Reading a few posts on this morning’s bus ride to the city, I am struck by the locquacity of some of my peers.

I loved Pete Shinback’s views on why CEOs don’t transition from the dining table to the bedroom; Shel clearly and aptly (again and as always) highlights the difference between strategy and tactics — blogs are great but they may not be the answer to your question, it depends on what question you are asking and why.

For example, one of my clients has no formal KM (knowledge management) plan at all. So, I will forward them a copy of Suw Charman’s case study on a pharmaceutical company who has introduced blogs (without calling them blogs) as a KM tool, with what would appear some success.

Similarly, another company I am acquainted with has a bunch of employees who are flat out trying to get all their work done in order to meet their tight KPIs. They are probably going to find it hard to introduce blogs as a KM tool, simply because no one has the time to a) learn the software, or b) time to post. The company needs to look at it processes and its staffing levels before it can consider the luxury of blogs.

From what I can tell, anecdotally, there is a ‘take-up’ rate of around 10% for internal blogging — that is, around 10% of the workforce will go to the trouble of setting up their own blog and regularly posting to it.

Sure, the numbers may vary from one company to the next — there will always be outliers — but from what I can tell the engagement rate with blogs is probably a fair indication of the engagement level of employees; the happier you are at work the more likely you are to want to contribute to the company’s pool of knowledge. The more unhappy you are, the less likely you are to contribute by blogging — and only an employee with a ‘fire me’ wish is going to slag off their employer (for everyone to see) within their own company walls (as Chris Hannegan quite rightly points out - and hat tip to Neville).

Now, it is the rare employer indeed who can boast a workforce of more than 50% who are pro-actively engaged, who are looking for ways to make a positive difference to the company.

Championing ‘blogs’ as the salve for all of your KM needs is somewhat presumptuous at best and downright unethical at worst. But for the ’stars’ within your company who WANT to contribute, who WANT to be part of the success of the company, blogs may well be a great outlet for them.

And if senior management join in the conversation (even though the conversation will often appear a one-way monologue — how many interal blog posts actually get comments to them? Not many, I would guess) then even better — any grass-roots initiative embraced and encouraged by senior leadership has a better chance of success.

More to follow once I have digested two of Amy’s contentious posts (and the other one is about her very lucky husband!)…

Update: have corrected the link to Suw’s study

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For whatever reason (I have no idea why, myself) this wonderful quote from the late, great—nay magnificent—Douglas Adams popped into my head.

From The Salmon of Doubt: “I love deadlines. I love the whooshing sound they make as they fly by.”

Update:

I just googled and found the quote, and a wonderful page full of his more memorable lines.

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Having created the space to ponder longer over what sort of ‘beast’ blogging is or can be, I am delighted to find that it can be many things (roll of eyes as the reader goes “Duh!”)

I guess for a SOHO consultant like myself blogging can achieve a greater profile. Indeed, Neville has stated several times that his blog is his only online presence. Similarly, whilst Shel has a website (with RSS feed, too! ha ha - Scoble has an interesting comment about sites without RSS) Shel’s blog would be, I would think, how the majority of online visitors find him.

But having had a good look at my own stats for both my blog and my website, I must conclude from the data that my website is still (by a significant amount) my primary ‘outreach’ tool.

Sure, there is a ‘longtail’ effect here — my website has been around a lot longer than my blog (by several years). But the effort I put in (before blogging came along) to writing and submitting articles to article databases has certainly paid off in terms of traffic [info on why articles are so good at generating traffic]).

Of course, the question for a SOHO operator is not so much the traffic (although that helps with Adsense revenue) but the conversion ratio of traffic to client. And here again I have to confirm that the website has brought in more clients than my blog.

All that said, I am increasingly finding two models at work for SOHO business bloggers:

1. The pure connection strategy of bloggers like Steve Rubel, Debbie Weil, Neville Hobson, Robert Scoble and to a lesser extent Shel Holtz (as Shel fits more into a middle ground between 1 and 2);

2. The commentary/think (with a link) strategy as exemplified by Amy Gahran, Seth Godin, Kathy Sierra, Doug Johnston, Nova Spivak, Hugh MacLeod, Paul Graham and Scott Rayburn inter alia.

