CRA Inc

4 May 05 @ 7:21 pm

Radio Shows, Cocktail Parties, & The Encyclopedia

Earlier today I took a call to help a client think through how they could use message boards and blogs to manage and disseminate competitive intelligence among their employees (+/- 10,000 folks, globally distributed). In doing so, I sprung wikis on them … a tool with which they (like many people) were unfamiliar.

Here’s how I described the three tools:

* Message boards are like cocktail parties. Walk in, poke around, start a conversation about nearly anything with nearly anyone. Of course, like a cocktail party, you miss a lot, and finding the conversation you want can be difficult.

* Blogs are like radio shows. Get one or more passionate experts together, give them the mic, and let them go. The audience may be hundreds of thousands, and they’ll vacuum up the content as long as it’s relevant. And if they want to engage, they can call in and be part of the conversation (through comment threads). What’s more, the broadcasters will talk about what each other is saying, and in doing so, drive the discourse along.

* Wikis are like encyclopedias. Or archives. Or a filing cabinet. They’re where the reference documents go. You don’t know you need it until you look for it, but with a simple search what you’re looking for rises to the top. What’s more, the material is in pencil, not ink, so the people before and after you can improve the article as they see fit, making it more and more robust over time, and adding any articles they think should be part of the reference set along the way.

In this schema, my suggestion was:

* Find 10 or 20 opinion leaders in the company who are passionate about competitive intelligence. Give them each a blog, or let them all contribute to one blog, and let them start broadcasting. Don’t worry about the ones that don’t post often or do a poor job – the best will rise to the top and the audience will read the best.

* Set up a wiki to which all 10,000 of the employees in the audience can create and update topics related to individual competitors and matters of competitive intelligence. Link to it from the blog / blogs, and encourage the opinion leaders to archive their wisdom there as they see fit.

* Create a message board just for the heck of it. Use it as a “tip line” where any of the 10,000 employees can start, join, or eavesdrop on a conversation about competitive intelligence. Have the bloggers prowl the message boards for things worth broadcasting, and when you find stuff that’s worth keeping, archive it in the wiki.

That was my thumbnail take. I’ll add to it this article from CommonCraft (a very strong blog by Social Design Consultant Lee LeFever that’s worth a regular read, by the way; tip of the hat to CorporateBlogging.info, and tip of the hat for it to CommEcon … see how this “blogs linking to blogs” thing works?) about how blogs and wikis can interrelate. It’s consistent with my thumbnail, and goes to the next level of granularity.

posted in category(s): Tools in Practice