Corporate Blogging and the Boss
Scott Rosenberg thinks corporate blogging will be inhibited by control issues. Namely, people are afraid of pissing off their boss.
...But for large numbers of workers in America, particularly those at big companies, the dominant fact of life remains don't piss off your boss...The blogs you're going to see from within most traditional companies will be either uninformative snoozes or desperate attempts at butt-covering and -kissing. Not because people don't have great stories to tell -- but because telling the truth has too high a cost...
This follows comments on the same panel at Supernova by Tim Bray: Any corporation that doesn't do this in the future is going to be playing catch-up.
David Weinberger replies:
I do agree that it'll take a long time for corporate public blogging to spread beyond easy industries, such as high tech. But, I think it'll happen faster than Scott does. First, internal blogging will happen relatively quickly because it's a great way for employees to build their reputations, a motive as powerful as the urge not to piss off your boss. Those internal blogs will go onto the extranet and eventually some will make it onto the Internet...
The prospect of being fired up (a cheesy cheerleader way of saying promoted) is as much a motivator as being fired. Whether large scale adoption of corporate blogging will occur outside tech because of control has less to do with characteristics of industries than leadership. It happens first in information intensive industries, but can happen anywhere a manager wants to gain competitive advantage and is willing not just to give up some control, but recongize its already lost. The same dynamic already happens with email as publishing, with less transparency.
David points out a natural cycle from internal to external blogging that we have seen in recent cases. Internally, blogging can also begin in less disruptive activities, like projects or lines of research.
