Making Effective Enterprise Blogging Evolve

Evolution is one of the most powerful phenomena known to man. Through evolution (adapting to their environment), single-celled organisms have turned into birds (flyers), fish (swimmers), and human beings (thinkers!).

The cheapest, quickest, and easiest way for a company to promote blogging and other knowledge-sharing practices is to transform itself into an environment that induces an evolutionary process of knowledge sharing.

Now let’s see what an environment that induces evolution is.

Evolution rewards small changes

The single-celled organism didn’t just wake up one morning as a bird. It began by dividing into two cells.

Multicellular organisms proved to be better adapted to certain environments than single-celled ones. Multicellular organisms, therefore, got a better chance to evolve.

Similarly, an employee won’t become a master blogger overnight.

To create effective employee bloggers (information sharers), a company should notice every small step an employee makes toward knowledge sharing. The company should reward the employee while taking into account all those steps. If an employee starts blogging, notice it. If he blogs a lot, notice it. If he blogs on subjects that are important to the company, notice it. If a lot of other employees read his blog, notice it. If he helps spread ideas created by other employees, notice it.

But noticing isn’t enough. The company must let the employee know that his actions have been noticed. It must reward him. Without feedback and reward, there is no evolution.

Evolution handsomely rewards ‘good changes’

Not all changes are of equal value. The prehistoric bird that developed wings that were strong enough to propel it through the air was much better rewarded than the bird that grew a fourth toe on its feet. The benefits that birds got from flying were powerful enough to make flying birds dominate the class. Eventually we were left mostly with flying birds.

Similarly, when an enterprise blogger comes up with great ideas, finds a way to make or save the company money, or acts as a channel to spread knowledge throughout the company, he should be handsomely rewarded.

Handsomely rewarding effective bloggers will greatly speed up the evolution of effective blogging and knowledge sharing in the enterprise.

The problem with the evolutionary approach

The biggest problem with using an evolutionary approach to induce effective enterprise blogging is defining the reward structure. If the company counts and rewards the wrong things, strange and unexpected blogging behavior will occur. For instance, if the company puts too much weight on the number of posts a blogger writes, bloggers will blog a lot about unimportant (and potentially distracting) matters.

Rewarding the right actions, setting the correct reward for each action, and determining when and how to reward corporate bloggers are crucial to creating the right environment in which knowledge sharing will emerge.

If creating the reward structure is so tough, then why do it?

Why you should use the evolutionary approach

When the reward structure is exactly right, effective enterprise blogging and information sharing will emerge quickly, and with amazing results.

This is the third article in the Enterprise 2.0 series.

Want to read the rest of the series? Subscribe to this blog!

Help protect kids around the world and get 2 links

Please read this to the end and you will:

a) be doing a good thing
b) get not one, but 2 links (one of them from this PR6 blog on a PR7 website)

I just got wind of this new and amazingly important initiative that is intended to shield children from web pornography.

If you are an adult content web master please read this …

Please require a password-protected login before allowing even free access to explicit adult content. We understand that selling porn is your business and we respect your right to make a legal living. But understand our legitimate concerns and work with us. You already have the “warning adult content” on your websites. Yet kids, who are not legal customers of your product, ignore the warning. So to prevent them from having direct access to explicit images, texts and sounds, the simplest way is to have a password-protected login. No more “free tours” before a visitor supplies basic information.

More about this initiative can be found here…

http://bloggerpower.wordpress.com/

There you can find details on how to support this initiative and also get your first link.

To get a link from me just ask for one in the comments after you do the following

  1. Support the initiative as specified in the above link
  2. Promise a link from your blog to the first 5 bloggers that …
    1. Leave a comment on your blog
    2. Support the the initiative
    3. Promise a link … (you get the point)

I will be giving a link to the first five bloggers that follow suit.

Move quickly…It’s a good cause and some nice links.

