact of social media within the enterprise. That chapter provided a great deal of insight, so I decided to jump back to page 1.

Charlene and Josh group consumers into six different categories of participation: Inactives, Spectators, Joiners, Collectors, Critics and Creators. They use a paradigm of a ladder to show the level of participation and call it the Social Technographics ladder.

When designing an online community or when reaching out to your customers with social media, you should look at where they stand on the ladder. Forrester's offers a basic tool for Building Your Customers' Social Technographics Profile on the Groundswell Website.

The focus of the book is not about technology, although technology has a role.  The book is about listening to your customers, your clients and your employees to improve your business.  The book shows that there are some new ways to do that listening and to interact with your constituencies. 

For full disclosure, Josh did send me a copy of the book gratis. But you should buy it. It is definitely worth adding to your bookshelf.

Watching The Tour de France

One of my favorite things about July is the Tour de France.  I have been disappointed with the doping scandals over the last few years. But the competition is still fantastic: Three weeks of riding, over 2,000 miles, up and down mountains.

It was great watching the surge of power this morning from Alejandro Valverde as he flew past Kim Kirchen to win today's stage and win the first yellow jersey. If you want to root for Americans, there are two US based teams this year: Slipstream Sport's Garmin-Chipolte and High Road Sport's Team Columbia.

Wired Magazine put together a collection of materials on How to Follow The Tour Online.  Last year I preferred the online coverage from VeloNews.  We generally take advantage of the DVR and replay the coverage from Versus at night. The DVR also allows me to fast forward through some of the less exciting parts of the race on flat stage days.

Google has put together some special street views of the race course: Tour the Tour de France with Street View

Martindale and LinkedIn Redux

In my previous post [LinkedIn is Now For Lawyers] I was impressed with integration of Martindale-Hubbell with LinkedIn.

Steve Matthews of Stem Legal  pointed out that what I thought was a special integration is actually just using LinkedIn's API. Steve doles out the details in a comment to Kevin O'Keefe's post [If you can't beat 'em, join them] and points to this post on the LinkedIn blog: Get Your Inside Connections with BusinessWeek & SimplyHired

Sure enough, I went over to SimplyHired and it has the same functionality as Martindale. In a job search site, the LinkedIn functionality is even more powerful than Martindale. I still give Martindale credit for moving in a better direction. But they lose points for originality.

LinkedIn is Now For Lawyers

The venerable Martindale-Hubbell directory of lawyers and law firms has teamed up with LinkedIn to provide a social networking function to the listings in LinkedIn.

When I go to the listing for Debevoise & Plimpton LLP in Martindale-Hubbell, I see the blue LinkedIn icon next to the name of the firm. If you click on the icon, it asks you to logon to LinkedIn to see who you know at the firm. After logging on I get a pop up that shows my two first level LinkedIn connections (Mary Abraham and Patrick DiDomenico) and a total of 131 connections through the second and third level.

Assuming clients are still using Martindale-Hubbell to find law firms and lawyers, this make the directory much more powerful. (Of course that is assuming that clients still use Martindale-Hubbell.) The interface is a bit kludgy, but the information is great. The LinkedIn connection also appears when you look at the listing for some individual lawyers.

As Kevin O'Keefe says, If you can't beat'em, join them.

If you have not joined LinkedIn or have not figured out what it is all about, there is a new video out from the CommonCraft gang on what LinkedIn is all about:




.

Email Deluge About Trying to Free Yourself From Email

In Saturday's post [I Freed Myself From Email's Grip] I pointed to a story about Luis Suarez trying to reduce his use of email by using platform communication tools. He is increasingly using web 2.0 and enterprise 2.0 mainstays like blogs and wikis to answer the questions and host the answers to the questions.

Law firms and businesses operated for a long time with out email.  They were successful without email. There is no reason to think that email is either the zenith or the endpoint for business communications.  Email is an incredibly powerful tool. But it is a closed system where it is hard to find and very hard to reuse information.  Take a look at your email.  Wouldn't you like to have the answers to a lot of those questions saved for later use? Are people trying to turn your email into a content repository?

Based on those propositions, Luis outlined what he was trying to do in I Freed Myself From E-Mail’s Grip.  The unexpected consequence of the article was that he received a deluge of emails from people sending him the article or their thoughts on the article: Giving up on Work e-mail - Status Report on Weeks 15 to 20. (I am a true believer; I sent my message with Twitter and put up Saturday's blog post.) 

The article about reducing email even ended up on the top ten list of most emailed articles on NYTimes.com.

Keep in mind that the goal is not eliminate email. It is a very powerful and very useful tool. But it is not appropriate for every communication.

"I am just saying that it needs to be re-purposed and used for what it was meant to be in the first place: A communication tool for one on one conversations of a sensitive, private or confidential nature. The rest should be going out there, in the open, in the public space(s), transparent and with an opportunity for everyone to contribute!"