The Tendo View

On Wednesday this week, I attended the Online Community Unconference , which was a fascinating experience. If you’ve never been to an “unconference,” it’s an event in which the agenda is created on the fly, on the day of the event, by the attendees. During the first hour, *all* 250 attendees were asked to introduce themselves and then invited to come to the front of the room and suggest the discussion subjects or sessions that they wanted to lead. These were quick 30- to 60-second pitches for discussion topics, written on an 8 ½ by 11 inch sheet of paper, and then affixed to a huge paper grid with time slots down the right hand column and session locations across the top. At the end of the hour, the entire grid was filled with ideas and, of course, the agenda.

I proposed the topic about which I last blogged—Do Corporate Blogs Require a New Approach to Corporate Leadership? Blogging requires a level of authenticity that some corporate cultures might not support. We might have all had management training at some point in our careers, but that was before the advent of social media. In today’s connected world, do you lead your team differently than you did when Facebook and LinkedIn and YouTube and Google/Yahoo didn’t exist?

I was pleased when about 10 people showed up for the discussion. As was explained at the beginning of the day, if no one attends your session, it just means no one was interested in the topic, e.g., don’t take it personally. Yeah, right. I was equally pleased that everyone stayed for the whole hour. We didn’t focus solely on leadership for blogging, as you’ll see from these key take-aways:

Roles. Corporate blogging is best achieved when the company hires a community manager, a person with strong editorial, management, and communications skills who can work with internal employees to encourage their blogs and manage them against guidelines, plan content, edit blog posts as needed/requested, sometimes write blog posts and comments, etc. etc. One community manager in the group shared stories of the challenge of getting executives to blog on a regular basis.

Internal vs. External Blogging. Two of the people in my discussion manage internal blogs that are kept that way since their communities include developers or research scientists who are blogging about company trade secrets. But the internal blogs are also used as a training ground to identify employees who’d be especially effective blogging externally. Once they’ve identified potential external bloggers, the community managers work with the employees to make sure they understand that blogging to the world requires different content than blogging internally (for one, it can’t contain sensitive trade secrets). And the manager will moderate an external blog more stringently than an internal one.

Motivating the discussion. Some companies are starting blogs and don’t have a huge audience; others have the huge audience and just need the bloggers. Regardless of your audience size, the community is better galvanized if it includes feedback and incentives and positive reward. Use other employees to comment back on blogs; measure and publicize page views for blog posts; pick a “comment of the week” and promote it; post a blog that extracts text from comments to encourage more conversation. Being a community manager is a bit like being a party host—you have to seed the audience and encourage their attendance and provide a nice environment for their interaction.

Leadership. In the end, we did decide that blogging requires a different approach to management. Blogging doesn’t work in a highly controlled culture and necessitates a more inclusive leadership style that invites participation.

What’s your corporate blogging experience? Does your company employ a community manager or have an internal blog? How do you motivate and seed the discussion? —Charlotte Ziems, VP, client engagement