Internet Changes Everything

Blogging the Market; Part 2

Continuation from Part 1

Shirky agrees with Sullivan that only indirect methods for revenue are feasible and that blogging “is mass amateurization, and it points to a world where participating in the conversation is its own reward”. Even so, Gizmodo’s affiliate model is such an indirect business model and thus, is subject to several factors that will ultimately decide upon its fate.

Not to forget, Gizmodo has near zero costs. As a blogger noted: “sure it's got a chance to be profitable. Eventually, with affiliate revenue, (maybe) some ad or sponsorship revenue and near zero costs, it will probably eke out a profit someday. Nothing wrong with profit....”.

Dave Winner responded that the odds of making a profit are slim since hordes of people interested in tech gadgets will exhibit more or less the same behaviour: they will blog and most importantly, they will blog for free. So he’d rather ‘google’ when he’s on the lookout for a new gadget rather than go directly to Gizmodo. Of course, if Gizmodo’s reviews showed up on Google, then he might pop to Gizmodo’s blog. In a follow-up to the same discussion, he pointed out that the CEOs of gadget companies will be blogging in the years to come and that’s the most direct business model for weblogs. Anything else is doomed to fail simply because of all those bloggers out there blogging for free, blogging for the mere fun of doing so.

From there on, the discussion snowballed into myriads of other directions. A blogger called Jenny Berger voiced the opinion that “Asking why blogging should be profitable is about as productive as asking why shouldn't it be profitable. Have we not yet figured out that on the Web, there is no "should," only "can?”

Another blogger, Rick Bruner (2002), pointed out that it’s very hard if not actually impossible for this Gizmodo-like model to be economically sustainable unless you have massive traffic.

Although all previous comments have their own merit, the most constructive comment was concerned with the power of engaging the market in a real conversation and that commercial value stems from a real voice unhindered from bureaucratic constraints and standardised corporate PR formats:

It [Gizmodo] looks like a great source of information, and it serves that purpose well. But most of the popular weblogs I read have other aspects that make them more compelling. Things like the personality of the editor(s) behind the weblog. Gizmodo, in its current state is pretty "dry." There's no personality or character there at all, just info. Weblogs should have opinions. Weblogs should have character. Tie it all up together with good information, and you've got a site people will come back to again and again.

So, it’s a matter of whether you speak with a real voice or not. Expanding on the previous comment, another blogger commented that “if enough readers make a "connection" with Gizmodo, if they hear something unique in the voice of the site editors, if they learn to trust the instincts of writers, they'll keep coming back”. That’s the point. Even Dave Winner who had previously positioned himself as a non-believer agreed that if weblogs have a true voice, they also have a chance of succeeding.

The search for community and profit: Slashdot and OpenFlows
Slashdot is perhaps the most vibrant weblog community. On any given day, the Slashdot weblog, entitled News for Nerds, Stuff that Matters, hosts a dozen or so of incredibly lively discussions bonded together by an underlying interest in how technology shapes society, business and politics and vice versa. Housing the virtual discussions of scores of IT professionals, computer science students, open source supporters, and technology enthusiasts, Slashdot has scaled from a one-man-show to a global community unlike any other.

One would logically suspect that for a website to serve over a million of page requests a day (OSDN 2001) and offer an endless flow of news items with accompanying discussions among thousands of people, a legion of system administrators would be required. And it is. Myriads of people voluntarily submit stories to the Slashdot system which with the help of a select few ‘lead-gatekeepers’, who actually constitute the first level of moderation, filters through the sea of submissions and decides which stories will make it to the weblog for discussion among the community. But moderation is not the issue here. In a business world where numbers matter, the sheer volume of community members – calling themselves slashdotters – would normally be expected to be more than sufficient to pay the bills. Slashdot sells a wide spectrum of stuff that nerds are intrinsically interested in. Illuminated keyboards for nocturnal types, cups featuring geek friendly logos, fancy gadgets, sci-fi books, DVDs, CDs and then some are on sale. Plenty of slashdotters are also submitting reviews of books they’ve read along with links that take you straight to bookshops. They also sell space to advertisers who are more than keen to have their banner ad on the top of such a bursting with traffic weblog. But in the end it seems that affiliate marketing, banner ads and all those products fail to provide a sustainable revenue stream. Not enough to keep Slashdot afloat anyway. To supplement its revenue or actually to survive, Slashdot relies on corporate underwriting by the Open Source Development Network (OSDN), a network of web resources catering for the needs of open source developers and owned by VA Software Corporation, whose revenue model in turn is based on selling hardware tuned in for running open source software.

From the viewpoint of a marketer, Slashdot represents an unsolved enigma. Any marketer would pride on the economic invulnerability of a website whose online following and subscriber base equals that of powerful mass media. Any marketer would dream of masterminding a web venture whose main product and organisational process is turning conversations into marketable content. Why then, given the admittedly well-balanced portfolio of revenue streams, does Slashdot have to depend on corporate underwriting instead of sailing off on its own? And if Slashdot, which has garnered a huge community that continuously contributes to the ongoing conversations in the absence of any direct financial incentives, is in absolute need of corporate underwriting, what should one expect from more mediocre undertakings? Is blogging-for-proft, in other words, doomed from the outset? Or to dig a bit deeper isn’t the online community a valuable addition to e-commerce ventures as so many publications and consultants seem to suggest?

For one thing, subscriptions and tip jar donations are not likely to work because volunteers provide the content that makes slashdot what it is. How could anyone ask the slashdotters to pay for access to what themselves provide for free? The same goes for donations. They could, however, insist that slashdotters pay for the privilege of using the community space that the slashdot weblog infrastructure essentially is. I had once rented a huge deserted garage space in the outskirts of Athens to have a party with my friends. I had no objection to paying some money in order to use that space so why not do the same with slashdot? Oops. I forgot that anyone could start a weblog at no cost outside of the time required to set it up. And given that most of the slashdotters are computer-literate, that is not likely to be much of a hassle. I also forgot to mention that the underlying source code that powers the Slashdot weblog –called Slash - is free software. That means that anyone could set up their own version of Slashdot by using Slash. And with some minor tweaking, one could easily change the look-and-feel of the weblog so that it wouldn’t look exactly the same. So, even if one feels that the Slashdot infrastructure is technically or aesthetically superior, there is no restraint in using it and no way whatsoever in forcing one to pay for using it. In fact, there are scores of weblogs powered by Slash.