I have toyed with strategies 1 and 2 and I have found that strategy 1 takes up a lot of time, but is less ego-centric. Strategy 2 gives the reader a better insight into the poster’s mindset, but posts are less frequent and therefore risks a potential drop in one’s google and technorati profile.

So, on balance, I will probably go for a mix, like Shel does, of Strategies 1 and 2. Which is a daily commitment, to take up Amy’s point (and its follow up), but feels most comfortable for me. After all, what IF someone reading my blog DOESN’T also read any of my sources? At least I am passing the baton on…

And I am still very taken with Nick Usborne’s business model of providing a way of the reader to gain more information by linking to an article on his website (although I would still use full feeds on my blog). Nick’s business model is outlined in an article (on plantar fasciitis, of all things!) I wrote quite a few months ago about a different site I found that used the same model.

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Due to a slipup with my ftp software I didn’t realise that the mp3 of my latest edition of Better Communication Results the podcast hadn’t uploaded to the server.

Massive apologies!

It’s there now, so please feel free to download it or, better still, subscribe via RSS and drop each and every sparkling edition into your iPodder or Doppler.

Still unsure what RSS is? There’s great information on what RSS is over at my website.

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Ahhh… of course the one great feature that GreatNews has that BlogExpress doesn’t is caching of feeds, allowing me to read the headlines and text on my notebook on the bus.

So I’m going back to GreatNews — I just wish it had the tab facility that BlogExpress has…

Previous articles: Great News vs BlogExpress - the Free Reader Wars

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Edition 11 of Better Communication Results the podcast is now ready for your listening pleasure!

And in this week’s edition I talk about how you can use kinesics to enhance your copy (and all the best copywriters do!)

Download it now and listen to it immediately - just 9 minutes and 27 seconds long, 8.7mb in size, and work-safe.

Or have your Doppler or Ipodder feedcatcher automatically download this and every new podcast of mine by hovering your mouse over the following link, then copying and pasting the shortcut into your feedcatcher: subscribe to my podcast feed

Links: TheCopyDoctor.com

Source article: Nonverbal communication: kinesics

Note: you can find the source articles for nearly all of my podcasts over at my communications mp3s page on my website. And you can find all of my articles on communication there on my site, too.

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Here’s something interesting: yet again research seems to support my original conjecture.

I have long held that before sending an email with a joke in it (or a sarcastic comment, or a pun, or similar) you should always read the email to yourself out loud.

Now research seems to be supporting me in this.

According to research by Prof. Justin Kruger at Illinois’s Urbana-Champaign, and shortly to be printed up in the JPSP, we overestimate that our audience will find our witty bon-mot as equally delightful as we do.

Kruger suggests we can counter this “everyday egocentrism” (the natural tendency to see things from our own perspective) by reading aloud, in a dead-pan voice, the email we are about to send, or at least in a tone inconsistent with the intended message.

Kruger found that by forcing participants to read aloud their message first, a lot of overconfidence disappeared.

Great advice. Perhaps by reading the emails aloud first you will be less likely to have that fantastic joke fall flat, or have the world laugh at you, not with you (Heinz said they’d help clean up).

Source: Kruger, J., Epley, N., Parker, J., & Ng, Z. (in press). Egocentrism over e-mail: Can people communicate as well as they think? Journal of Personality and Social Psychology

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Well, the flu is finally on its way out of my system (slowly, slowly…) so I have put a new podcast together.

Edition 10 is now ready for your perusal!

At just a shade over 5 minutes long, it answers that perennial question, “Podcasting in business - why should I?”.

Download it now and listen to it immediately.

Or have your Doppler or Ipodder feedcatcher automatically download this and every new podcast of mine by hovering your mouse over the following link, then copying and pasting the shortcut into your feedcatcher: subscribe to my podcast feed

Links: Audacity; Feedspring; Doppler; BlogExpress
Source article: Business communication solution: Podcasting in business - why should I?

Note: due to feedback from fellow Aussie Anthony over in China (sounds like a great gig, mate!) you can find the source articles for nearly all of my podcasts over at my communications mp3s page on my website.

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