The most profound finding in the Edelman Trust Barometer 2005—out annual study of 1500 opinion leaders in eight countries– is the rise of the "Average Person Like Me" as a trusted spokesperson. The average person now ranks as high as academics and physicians as a trusted source of information about a company.
A couple of days ago I found a weblog called E-Mediators, authored by Jon Froda and Jesper Bindslev, graduate students at Copenhagen Business School. They are using the blog to document their dissertation on the influence of corporate blogging on management styles, with a focus on intercultural management.
Here’s a summary (quotations + heavy paraphrasing) of some of their ideas:
- There is much more to corporate blogging then enhancing external image
- The decision to start blogging in an organization is likely to spark changes in hierarchies, management styles and information-flow.
- "These changes are taking place across multiple corporate sub-cultures, and the way they are perceived depends on the social context of the people it affects. [T]his is especially true in the case of geographically dispersed and culturally diverse corporations."
- Corporations are trying to figure out the ‘right steps’ for business blogging. This implies trust management.
- Businesses and employees will have to figure out a solution to the trust vs. control paradox:
- "What kind of approach enables a corporation to gain the authenticity, the conversation and the sweetening of reputation that blogs are thought to bring, while at the same time making sure that confidential information and "bad-press" is not leaked to the public?
- How does an employee make sure that he is not getting fired for saying too much on his blog, while at the same time saying enough to actually sound human and passionate?"
- As employee blogging is spreading outside the US, the debate will become more colored by the differences in management traditions between differrent regions of the world.
- Therefore, "intercultural competence and understanding might be a decisive success-factor for employees when they start blogging."
- Figuring out how to manage the trust vs. control paradox is something that will happened more or less in public, under the pressure of a blogosphere that dislikes the corporations who are firing bloggers, and that has the tendency to jump to conclusions.
- When a company allows employees to blog, it gives them the chance to become stars and the opportunity to make mistakes in public. Both corporations and employees will find themselves "in a new context and bad judgment is bound to happen."
- In order to prevent misunderstandings, employee bloggers must work with corporations in order to create " simple and easy to understand guidelines" — see Lenn Pryor’s presentation (PPT) at the Blog Business Summit 2005.
- Firing an employee for blogging can be avoided if a series of preventive actions are taken (actions based on improving communications between the employees and the corporation) — see Matthew Oliphant’s presentation (PDF) at BBS05.
And this is the best part (no offense to marketing consultants!):
"Cultural change is lurking behind the fancy tag-lines of the increasing number of blog-marketing consultants - behind the hype and hiving."
The whole appeal and success of blogs comes from giving people a simple communication tool that allows them to connect to others as people. This brings inside organizations a factor that is subversive — because organizations are not designed to accomodate it. As we know, people (a.k.a. employees) are supposed to have professional (not human) relationships, both inside and outside the corporate walls.
Bringing weblogs inside an organization shifts the emphasis from the role of ‘corporate actor’ in which the employee is casted, to the employee as a person. This shift must be addressed when drafting blogging policies and strategies. Moreover, the consequences of starting external blogging will spill inside corporate boundaries, and as a result organizations will have to change, in terms of culture. And here’s another way of looking at this shift: corporations getting aboard the Cluetrain will have to operate an internal change of metaphor. If markets are conversations and if organizations want to be included in these conversations, then organizations must become conversations, too.
(Yeah, well, sweet dreams, pal!)
Hey, don’t forget to visit the E-mediators blog! It’s one to keep. And check out their one hour interview with Scoble.
In their last podcast, Shel Holtz and Neville Hobson have said some incredible nice words (way too nice to be quoted here) about me and two of the projects I started, the NewPR Wiki and the Blogdigger Groups-powered Headlines from PR Weblogs.
A heartfelt thank you!
My goodness. New media format fails to alter human nature.
Film at 11. :-)
(rusty, commenting on Anil Dash’s posting on how "zealous political bloggers" are changing the blogosphere by being "so polarized and antagonistic", "just like the media" they hate.)