OpenFlows is one of those weblogs and a lively one. It is an online community sheltered by a weblog. At the same time, OpenFlows is also a commercial organisation whose business model is based on implementing, customising and providing support services on open source/free software. So what does this have to do with weblogs? I will explain. Say I am writer and I have decided to start a weblog to promote my new book and discuss with my readers the ideas in it. Say that I also like the Slashdot weblog and would really like mine to work in a similar manner but look different so that to have its own personal aesthetic character. Unfortunately, even though Slash is free and I could adopt and modify it to suit my needs, I know next to nothing about programming. So what do I do? I arrange that Openflows do it for a fee. This hypothetical example is not far from the truth. No Logo,a weblog dedicated to discussing the ideas in Naomi Klein’s No Logo book is powered by Slash and OpenFlows is the company that tailored it. That’s how Openflows makes money.

A friend of mine while reading the above shouted “So is it customisation and selling services to companies who want to jump on the blogwagon where the money is?” and he went on “consultants and website designers have been doing this for ages…or is it selling weblogs to the masses?”. First of all, I reckon we all agree that consultants and website designers have been doing it for a long time. And selling weblogs to the masses is not my point here, although companies such as Radio Userland and Pyra Labs (recently acquired by Google) are doing pretty well by doing exactly that. My aim is to show that weblogs mean business but not necessarily in such easily identifiable ways. Had it not been for the OpenFlows weblog, which is of course free for all to use, I doubt if any company or individual would hire the programming talent of the company known as OpenFlows. The weblog, in other words, is a living ad of the company. It demonstrates in real-time and under real-world circumstances, rather than in a closed-doors demonstration distanced from reality of the typically encountered product marketing pitches during industry conferences, that the company’s product does not collapse under pressure and the company is really committed to what it’s selling. By engaging in community dialogue at its own weblog, it also demonstrates that the company is open to criticism and feedback from the marketplace. The company is not distancing themselves from the marketplace; on the contrary, they do all they can to connect to the marketplace and engage in a conversation.

In the infuriating Cluetrain Manifesto, theses 34 – 40 read[6]:

To speak with a human voice, companies must share the concerns of their communities. But first, they must belong to a community. Companies must ask themselves where their corporate cultures end. If their cultures end before the community begins, they will have no market. Human communities are based on discourse – on human speech about human concerns. The community of discourse is the market. Companies that do not belong to a community of discourse will die.

For one thing, OpenFlows understands that “companies that do not belong to a community will die”. We should remind ourselves that OpenFlows is cashing in on open source/free software. Making money out of open source/free software is not evil - as some people wrongly believe - as long as the community rules are strictly adhered to. To rephrase that, if the company does not ‘belong’ to the community, a commercial symbiosis (between the community which provides the product to start with and the company) is most certain to fail. And failure results in inability to use the product. Therefore, it is safe to say that Openflows is a community-centric organisation; is run in harmony with the open/source community ethics and its weblog is dedicated to the continuation of public discourse centred on issues of interest to the community.

Felix Stalder, co-founder of OpenFlows, wrote in 1999 that portals exemplify an “old trick all over: if you cannot sell to the audience, sell the audience” and judging by his tone, he wouldn’t be keen on betting his company on mass marketing practices. Three years later, in Open Source Intelligence, which he co-authored with Jesse Hirch, the other co-founder of Openflows, it is made clear that their professional activities and leisure interests are compliant with the community principles. The term Open Source Intelligence, they write, refers to “the application of collaborative principles developed by the open source software movement to the gathering and analysis of information”. Interestingly, the No Logo weblog is one of the three case studies discussed in the paper.

Community weblogs can be immensely valuable for organisations. That is obvious. What is not so obvious is where the revenue will come from. Unfortunately, there is not one-size-fits-all model. For Chris Locke (2001) only corporate underwriting could be a viable and guaranteed revenue model as any other model is currently unable to ensure that community members are not been alienated in the corporate race to eke out a profit. “The problem is that commercial enterprises have clearly defined goals: to sell something. Real communities, on the other hand, are amorphous and can change their goals and, the moment they become incompatible with the goals of the company, they clash. Since the company that owns the servers dictates the policies (after all, it’s private property), communities tend to lose in such conflicts”[7].

Corporate underwriting, in order to harness the community, loosens up the burden on the success criteria that corporate-backed weblogs are judged against. “Success should be measured on the quality of the content and the diversity of its sources – instead of by the sales leads it generates” (Locke 2001:106). These criteria are in stark contrast to the ones set in a e-CRM driven community which evaluate the community’s success based on “the number of participants, amount of time spent in the community, and transaction intensity – [and whose ultimate goal is] to create profiles on individual customers which will yield rich data sets about both individuals and customer segments” (Hagel & Armstrong 1997:143). By this token, Slashdot is immensely successful.

Nevertheless, as a headstrong marketer, I still believe that money can be made. I do not wish to enter the debate on micro-payments. I do however wish to discuss the possibilities of affiliate marketing in the context of massive community weblogs like Slashdot. In the space of a week, more than a thirty posts (or stories) linked to specific products make it to the Slashdot weblog. Some of these posts are celebrating a product, others make sure than none will ever dare to buy it. It is naïve to assume that none of the Slashdotters would buy products discussed favourably within the weblog. Of course they do. As Flemming Funch (2003b)states, collaborative filtering works best with people we trust rather than algorithms and systems similar to Amazon’s that make recommendations based on past purchases. So, in such an affiliate marketing scenario, revenue flows in from referrals. But who gets the money? Is it the marketing genius behind Slashdot who pays for the server expenses that should get the money or the volunteer who provided the link to the product and wrote the review at the first place? Or both? If it goes to the marketing genius, it’s not fair for the volunteers who are then been exploited. If on the contrary it goes to the volunteer, it’s not fair for the marketing genius who through his efforts to put a community together has exposed the link to an audience way beyond the volunteer’s otherwise potential reach. What if they split the profit halfway? The volunteer who provides the link (and the ink) gets 50 percent of the commission and the ‘owners of the weblog’ get the other 50 percent. That would be fair. Of course, a mechanism for automatically distributing the profit would need to be devised but this wouldn’t be that hard to achieve either. The real problem lies in setting up partnerships with e-tailers, not to mention that not all e-tailers offer affiliate marketing programmes the way Amazon does. This is the main flaw in such a business plan. But given time I reckon this flaw could be overcome and this model could offer a glimpse of the future to come as either more and more e-tailers start their own affiliate marketing schemes or eBay and Amazon become the definitive electronic marketplaces for all kinds of products.

