I'm beginning to get a little weary of the top-down vs bottom-up divide. It's a small point, but isn't the real paydirt what you might call the side-to-side?
My italics and bold..but what an important point. There is a lot of focus on point-source blogs - where often a single blog is used as a communication channel, allowing, for example, a CEO to "connect" with employees, and to get some real and direct feedback.
Yeah - that's interesting, and for some companies it's even a breakthrough - and I'm speaking from my own consulting experience here with some recent work. But, and here's the point that needs to be emphasized - the CEO blog should be the thin end of the wedge, not the end-goal. Getting senior members of the company blogging should result in more understanding and adoption of blogging, with the aim of creating an internal blogosphere. Why is that good ? Because that's when you start to reap the benefits of being able to aggregate, tag, subscribe, connect, datamine, and share all that information (sometimes known as knowledge) - and not in a formally mandated ("here's your KM template form to fill in to share knowledge") way.
[tags]internal, blogs, CEO, blogging, enterprise[/tags]
I worry that some people will see blogs as an easy way out. They can do it from their desks and convince themselves that they are creating dialogue. I agree that this is just one tool...walking around, talking to people, getting a sense of the real issues, going back to the floor etc is still for me the most important. The visibility of leaders is an issue and this leads to the cultural divide. Blogs great, technology great but creating an emotional relationship with people remains the key for me...and best done when you are visible.
Anna - interesting take - I've yet to see people view blogging as the easy way out, as the easier thing to do is not blog at all. But I take your point - I would never regard blogging (or any of the other social tools) as a replacement for conversation, but they're a great support/enabler for those direct conversations.
Now - if you're in a small org, then the value of internal blogs as a means of connecting may diminish, but their value as a knowledge tool remains - project histories, important news, etc can all be stored (and much more importantly, accessed).
But, say you're in a big company, 1000's of people, spread out over cities, countries and continents. Now you're in a situation where you might not even know who the right person to talk to is. You've a better chance of quickly making the connection (or of having already made the connection), and of being assessing the credibility of the person if there's an underlying network - cue blogs !
Yup - I think Anna's right to say that blogs can't replace management by walking around and similar approaches. But as you say, Anu, scale (and the distance and number of people to be walked to) take up time.
I suspect blogs (and other tools from the Social Software family) aren't a way out of "real conversation", but are a way in to it. One of the values to me as a manager to blogs would be they way, when aggregated, the can highlight "side-to-side" network activity - finding out where and who something has fired up employees interests, fears, enthusiasm or anger.
I may well be wrong, but to be able then to read the feeds and find out what people are thinking allows for more targeted walk, and a more productive conversation at the end of it.
Piers - totally agree.
Yes agree. I mean leaders who don't like to be visible can convince themselves they are having dialogue which is true to a certain extent but people need face to face contact. What is it they say, only 7% of a message is delivered through words, 38% in tone and 55% in body language. I firmly believe as a blogger myself that blogs could play an integral part in the future but as part of a communication strategy not as a replacement. I fear we may be in violent agreement !