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.

Posted on February 19, 2007 by Yoav Ezer 
Filed Under Collaboration, Enterprise 2.0, Methodology, Office 2.0, Web 2.0

Comments

4 Responses to “How to ignite behind-the-firewall blogging”

  1. nettie hartsock on February 21st, 2007 9:43 am

    Yoav – great tips!

    Nettie

  2. Yoav Ezer on February 21st, 2007 6:54 pm

    Thanks Nettie

  3. Christine on February 22nd, 2007 8:27 pm

    I wonder though – if pay for post is really the precedent you want to set inside your company. If you do this, the employees will always think that blogging is not an integral part of their job – because they get “paid” outside of the job for it… (and maybe this endeavor would be better suited to a wiki? – just a thought ). Perhaps another way is to make it part of their goals and objectives…

    If the goal is knowledge transfer and knowledge share… perhaps that’s something that could be “owned” by a community leader, ie, using your example you might have the “sales excellence forum” where employees could write in and ask for advice on sticky sales situations.

    Of course, it’s all culture dependent… and I’m sure developers and tech support ppl will be motivated to document their expertise in different ways than sales people – who are by nature – dollar driven. But, I do shy away from dividing Web 2.0 activities from the course of normal business – and paying for them to do it seems to do that…

    My two cents anyway. I’m interested to see what other people think.

  4. Yoav Ezer on February 22nd, 2007 9:22 pm

    Hi Christine,

    Thanks for stopping by and for your insightful comment.

    I might have gone a bit too far with adapting the Internet’s incentive model for enterprise blogging. The reason that this model looked so good to me is that it encourages the two activities we want from enterprise blogging:

    a) knowledge sharing
    b) knowledge spreading (transfer)

    Your suggestion that the reward structure should be more in line with the employee’s job definition/goals is 100% on target. Maybe the company should expand the their job definition to include blogging and add a monthly reward (honorary and financial) along the lines of … “Sales Blogger of the month”.

    I’ll make another go at it.

Leave a Reply