Macromedia is blogging at full speed
Ed Krimen, the Vice President for Community Development at Macromedia who also oversees the Macromedia community managers, the Team Macromedia volunteer program, and the content publishing processes for the Designer and Developer Center at Macromedia, has contributed a manifesto celebrating Macromedia’s innovative approach and advocating the use of weblogs for companies. In his “Blogs are HUGE”, which is hosted at a Macromedia page, he explains his enthusiasm for blogs:

Blogs give us the fantastic opportunity to mass communicate directly and quickly with our customers, in an easy-to-read format, without going through slow corporate processes. While Macromedia's online forums are also a very popular method for discussing our products, the blogs give our community managers centralized areas where they can each point out the top topics that they're seeing in the community on a daily basis.

In what I see as a landmark Macromedia document, Ed Krimen makes a compelling case for corporate blogs. There may have been some problems that Macromedia had admittedly encountered during the launch period such as deciding on an appropriate corporate policy regarding the use of weblogs by Macromedia employees for promoting Macromedia products (“Should we associate the blogs with Macromedia? Should the association be clear or vague? Should the blogs be personalized for each community manager?”), but once the ball had started rolling, the feedback from customers and the surrounding community of developers was too overwhelming to ignore. Krimen conveys a great sense of optimism for the future of corporate weblogs and there is no one who can blame him for that. Indeed, the technology press has hailed and welcomed Macromedia’s revolutionary ‘blog strategy’ as being a step ahead of the game, a move that will certainly mesmerise other companies to join the blogosphere.

Jeremy Allaire (Macromedia CTO): http://radio.weblogs.com/0113297/

Mike Chambers (Flash MX): http://www.macromedia.com/go/blog_mchambers

Matt Brown (Dreamweaver MX): http://radio.weblogs.com/0106884/

Bob Tartar (Director): http://btartar.blogspot.com/

John Dowdell (All MX related): http://jdmx.blogspot.com

Sean Corfield (ColdFusion MX, Architecture): http://www.corfield.org/blog/

Waldo Smeets (Macromedia Sales Engineer): http://www.waldosmeets.com/

Michael Williams (Flash Product Manager): http://www.markme.com/mwilliams/

Macromedia bloggers speak with a real voice: a few of the most popular of Macromedia weblogs

It’s captivating to see how responsive the market can be to a blogger speaking with a true voice, even when the blog is solely focused upon the products and services that the company (for which the blogger works) is selling. At first glance, one might reckon that a blog discussing products would not be any appealing – besides, who wants to read about dull stuff like Flash MX? And how could anyone possibly associate with a blogger who’s only writing about products his company sells? Well, quite a few people wished Mike Chambers a happy birthday by leaving a comment at Mike’s blog, although he never said when his birthday is. The fact that his ‘customers’ found out about Mike’s birthday from another weblog without him telling them lends further credibility to the business case for blogging. And it is not rare for Mike to ask his buddies about their opinion on Macromedia plans. Recently, Mike, who’s Flash Community Manager at Macromedia, asked for feedback on Macromedia’s plans to roll out a subscription service (and sixteen people commented on it within the first day that Mike posted the request for feedback), and it was not long ago when he ran a promotion on his blog (in order to test the effectiveness of the weblog as a promotional vehicle) that the response was so overwhelming that Mike admitted he never expected so many people would go for it.

Figure 8: The “Read the Weblog -- Get 10% off” promotion at Mike Chambers’ blog on September 18, 2002

Source: http://radio.weblogs.com/0106797/2002/09/18.html#a281

Since then, promotions have been regular at Mike’s blog, exemplifying how weblogs can be put into use for promotional purposes. Mike Chambers’s blog is demonstrably proving that the market will embrace a blogger when he is out there to communicate with the market rather than trying to sell the ‘audience’ on to some hidden PR agenda.

But why stop there? Why not transform Macromedia’s corporate homepage into a weblog? In a Wired News article (Manjoo 2002), published only a week after the launch of the first five Macromedia weblogs, Tom Hale, Macromedia’s Vice President in charge of Developer Relations, explained: “Would it have been a true blog if we put it on Macromedia.com? Not really.” The article praised the effort and recognised that “it was important to Macromedia that its blogs seemed true, that readers perceived them as the thoughts of helpful community managers instead of corporate shills. If the effort felt disingenuous, like the company was merely jumping on the blogwagon, it could have backfired”. Hale added that “Macromedia asks only that its bloggers keep their postings relevant -- no blogging about what they ate for breakfast, in other words. They're free to discuss any aspect of the software”.

There are certain issues to be stressed here. First, it is obvious that unless the weblog is unique, it’s not going to work. Weblogs are an attempt to break free from the dehumanised, standardised, conformant with corporate guidelines on how to address an audience PR speak. This is why they work and Macromedia’s Tom Hale gets it when he says “readers should perceive the weblogs as the thoughts of community managers instead of corporate shills”. No doubt. But then he says that they wouldn’t have been true blogs if they had put them on Macromedia.com. Why? Is it OK for employees to speak with a real voice but it’s not OK for companies to do so? Primarily, it’s a matter of mindset. Organisations have been stuck with rigid frameworks for way too long. It’s only because of these mind frames that companies are compelled to traffic their voice to press conferences, press releases, investors and shareholders reports. Channelling one company’s voice into routes more dialectic than traditional corporate outlets has been frowned upon as a mere illusion. But there is no illusion here. It all depends on your definition of a company and corporate (or marketing) communications.

