Workplace blogging

You return every week because the posts are gossipy and interesting. Now imagine applying the same engaging technique to keep up with your workmates.

Andy Lark, the New Zealand-born vice-president of marketing for Silicon Valley-based Sun, was recently in Auckland, where he evangelised for workplace blogs. He says his company didn’t so much invent the corporate blog as try to harness what was already there. “Many companies think they can introduce blogs. They can’t. Employees introduce blogs. Customers blog. Shareholders blog. Even executives blog. All we did was turn the web into a printing press so more employees can engage.”

A close cousin of the web log is the Wiki (which its developer named after a Honolulu airport shuttle bus, the Wiki-Wiki). Wikis are like interactive blog pages, making it easy for all-comers to add their own comments to a website (you don’t need to know anything about HTML development, just how to type and click). This makes for a much more user-friendly way to share ideas on a project than the good old round-robin email, in which people typically drop in or out of the conversation, or accidentally delete that good idea (what was it again?) from six emails back. A Wiki lays it all out in front of you.

Again, Wikis started out as an amateur pursuit. Check out Wikipedia (en.wikipedia.org), an online encyclopedia that features 280,000 articles – every one of them created by its collective of readers – or the Open Guides city guide series (openguides.org).

Like all forms of online discussion, blogs and Wikis have their share of fluff, and outright rubbish. But they can also be constructed so that the most-read entries are highlighted, allowing the useful stuff to stand out. That’s why multinationals like SAP, Kodak and Motorola have caught Wiki fever, and why a lot of smaller outfits could do worse than checking out the free Wiki tools at sites like www.openwiki.com.

Sun is notable in that it not only ranks its employees’ blogs by popularity, but also makes most of them available to the general public (see blogs.sun.com).

Isn’t Lark a little worried about what might emerge in this uncensored forum?
“Why hide your voice? Our employees are smart and will ultimately do the right thing. And some of them write really well. Blogs improve communication – inside and out. Employees understand how responsible they are for our reputation.”

But Sun’s blogs do have a downside. “They really freak the lawyers out. And some of the grammar is shocking. Both are meaningless in terms of the benefits – although the lawyers might disagree … It’s just entertaining to see some of the stuff our employees have an opinion on.”

Elsewhere it hasn’t always gone so smoothly. Last year Microsoft got a truckload of bad PR after firing employee Michael Hanscom, who posted a picture on his blog of Apple computers being delivered to Microsoft’s Redmond campus – provoking much guffawing among the Mac community (although it does do some development for Apple, Microsoft is largely a competitor). Microsoft said it fired Hanscom for breaching a confidentiality agreement rather than the blog embarrassment factor.

But Lark sees the practical benefits. “Blogs’ immediacy and economics are stunning. We asked one of our team to come to our recent SunNetwork event in Shanghai and blog away on anything she wanted. Mary’s blog still ranks as amongst the most popular. Armed with a notebook and a digital camera, she put the show on every employee’s desktop at a fraction of the cost a formal programme to do so would have cost.”

Lark’s final word: don’t try to fight the blog. Your staff are going to chatter anyway, so it’s best to try to be a friendly facilitator rather than network dictator.

“Unleash them. Give employees the printing press. It’s going to be much easier to manage if it’s your press. Organisations with septic cultures are going to have a real hard time not changing. Employees will lay them bare.”

There is a slight hitch here. While most IT companies have started to rebound strongly from the tech wreck, revenues for Sun’s mainstay server products are still in decline. The company that invented Java, and once claimed to put “the dot in dot-com” is looking for its next great idea. It may have found it with its N1 grid computing concept. Now we’ll see if its hard-blogging employees can hone it into a winner.