The Corporate Blog Adoption Cycle

It’s been interesting watching the blog adoption cycle here at Ephox. For a long time I think I was the only person actively blogging, and just from the positive effects of blogging that I’d experienced other people got interested. Our CEO was pressured into getting back into blogging again1, the engineering team started up an internal blog to share some of the cool stuff we found which never really took off and then the CEO started an internal blog2 which has helped the rest of the company get more of a grip on where he’s going. Andy started a blog and we had a couple of hires who had blogs lying dormant that they were then pressured into getting back into and suddenly there was a critical mass of people blogging – enough to have a conversation between us on the blogs.

Once you hit that point things really start to change. All of a sudden you can talk about work and not feel like it’s an echo chamber and noone cares. We started seeing people posting reflections of changes at work, their first month etc and all of a sudden we were getting a better insight into what people were thinking and how they felt about work. We’re a company that talks pretty openly and communicate well, but because blogs are written it makes reflect on what they feel and lets them get it all out at once. That provides a new perspective on things and lets you get a much better understanding of what the company’s doing right and wrong.

A lot of people feel threatened by the openness of blogs because they think the company’s dirty laundry will be exposed. While that does happen to a degree, more often it’s the good things that come out when they otherwise wouldn’t be mentioned. A couple of recent entries have been great like that: Suneth talking about how Jack and Andy have helped him, I’d been concerned that I wasn’t finding enough time to make sure that Suneth was coping – turns out I wasn’t needed which is good. Rob’s post on good management is another important one. I only realized when I was over in the US office recently that they didn’t get to see all the good things that come out of the management work that Brett does and how critical it has been to keeping the engineering team together through some tough challenges and in continuously improving our practices so that we consistently generate great code and can move forward faster. I’ve also mentioned previously how glad I was to see the chairman of the board commenting on blog posts.

The key things I’ve learnt so far:

• There’s a certain critical mass of bloggers within a company that starts to make blogging really useful for the company to learn about itself.
• Internal only blogs don’t work as well as public blogs. You feel bad if you don’t update your personal public blog because everyone can see that – you don’t care so much if it’s internal only.
• Group blogs don’t tend to work. Again, you don’t feel bad if it’s not updated so it tends to wind up being ignored.
• Someone needs to push the bounds a bit and post what they really think about the company. Once one or two people do that, things start to really open up and become honest instead of treating the blogs like a marketing exercise. That’s when you really learn the important things.

So if you’re working with Ephox and don’t yet have a blog, I really encourage you to get one. I can set one up for you on people.ephox.com in about 5 minutes if you want – just say the word.

1 – though he still neglects his blog too much↩

2 – the contents of which I'd suggest should just go on his public blog3 ↩

3 – yes these footnotes are basically just here to prod you Andrew…↩