But it seems that Macromedia is not constrained by rigid mindsets. As a testament to the power of blogging, Tom Hale responded to my essay when it first appeared at my personal weblog and left a comment:

I don't think it's "OK for employees to speak with a real voice but it’s not OK for companies to do so?" Corporations are made up of people, but in many cases they must hew to the "company line". We *do* link to our blogs from our website, but we make it clear that the blogs are the publications of the individuals, not of the corporation. BTW, I love it when corporations talk "human" to me... If anything, the blogs are the human face of macromedia - managing to be both part of the corporation and separate from it. We are blazing some new trails here - so thanks for the feedback and attention.

tom

Another reader anonymously alerted me to my errors. I thought that there were not any links to the weblogs from any Macromedia pages outside of Ed Krimen’s Blogs are HUGE manifesto. I was wrong. The anonymous comment read:

fyi, the Macromedia weblogs are linked from:

http://www.macromedia.com/desdev/

which is the macromedia developer center

bc

Indeed, the time has come and Macromedia is no longer distancing itself from weblogs, if it ever was. There is a link from Macromedia’s corporate homepage to the Designer & Developer Center which is where you go if you are a developer and where eight of Macromedia employees’ weblogs are listed. It should come as no surprise that those weblogs’ URLs have also changed to reflect Macromedia’s commitment and embracement. For instance, Mike Chambers’s weblog (focused on Flash MX) is accessible at http://www.macromedia.com/go/blog_mchambers and Matt Brown’s blog (focused on Dreamweaver MX) is accessible at www.macromedia.com/go/blog_mbrown.

I should note though that had it not been for my weblog, I would not have known all that. Do you still have any doubts that Macromedia is conversing with the market and that weblogs are market conversations?

Corporate Policy on Employee Weblogs
It is imperative that a corporate policy on employee weblogs be existent so that company lawyers will not worry that someone could take a casual remark or a personal opinion as official policy. As a first step, it would be wise that a notice is put on one’s weblog that makes clear that the views expressed in the weblog are not (necessarily) shared by the ‘parenting organisation’. For example, the notice on Ray Ozzie’s blog reads:

The views expressed on this website are mine alone and do not necessarily reflect the views of Groove Networks, Inc.

Similarly,Jorgen Thelin's weblog,The Architect.co.uk, mentions that:

This is a personal weblog by Jorgen Thelin, Chief Scientist at Cape Clear Software Inc. The opinions expressed here represent my own and not necessarily those of my employer.

AndTim Oren who is a Venture Capitalist with a weblog, states:

This blog is kept by Tim Oren. I'm a partner at the venture capital firm that hosts it, Pacifica Fund…. What I write here is what interests me, and is my own opinion. I make no pretence to objectivity. A VC without a point of view is a useless VC. My opinions don't necessarily reflect those of my partners or the firm, something I find out regularly. Likewise my opinions don't necessarily represent those of other venture capitalists, firms, or the industry as a whole (if there is such a thing). It's all mine, love it or hate it.

That is fairly straightforward and in most likelihood there will be no problems when a single person-employee is responsible for posting to a weblog, especially when the weblog is meant to be a personal project or hobby. The tricky part is with corporate weblogs, when more than a couple of employees post their thoughts to the blog. Regardless of whether the blog is inward - looking (hidden behind a firewall and thus accessible only to employees) or outward - looking (public and accessible to everyone), consider a corporate weblog that serves for brainstorming among twenty employees. This is not a wild dream. Instead of launching ten separate weblogs by ten individual employees which is the solo approach followed by Macromedia, a company may choose that a group weblog in which ten employees will be responsible for posting daily content and stimulate discussion is more likely to result in a vibrant community. It’s not hard to understand why a company would go for such a blogging strategy. The more interesting the content and the livelier the discussion is, the more chances are that an online community will coalesce around a weblog. And beyond any doubt, ten people will probably have more ideas and thoughts to write about than a single person would, even though in the process a few of them may stand out as more knowledgeable or more attention-grabbing individuals. Moreover, as the burden of maintaining the weblog is distributed across several people, redundancy is weaved into the system. Redundancy, in this case, means that even when an employee is unable to fulfil her blogging duties due to other work obligations or for whatever reason (ie. sudden illness or maternity leave), the remaining bloggers will ensure that the conversation does not die off and the weblog does not stagnate in the absence of fresh and frequently updated content.

In a discussion I had with some friends regarding the implications of such a group weblog, it was evident that some people do not share the belief that a group weblog will (most of the times) be more interesting when compared to a single person’s blog. As a friend pointed out, she ‘d rather associate with a blog that expresses a sole author’s views with an attitude rather than having to deal with what she likens to a corporate melting pot adhering to strict corporate guidelines. But a melting pot does not have to be compliant with totalitarian guidelines or to wrap views up in a homogeneous manner tailored for easy digestion. A group weblog should not be seen as an aggregation service catering for those lazy enough to bother checking more than a handful of weblogs. If the group bloggers collaborate toward a shared goal, the diversity inherent in their interactions will metamorphose the blog into a process of cross-fertilisation among individual ideas and thoughts.

A shared goal provides context and doesn’t have to be an abstract concept. In the case of the community weblog Slashdot, the shared goal, or the context if you prefer, is established through only six words prominently displayed at the top of the site: news for nerds, staff that matters. These six words convey the purpose of Slashdot. Come to think of it, it is a sort of a mission statement, but unlike most corporate mission statements which are seldom meant to be discussed or criticised in the open, this one is meant to lie at the core of the occurring conversations.