And the first link goes to kung fu cabbage - thanks zane

Wiki adoption in the enterprise

It seems that adoption is the biggest problem of Enterprise 2.0 applications. Jerry Bowles, an Enterprise Irregular, writes about the difficulties in getting employees to use wikis.

As I already wrote, I believe it boils down to this:

Enterprise 2.0 apps like blogs and wikis make people give the company something that was previously their own - their knowledge, expertise and ideas (by forcing the employees to document them). It is only natural that they resist.

For this to be a fair deal, the company needs to give something in return. More specifically - Pay.

How to ignite behind-the-firewall blogging

Is it possible to take the most powerful and productive force on the Internet today and apply it to the enterprise?

Can behind-the-firewall blogging be as effective as the Blogosphere?

Knowledge sharing and collaboration can create amazing results in the enterprise. They can dramatically increase sales, improve productivity, boost morale and much more. If you disagree with me or doubt this, go ahead and read the previous article in this series (but come back).

Igniting knowledge sharing in the enterprise

Igniting knowledge sharing and turning it to a full blown fire is possible by …

having the company “advertise” on corporate blogs. Here is a short recipe:

Management should prepare a list of topics that are important for company (the company will see real benefits if employees share their knowledge of and collaborate on these topics).

Management should then define how much it is willing to pay for blogging on the subject, in the same way that advertising is done in the Internet today–by determining how many dollars they are willing to pay for a thousand page views of an article on the subject.

It should than expose this new incentive model to the employees and . . .

step back.

For example:

If the company wants employees to share sales knowledge and insights, it can define a price tag of $75 for a thousand views of an article about sales. This will result in employees’ writing articles about sales and making sure that everyone reads them. Presto: You have knowledge sharing in the sales department.

Why use the Internet’s advertising model on internal blogs?

Because it gives a employees a powerful financial incentive to do the following:

  1. Work hard on spreading their knowledge (marketing their blogs): It’s a simple equation: the more people read the employee’s tips, ideas, and insights, the more money he or she gets. Employees will send e-mails to their co-workers, talk about their blog at lunch, and beg other company bloggers to link to them.
  2. Write about the most useful/interesting stuff they know: Writing an article about drinking coffee is boring and no one will read it–there’s no payday. Writing a tip that can help you triple your sales is extremely interesting. Everyone will read it! In fact, it will go viral. Some of the employees will send e-mails about it to their friends, effectively doing the marketing for the blogger. In advertising, that’s a gold mine.

Ignoring the Internet advertising model and paying employee bloggers an extra $1,000 a month will turn every employee into a blogger–but will turn none of them into an effective blogger.

A must-read tip about paying corporate bloggers

The company has to be generous! Especially at the beginning. The first bloggers are the company’s blogging poster girls/boys. They will spread the idea of knowledge sharing and collaboration throughout the company. If they are financially successful, others will quickly follow and knowledge sharing and collaboration will spread like wildfire.

Where to begin

Just do it! Setting up a blog and counting page views are extremely easy. Getting a small budget for the experiment is even easier. Paying only for page views on topics that are beneficial to the company is a bit more complex, but it can be done manually at first (I’ll discuss this in another article).

A friend of mine once told me, “Working with cutting-edge technologies and cutting-edge ideas means that sometimes, you get cut.” Your company should be aware that it might suffer some paper (blogging) cuts. But reaping the benefits of knowledge sharing and collaboration can supercharge even the largest company. Don’t delay!

This is the second installment in a series of articles about Enterprise 2.0.

Don’t miss the rest of this series! Subscribe to this blog.

A Digital Book for a Digital Ghost

DG got a digital book. It seems amazing, and immediatly I wanted one as well. But since I have a track record of buying gadgets and using them once, I’ll wait for DG to use it for a couple of months before I ask my friends (did I ever mention that you are my best friend) to get me one.

If you could, DG, please let us know after a couple of months, if it’s really that great.

I also need a nap

Just follow the link.

If you have kids, you’ll understand.