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.
Hi Sophia
I’m interested that you’ve found blogging a more useful tool than wikis for group communication. Any tips on organising the blog posts to make it easy to find what you need? And also, would you use some other document sharing tools alongside it or is there an easy way of incorporating access to shared documents on to the blog?
Alison
Hi Alison
I think the reason blogs have worked better as a starting point for teams using social networking tools to collaborate is that the journal format makes it more intuitive to understand how the information is organised. The advantage and disadvantage of blogs is that you can’t change – but you can add to – what’s already there. It makes it easy to see how a conversation has developed. But it can’t become the end product in the way a wiki can: if a conversation becomes really intricate, someone has to take it offline and edit all the threads into a combined answer.
So once a group is comfortable sharing information online, I’d get them to use a mix of blogs and wikis, depending on what they were trying to achieve. Meanwhile, I think the combination of free search, tagging and archiving of blog posts makes them very easy to organise with very little effort. If categories are well used and clearly displayed, they’re a great way of illustrating what the blog’s about. I’d limit the use of ‘pages’ on a heavily-used blog, as people may well forget to look at anything behind the home page.
As for shared documents, my experience is that blogs are pretty rubbish for them! Great for documents that arent’ going to change, but very fiddly for documents that are. I’m still experimenting, but at this point I find wikis and dealrooms better ways of dealing with them. Or SharePoint, which so many companies are using now.
s
Hi Sophia,
Thanks for your message, it might be interesting to talk at some point! I’m heavily involved with external online community-building at the moment, and have thought a lot about how to engage with people. I even have a theory…
Hi again Sophia – I’m back from my hols! We should meet for lunch or a coffee sometime. you can get my number from Alison Clayton Smith.
I don’t find wikis all that helpful – they seem to get used and then forgotten owing to gaps in the response loop; but then the culture that I’m working in is actually not that familiar with any of this.
I’ve seen Ning, which I rather liked, and am currently using a version of Drupal – both of those offer ways of making custom communities. My main beef is that there needs to be a process or a plan in place, overseen by someone who will make the community happen, because if it’s simply down to voluntary action it may never take off.
The other thing that I think is incredibly helpful is willingness to create content (text, links, opinions, pictures); there can be real barriers to doing this in organisations where opinions tend to be guarded.
Anyway, very happy to talk about this and i’m interested in how you use wikis.