It is this process of cross-fertilisation among individual posts that is most amenable to external top-down control, perhaps in the form of undemocratic and authoritative moderation, which in turn can backfire and stifle innovation. Managers should resist the temptation to control because attempts to control the conversations can kill them or send them underground (Cothrel & Williams 1999). “The real question is whether the benefits of control are worth the potential drawback of dampening the creative spirit that fosters innovation – one of the reasons for having online communities in the first place” (Ibid: 57). To make sure this doesn’t happen, Meg Hourihan (2002) suggests that acceptability guidelines be established. Apart from satisfying Human Resources and lawyers, these guidelines will ensure that the removal of inappropriate content (such as a post saying nasty things about the company’s competitors or a colleague that climbs up the corporate ladder because of consistently backstabbing others), is not been interpreted as censorship. As she says, “you’ll find people aren't much interested in contributing if they feel their content may be censored” without being given proper explanations.

Groove Networks has such a corporate policy in place. Although the weblogs maintained by Groove employees, including its CEO, are publicly accessible, the set of guidelines could also be applicable to weblogs hidden behind the corporate firewall. In short, the policy states:

1. put a notice which makes clear that the views expressed are your own

2. do not disclose any proprietary or confidential information.

3. be respectful to the company, fellow workers and competitors
and

4. we may ask you to stop if we feel that what you blog about is what we pay you for

5. we may ask you to confine your weblog commentary to topics unrelated to the company

6. we may ask you to stop if we believe it is necessary or advisable to ensure compliance with securities regulations or other laws.

Apparently, the last three guidelines are open to interpretation. While some people might feel that such guidelines are more restrictive than they should be, there are also people who regard them as essential. Interestingly, a while ago, a journalist on CNN’s payroll, named Kevin Sites, was asked to suspend his war blogging from Iraq. Since Kevin Sites was the only professional journalist blogging about the war live from Iraq, the reaction from scores of bloggers that disapproved of CNN’s move was in the least anticipated. On the other hand, there were also some bloggers who took a more balanced view on the grounds that real world constraints such as squandering scarce and expensive bandwidth dictated CNN’s seemingly authoritative decision to temporarily shut down Site’s blog.

Secret CIO Vs. Weblogs
Perhaps the real reason for shutting Sites’ s blog down lies elsewhere. In “Beware the Blog in your Company’s Future”, a secret CIO (with the nickname Herbert W. Lovelace) urged corporate decision makers to be ultra-sceptic of weblogs. “The reason is threefold: quality of data, time expended versus value received, and the reality of litigation”. According to the secret CIO, the argument for dismissing blogs as pure hype hinges upon the hypothesis that employees will be wasting their time blogging when they should be doing real work instead; intellectual property concerns compel intelligently run companies to keep everything in the closet; and weblogs simply make the task of filtering through an abyss of information harder.

First, I fail to grasp how weblogs mean ‘waste’ when employees find it easier to organise their thoughts, collaborate and share knowledge with other clusters of employees and communicate with the customers in what ought to be seen as the ultimate objective of any well conceived marketing approach. And the “litigation issue” that the secret CIO thinks as the most compelling reason for companies to stay away from weblogs is equally absurd. None said that weblogs should be used to post all corporate information on the Web. Weblogs are a market conversation. But the secret CIO seems to be well scared of the power of conversations. “As Microsoft has learned from keeping old E-mail too long, in this age of writs of discovery, what you've said way back when may really hurt you” says the secret CIO. Well, I can’t say he’s entirely wrong. If your weblogs are no more than discussions among top corporate brass about how to most effectively stifle competition, and leaking all sorts of rubbish-like reports to the press with the intention of distorting marketplace reality and manipulating customers’ perceptions, then I have to admit that weblogs are probably not going to work for your company.But I guess there could have been none better to answer this than Microsoft itself. Microsoft, in what I reckon is an excellent strategy to get rid of its notorious reluctance to share information and engage in a dialogue with their customers, is transforming into a weblogged organisation. A weblog, characteristically entitled Microsoft Blogs, is listing all weblogs maintained by Microsoft employees and as of March 2003, there are more than fifty of those. Well, secret CIO, what do you have to say about that?

Third and last, the secret CIO asserts, weblogs will make it harder to navigate the information maze to find what is really valuable. He believes that all employees will start posting all kinds of nonsense to the corporate weblog, making it all the harder to make the right decisions. If you regard and treat employees as corporate cogs or even worse as intellectually crippled corporate servants with a severely limited capacity to think and act reasonably and responsibly, then again the weblog may not be the ideal strategy for your organisation. But even then, a weblog may remind those at the top that knowledge is oblivious to corporate ladders. Domain and subject-knowledge expertise may be hidden if you look through the lens of the corporate scaffold. Although many organisations keep track of individual employees’ hobbies as an indication of where specialised knowledge may reside, not all organisations do. For example, one of my best friends would make a fine mechanical engineer if he didn’t chose to read economics and to pursue a career in finance. That’s not the exception but rather the rule. Most people’s job definitions and job titles fail to convey the width and depth of knowledge they possess outside of a narrowly identified work category. Is the absence of a degree a reason good enough to prevent some knowledgeable people from contributing? Perhaps, the geek from the IT department knows more about professional photography than the marketers assigned from the holy top to promote a new camera. Should the geek ‘s opinion be ignored since he lacks a degree in professional photography and he’s never worked as a professional photographer? A weblog will not only help reveal this hidden knowledge, it will also transfer that knowledge from the source to the action.

Furthermore, as increasingly more people start to realise, not even domain experts could possibly know everything. Our collective knowledge and wisdom greatly exceeds that of any one person’s grasp (Gillmor 2003b). David Weinberger (2002) learnt that from first hand while searching at eBay: “No matter how unsystematic and uncertified this knowledge is (these reviews are), because they come wrapped in a human voice, the knowledge they communicate is richer and, in some ways, more reliable: the lively plurality of voices sometimes can and should outweigh the stentorian voice of experts”.

In all, and mostly for the sake of avoiding any probability that removal of content is seen as censorship, a corporate policy is not a bad idea. But as David Weinberger (2000) says “businesses take legal risks just by shipping products”.

