Blogging for beginners

I’ve been working on some experimental collaborative blogs, as a way of helping teams share knowledge that doesn’t sit locked away in their individual email inboxes. After many false starts, a couple of teams have recently developed a business blogging habit that works for them. Here’s what I’ve noticed:

It takes 2 or 3 regular bloggers to keep posting away (out of a team of maybe 10) for several weeks before the others have the courage to join in.

It only takes 1 or 2 blog posts to really ring a bell with the group for the blog to take off. Suddenly people are commenting on it and talking about it in meetings and they can visualise how it can be useful. Very hard to predict what those blogs will be. In one case it was recommending a particular journal. Go figure.

A real value of a group blog is that the team can find more about each others’ special areas of interest. Rather than taking up time in meetings, they can go off exploring links and developing their own knowledge. Plus they develop a new respect for their colleagues’ expertise.

Sometimes you just have to show people the value of accessing a shared website rather than relying on email to share information. When they see it, they get it, but seeing a bullet-point list of benefits doesn’t have the same effect. (So I’m not going to give one here. But it was tempting …)

A blog can often do what a wiki was designed to do, but in a more accessible way. There’s something about that journal format that’s compelling. A wiki index just isn’t the same.

It helps to have a critical mass of subject matter when you’re launching a blog to a new team. One way of doing it is to get them started by using an email distribution group – familiar territory – then cutting and pasting the good stuff into the blog. The teams I’ve done this with have sped up the learning curve the fastest.

One minute you’re explaining the difference between a blog and a wiki, and the next thing you know you’ve unleashed a power networker on Facebook. When people get it, they really get it. Is that a bad thing for business? No. Having a bunch of people who can easily access knowledge and ideas and network online is going to be increasingly essential.

Do blogs and wikis mean the end of the corporate intranet? No. They do a different but complementary job. I’ve had this conversation many times and I’m sure I will again. Especially with managers and editors of corporate intranets.

Why isn’t it easy?

I regularly work with people who are struggling with how to share knowledge and work in teams without a heavy burden of admin. They think about it a lot and they’ve been doing it for years, so why isn’t it easy?

Recent examples include: the investors in retail property funds in Central Europe who discover just before signing a deal that they’re missing 2 essential documents they didn’t know they needed. The outsourcing project managers who are so busy preparing for the next iteration that they’re in danger of forgetting the lessons they learned on the last one. The lawyers working on common new business plans across Europe who aren’t sure who the experts are among them, or what their latest targets are, or how to find out what happened in meetings they couldn’t make.

They’re all very good at what they do, and so busy doing it they haven’t found much time to think about how they do it.  As soon as they’re liberated to do exactly that, and we start talking about the armoury of solutions available to them, they quickly become experts on teamworking tools and I have to work to keep up with their vision for what they’d like to do. That’s the first part. Then we work on adapting the best tools to their personalities, skills and working styles, so we can come up with things they will really use, over and over again. Habits and practices that will speed them up, not slow them down. Then I chase and cadjole them into using them, adapting as we go, until they’re second nature.

The best bit is when we’re working on the second or third project – whatever they’ve called me back for – and I’m busy extolling the virtues of some tool we’ve explored in the past. And I get that raised-eyebrow ‘oh we’ve done that a thousand times, doesn’t everybody use that?’ dismissive look. And I know I can move on to something else that still – dammit – manages not to be easy.