Here’s what a recently launched corporate blogging appliance allows you to do:
For example, a chief executive who was posting to a blog could set up controls to have material automatically directed to a public relations manager or general counsel before it went live. (Seattle PI)
Yeah, who would have thought? "Controlled blogging" must be the last entry in the list of soon-to-be-famous oxymorons (*).
[The appliance] "offers controlled blogging and must be targeted to the clueless Vice President of Stupidness, much like the Ministry of Silly Walks." (Textura Design Blog)
(*) oxymoron (from Greek - oxymoros, "pointedly foolish," oxy-, "sharp" + moros, "dull, stupid, foolish"):
A paradox reduced to two words, usually in an adjective-noun ("eloquent silence") or adverb-adjective ("inertly strong") relationship, and is used for effect, to emphasize contrasts, incongruities, hypocrisy, or simply the complex nature of reality.
Updated on February 26, 2005: Great minds think (well, almost) alike :grin: :
Doc Searls (in a different context): "Corporate blogging" is so ironic it’s nearly an oxymoron. Having a "system in place to monitor what is being said" seems more consistent with ending a conversation than with starting one.
Mr. Thompson [...] ran for sherrif of Pitskin County in 1970 on a platform promising to change Aspen’s name to Fat City and to decriminalize drugs. He almost won.
(from "With an Icon’s Death, Aspen Checks Its Inner Gonzo," a New York Times article by Kirk Johnson on Hunter S. Thomson’s life in Aspen, Colorado)
Besides other goodies, the big fish :) in the last podcast of The Hobson and Holtz Report is an 18-minute conversation with Michael Wiley, Director of New Media at General Motors. Neville did a wonderful job in transcribing the whole conversation, so you can actually follow the text while you’re listening to the podcast (19.4MB, the interview starts at 13:46).
Highlights:
- Why the blog: "Typical communication is issuing press releases, talking to the media, who re-purpose your messages for you, and there’s no way for customers to get their thoughts back to you. We’ve been wanting to create this direct line of communication so that our various stakeholders aren’t going to message boards to talk about us - they have an opportunity to come and talk directly to us."
- New blogs: GM has discussed launching other blogs, but they "don’t want a bunch of blogs to proliferate" and then "see dead blogs out there that aren’t properly managed." They "want to ensure there’s consistent high level communication going on."
- The big surprise: "I was completely blown away by the level of comments and the thought that goes into those comments. We didn’t know what to expect and in many cases you feel that people have been waiting for years and years to be able to vent their feelings to General Motors, so even the negative ones aren’t sniping, they’re just giving us their sincere feelings and thoughts on what we can do to create better products."
- Podcasts: GM is working on a 15 minutes-long weekly program.
- Video blogging: it’s "certainly something that is appealing" to GM, but they want to make sure they "have plain old text blogging down" before moving on to the next thing.
- RSS: GM is looking at offering RSS feeds on their media website. They haven’t done it so far because the media is just learning about RSS.
- Journalists using RSS: "A survey shows that about 20% of the journalists are on RSS now, a pretty good number." (20%?! :shock: Is there a source for this survey?)
- Internal weblogs: GM is launching its first leadership blog probably on February 25, by Tom Kowaleski, VP of Communications.
- RSS on intranet: not yet, but considered.
- Challenges: A lot of the rank and file employees "just don’t know what a blog is".
All in all, a thorough, excellent interview! Congrats to Shell and Neville! And congrats to Michael Wiley for engaging in this dialogue!
Please consider voting on the Podcast Alley for The Holtz and Hobson Report; it really deserves it.
Updated on Feb. 23, 2005: In the comments made on Neville’s posting, Michael Wiley clarifies the source for the survey showing that "20% of journalist are on RSS now":
We conducted a survey on our media website during the recent Detroit Motor Show. It wasn’t a scientific study, it was an informal, opt-in survey. The question was phrased something like "Would you be interested in subscribing to RSS feeds from GM Media Online?"
Now I’m good :) I was really worried that journalists are jumping into the RSS bandwagon…
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