Re-inventing Knowledge Management behind the firewall
“Where community processes are likely to have a significant financial benefit is in the enterprise. Organizing and distributing information among workers is a critical need of every information-dependent organization. Weblog-based tools will be the foundation for a new discipline of bottom-up knowledge management, which will lead to efficiencies and productivity boosts for companies.”(Interview with Kevin Werbach)

In much the same way that weblogs can be deployed to communicate with customers, they can also be used for inter and intra-organisational communication purposes. By adopting weblogs within an intranet context, organisations will boost their employees’s productivity and present viable alternatives to current knowledge management systems. It is elementary to recognise that knowledge management implementations and practices vary greatly across organisations. Several companies adopt hierarchic knowledge management systems whose spine is a database; others regard their corporate librarian’s ability to hook people together as the most effective knowledge management ever considered. Keeping a record of individual employees’ interests and skills along with an evaluation of their past performances in specific projects by their peers is another type of knowledge management. Job rotation and project-form of organising is yet another as it ensures that individual workers’ tacit knowledge is disseminated and shared as a result of their interaction with the network of their co-workers. In short, there is an increasingly wide spectrum of KM applications and methods. It is true that many commentators feel that the field is still in its infancy, however tools and approaches towards knowledge management have dramatically proliferated during the last ten years. From neural networks, intelligent agents and Bayesian statistics to Enterprise Information Portals (EIP) and Case-Based Reasoning, and from Unified Modelling Language (UML) and Ontologies to Groupware and data mining, organisations have never had such a vast array of tools and out-of-the-shelf commercial solutions at their disposal to choose from. By no means does the advent of weblog technology render all these knowledge management systems obsolete. In many cases, using weblog technology will not eliminate the need for different knowledge management systems to be used in parallel. Each organisation should carefully consider its individual needs and choose to proceed to a well-balanced portfolio comprised of different KM applications. However, weblogs are a harbinger of a new type of human relationship and information management and several of its characteristics exemplify that weblogs, even when used as a stand-alone KM system, will fundamentally change our perceptions of organisational memory and knowledge management. Their harmonic balance between centralised referencing of knowledge and decentralised distribution of power and capacity for self-rule poses unprecedented challenges even to the most sophisticated, state-of-the-art knowledge management systems.

During conversations I had with friends, it dawned on me that knowledge management has become so complicated as a notion that many people fail to grasp its importance. They do not really know what KM is trying to achieve: is it about better storage, retrieval and management of data or is it something that could provide solutions to complex problems? Is it something to be used only by the top-layer managers or could it make all employees’ working lives more flexible and productive? Is it about enhancing control over one’s work or is it about fuelling innovation? Same thing about many technical KM systems: friends of mine keep telling me that they cannot afford to invest the time required to gain familiarity with the new KM system recently rolled out at the company they work for since their working life is already full. And when they manage to find some spare time between meetings and other tasks, they ‘d rather do something more relaxing and fun, such as socialising with their fellow workers at the cafeteria, rather than stumbling upon how a new piece of software functions. They find most KM systems to be boring, if not useless and soulless. Sometimes, they even consider KM systems as a direct threat to themselves. As a friend who’s working in finance once told me: “What happens if I put all my contacts into the system and store everything I know – all the experience I have - into a database and then I get fired? I lose my competitive edge. Perhaps, if I do put all my contacts into the system, they’ll have a pretty good reason to fire me straight away. They won’t need me anymore. They ‘ll give some rookie half the money I get to do what I do by using my contacts. And I don’t want that to happen. No doubt I need a KM system and that’s why I have this filofax. But with all these stories going around about people getting fired and having their personal things collected by the security while they’re asked to go see their managers, I’d better keep it at home”. With the exception of a couple of friends who told me they have effortlessly familiarised themselves with their company’s Enterprise Information Portal and use it everyday to get the latest corporate news and announcements, most people I know agree that the best ‘knowledge management’ ever is to get to know as quickly as possible the employees who are so well connected that somehow they know things or they know to whom one should speak to. But even those two people who find the corporate portal to be a valuable component of their company’s knowledge management strategy, they admit they get the official news from the portal but then they get to know the unofficial version of the news, the corporate gossip if you want, by chatting with their fellow workers during the coffee and lunch break.

There is no need for KM to be confusing. Unfortunately, like so many other domains of organisational life that supposedly simplifying frameworks have penetrated, KM falls prey to misinterpretations and hype. Since Peter Drucker (1993), the father of contemporary management theory, prophesised the rise of the knowledge society and coined the terms “knowledge work” and knowledge worker”, knowledge has become the hotbed for innovation, profits, competitiveness, sustainability, leadership and generally it appears that effective knowledge management is responsible for every corporate success. This claim may sound exaggerated but it is not hype and theoretical bluff. Although Drucker along with other leading management thinkers are responsible for popularising the field and turning it mainstream, there is widespread recognition of the economic and social significance of knowledge since ancient times. Who can deny that knowledge is crucial to all aspects of our societies and businesses? From building bridges to coping with environmental crises and from designing commercial technologies to conducting medical research and structuring organisations, knowledge is the link that binds all successful endeavours together. Regardless of how we choose to define it, experience or creativity, know-how or skills, brainpower or ingenuity, knowledge matters.

In simplistic, but nonetheless accurate terms, KM is the process that nurtures the creation of ideas and by which vague ideas translate into concrete actions and identifiable skills, capabilities and corporate assets. In recognition that knowledge is ultimately beheld by individuals and initially developed within a small group context, knowledge needs to be effectively communicated, shared with the group and disseminated through the organisation so that ideas are tested and contribute to the development of better products, services and business processes. Bluntly speaking, KM is about creating better organisations through better communication. This is the cornerstone of KM: for ideas to become something specific and tangible that an organisation can exploit, knowledge needs to be managed. Prior to its management though, knowledge needs to be communicated.

