Sunday, June 15, 2008

To Blog or Not to Blog

For a while now there has been the rumbling of Social Media and Social Networking. Last year we saw VzConnect (internal to Verizon) and indication form the pundits out there, is that Social Media/Networks is one of the top 4 technologies for the coming years.

Rachel Happe is an analyst from IDG and wrote this article, excerpt below (http://www.thesocialorganization.com/2008/06/executive-blogs-dont-need-to-be-difficult.html )

When I meet with executives I often ask if they blog and the answer is often no - followed by a variety of reasons, some valid, some questionable. But one thing is often true: blogging can take a lot of time. Some executives get around this by having someone in their communications group write their blog posts. Not really ideal and probably less than authentic.

Jeff Schick - IBM's VP of Social Computing - has come up with an ingenious solution. He blogs internally to his team but his posts are simply his daily schedule (most of it anyway) followed by a couple of lines about his impression of the meetings or the outcomes. This gets him out of the endless cycle of "What am I going to write about today" and gives his team some interesting reading.

I like this approach for two reasons: One - what a great tacit training tool. Ambitious employees who want to move up have a great way of seeing what an executive really does all day and of understanding what they might want to start paying attention to within the company. Two - large teams often rarely see their executives and have no idea what they are doing until they show up, ask some questions, and go away again. That can lead to a lot of speculation and even resentment if employees feel like they can't get the attention they need to solve problems. Jeff admitted that since he started publishing his schedule publicly he actually now gets sympathy from many people on his team. That sympathy helps a lot when you've got to turn around and ask the team to do something hard.

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