Is your corporate email broken? Don’t fix it, try weblogs instead!
A great example of how weblogs are being put into use by organisations as a tool for managing knowledge is vividly described by Meg Hourihan and her friends (Bausch, Haughey, and Hourihan 2002). They tell the story of Stuff, an internal weblog at Pyra Labs, the company (now acquired by Google) that along with Radio Userland is mainly responsible for turning weblogs mainstream by selling them to the masses. Back then Pyra was still a two-people show, and thus most of the communication bottlenecks typically encountered in large organisations were largely unknown at Pyra. Stuff was originally developed to keep track of important information that Pyra’s two employees deemed rather important, but which they would not interrupt each other’s flow of thought and concentration to share. They knew that email is broken as emails containing crucial information quickly sank to the bottom of their inboxes, and hence were of no practical value. So, even though they were just sitting ten feet away from each other, they started posting bits of information to Stuff to ensure that this information would be available when they had the time and inclination to check it at a later time. However, as the company grew bigger and more people joined the Pyra team, they realised that Stuff was more than a centralised archive of information suited for asynchronous communication. It quickly became the definitive repository of organisational memory. Instead of educating new employees about what the company stood for through a formal mission statement, they told them to check Stuff out. “It was a visual representation of the team and of a collective stronger than each individual who made it up”. Not only weblogs display and record the final outcome of a certain decision-making process, they also unveil the context and the journey through which these decisions were reached. And understanding the evolutionary dynamics of the process that led to a decision can be much more crucial in understanding how an organisation works, explains Ton Zijlstra (2003a, 2003b).

Meg Hourihan explains:

“When new people joined our company, one of the first things folks did was read back through Stuff—all the way to the beginning. In a few hours they had a better sense of what Pyra was about than any mission statement could have hoped to communicate. We didn't need to tell anyone what our corporate values were; the spirit of the company was revealed through the posts available everyday in Stuff”. (Bausch, Haughey, and Hourihan 2002)

The weblog became the place where employees shared knowledge, jointly created a shared context for their work, and through which they defined their company.

The End of Corporate Email?
Of course, they didn’t stop emailing others, and it would be simplistic, if not naïve, to support that email should be entirely abandoned. A good deal of critical corporate knowledge is communicated via emails, and besides, it would be hard to convince people to stop using their email. But weblogging and emailing are not mutually exclusive. On the contrary, they can interoperate quite efficiently so that value is captured where it is created. As part of a business implementation, weblogs can be made to interoperate with commonly used business applications like popular Office Suites, instant messengers (IM) and email. In fact, by enabling blogs and popular business tools to interface with each other, knowledge will be captured the moment it is created. For instance, an email exchange between two salesmen can be easilyposted to the internal weblog so that this information becomes a resource for other salesmen to use and draw upon, let alone it does not go away when those two salesmen decide to flee. The differential factor hinges on how easy it is for employees to post their emails to the weblog. If it requires any burdensome process or technical savvy for emails to be converted into weblog posts, it simply is not going to work. For example, the only requirement in Radio Userland’s popular weblogging software in order to automate the mail-to-weblog process is to enter a pre-defined keyword in the email subject line field. Not much of a hassle. Similarly, the ability to easily post one’s spreadsheets, word-processed documents, and slide presentations to the weblog is of paramount importance. However, as Dave Pollard (2003a) notes, employees have to be educated in using the internal weblog wisely, so that not all of their emails make it into it, or that important email communication is not been left out. If the mail-to-weblog process is automated, and it is only a one-click away from posting an email to the internal weblog, then it becomes obvious that employees will have to think twice about the potential current and future value of the communication stored in the email. Employees should pause for a second, or two, and think carefully if the email should be on the weblog, Pollard remarks.

Others though, are far more extremist and radical in prescribing how weblogs will be used. In fair recognition that email is broken, Joi Ito (2003b) and Ross Mayfield (2003e) positively state that weblogs are perfectly suited to all internal communications, with the mere exception of one-to-one communications, in effect offering an almost complete replacement for email. It is true that a good percentage of email is spam, and email filters block another good percentage as if it were spam, even when it is not, let alone the unwanted extra information overload that occupational spam[8] adds up to. Weblogs are easier to administer, moderate and make for easier navigation, information retrieval and reading, says Mayfield (2003e). Most important, Mayfield (Ibid.) adds, is that weblogs prevent email overload due to the non-intrusive, decentralised character of weblog tools and technologies like RSS subscriptions and news aggregators, which enable users to receive only information they have explicitly chosen to receive when they need it in a timely fashion. Latest industry intelligence (Singel 2003) reports that such weblog tools enable users to keep up to speed with a large number of news sources in less than half the time it would take using a web browser, and a favourites bookmark. But the most compelling argument is the elimination of waste. Time that was previously wasted in managing one’s email, could now be redirected into other productive uses. Mayfield (2002a) uses the real example of a product manager at a major software company who proposed the adoption of a weblog as a solution to his ever-growing pains of answering the same question time and time again in order to illustrate why weblogs are indeed the ultimate replacement for corporate email. What follows is the email sent by the product manager in which he clearly identifies his problem and the solution he proposes:

Here's the situation: I'm managing four products that are sold by about 300 sales engineers and 300 sales people worldwide. That translates into a lot of sales-related questions sent via email. There is some degree of overlap to these questions. Currently I'm answering these queries by responding individually to each email, and this takes a big chunk of time...Given this situation, I'm thinking of setting up a weblog (aka blog) to post answers to questions likely to be of interest to a significant chunk of the sales team. (Mayfield 2002a)

It’s straightforward economics that drive the adoption of weblogs within organisations: better communication does not need to be more time consuming. However, as one of my valued proofreaders pointed out, why didn’t the above manager set up a FAQ (Frequently Asked Questions) Section to address his problem? “An HTML document giving answers to some questions would more or less do the job”, he told me. Indeed, I agree that an HTML document would be sufficient, if the questions never were to change. But as more and different products come out of the factory, and the sales force has to sell them in different ways, the questions will most definitely change, and multiply. MP3, minidisk, CD, tape, and vinyl are all formats used to distribute and sell music, but do they require the same approach to marketing? I doubt it. What about the industry dynamics? Do they ever change? Is the Sony Walkman currently marketed the same way it was fifteen years ago? I don’t think so. And as those marketplace dynamics change, the sales force should change its approaches and methods too. So, instead of winding up with a long series of HTML documents stored in a non-user friendly corporate database and having no consistent location, why not put a weblog up with all the latest tips that the sales force needs to know?

But weblogs do not simply provide a more polished view of FAQs. And it would be also naïve to assume that questions would automatically vanish because of the mere presence of a weblog. But if each weblog entry had a corresponding comments section, and each had a consistent location (a URI), then any question would only be answered once. That way, whenever a new sales rep emailed the troubled product manager with a question that had been raised in the past and had been answered in the weblog, the manager would reply with a single line indicating the location (URI) of the relevant question-answer, rather than having to answer the same question all over again. Or if newcomers are advised to read the weblog archives before resorting to email, and the weblog offers search capabilities, the only thing one would need to do is enter the question, or a keyword, into the weblog search engine field, and find out the answer to the question without having to email anyone, and most importantly, without having to wait for the reply. No time wasted, no aggravation, and consistent, time-enduring storage of knowledge. What else can anyone ask for from a knowledge management system? In addition, the presence of a comments box (see figure 9) would introduce a conversational effect across the system, which in turn would give the opportunity to knowledgeable sales reps to demonstrate their expertise by helping other less educated sales reps out. Apart from identifying where knowledge resides, the burden on the product manager would be substantially lighter, as knowledgeable reps would take on the task of giving further clarifications, or answering questions.

Figure 9: Radio Userland’s Comments Box

Authorship at Work
The ability to demonstrate one’s knowledge, and being given credit for it, compels us to recognise the growing significance of work ownership. In Working Knowledge, Prusak and Davenport (1997) pontificate that there is a market for knowledge at work inside all organisations, and in much the same way that marketplace transactions are governed by quid-pro-quo relations, the corporate knowledge market depends upon a give-and-take mechanism in order to function efficiently. Put differently, a salary is seldom a reason good enough for employees to share their knowledge, as they might reckon knowledge is their competitive advantage, and by giving it away they might lose their edge, and possibly their job by becoming more dispensable to the company they work for. The answer, according to Prusak and Davenport, lies in properly motivating people to share what they know. Yet motivation is a notion wide open to subjective interpretation, and managers have been frequently observed to employ instruments of fear to motivate employees when promising more money and lucrative stock options turns out to fall short of expectations.

In the excellent Up the Down Escalator, Charles Leadbeater (2002: 235-244) discusses the changes in the evolving model of capitalism, and argues that micro-entrepreneurship, extended study, self-employment and free-lancing are all attempts on the workers’ part to claim more ownership and control over their working lives. Of course, ownership, carries many connotations, and is a very complicated concept at the heart of business governance. Leading business thinker Charles Handy (2002: 86), for instance, attacks the widespread Anglo-Saxon belief that companies are owned by shareholders, and he is certain that the time has come for when “a collection of people turning ideas into products is a piece of property that can be owned by someone else will come to seem absurd”. For the sake of avoiding unwanted oversimplifications in the context of this paper, by referring to ownership I mean that workers need to be provided with the intangible, yet real, sense that they are authors of their own work. This is not only key to innovation, but also to reduced bureaucracy and improved efficiency. When you ask people to sign their name under their work, the quality of the end product invariably rises. Not because workers are afraid of management retaliation for work badly done, but because they want to take pride in their own work. This has been empirically proven over and over again. This is precisely why there are so many names mentioned at the end of movies, and why brands were introduced in communist Russia. By saying brands I don’t make any references to advertising and marketing gigs. On the contrary, in communist Soviet Union, brands meant names. As the quality of products constantly deteriorated, it was reckoned that forcing producers to put their name and corporate eponymy on the products that they manufactured and brought to stores’ shelves could somehow restore quality. And it did. Obviously, in the case of Russia this was aimed at corporate accountability. Nevertheless, credit and work ownership is a strong form of motivation, communist Russia’s experiences notwithstanding.

In many companies, workers are reluctant to share what they know because they feel their bosses might hijack this knowledge and present it as their own. This breeds resentment, and reinforces a corporate culture where knowledge is hoarded. With weblogs, it is made clear which employee is responsible for contributing which piece of knowledge, so credit and acknowledgement are given where appropriate. This is also why weblogs stand a good chance of superseding current knowledge management systems, especially those used for discussion purposes. By making owning your words a requirement, the system is not seen as anonymous, and indeed, it is gives a sense of belonging to the lifeblood of the organisation – its employees. To visualise how this could come into practice, imagine a fictional company where a manager is charged with leading an experimental project. Rather than email his subordinates and ask them to email him back with their thoughts and suggestions, he sets up a weblog. In order to overcome any reluctance to share, the project manager invites his assigned project team to share ideas and contribute to the process. Employees would post their ideas to the weblog, and would collaboratively lead the task in cooperation with the manager. Or alternatively and more democratically, he could set up a weblog, post the weblog’s location (URI) along with a description of the project to the intranet homepage where major corporate news and projects are announced, and the intranet homepage could well be a weblog too, and ask for any would-be interested project partners to visit the weblog and get involved as their interests and expertise best dictate.

As a good first step, many suggest that employees should maintain their own personal weblogs, and use them as a replacement to their filing cabinets (Pollard 2003a). Individual weblogs offer an added advantage with respect to facilitating work groups to form more effectively. Communities of practice and social networks are easier to form as the blog serves as a personal CV, in essence economising on the time it would take for two employees to familiarise with each other’s professional interests and areas of expertise. As John Robb[11] says, “many organizations use discussion groups. Unfortunately, as most have found, discussion groups are typically dominated by a few talkative individuals that drown out people that actually have value to contribute. K-Logs[12] change that dynamic by providing every contributor with a forum. Through subscriptions and community-monitored traffic, the valuable contributions and contributors can be identified. Additionally, discussions groups usually are topic-based. One thing that I have found (and this is universally applicable) is that my method of organizing topics is different than everybody else's. We all structure the world differently. K-Logs organize information around individuals and time[13], both of which are universally understood”.

January 12, 2004 at 11:20 PM in Corporate Blogging | Permalink | Top of page | Blog Home