Learnings On Facilitating A Blog Community

Blogging about group and blog communities is directly related to my job. If you are interested in facilitating a blog community, here are some of my musings and learnings at my 21Publish blog having looked at a number.

Update (10/19/05): I was prompted to write about this based on a post by Beth Kanter – she covers the non-profit space quite a bit.

Update (10/19/05): Beth has an update here. Feel free to join the discussion.

Update (10/21/05): Beth summarized and consolidated here. Thanks!

Technorati Tags: , ,

Blogging Observations: Nine Months Of Posting Versus One Month And Ten Posts

Some facts first. Dave Sifry (CEO of Technorati) recently posted about growth in the blogosphere. 19.6 million blogs. If I checked the Technorati ranking of my blog here, it has been somewhere between 35,000 and 40,000. That’s in about the top 0.002 or 0.2% of all blogs and took about nine months. Additionally, this blog has a very modest following of probably 50ish readers via Feedburner RSS (still some renegade feeds out there) and 20,000 some page views since inception.

Of course, blogging is about microaudiences, the long tail, etc., etc. so expectations from the average person that they will get huge audiences is probably against the odds/base rates unless they are really targeting a niche segment.

The highest number of comments I received on a blog post on my individual blog here (including my own comments) was seven comments. It was a post linked to from Virginia Postrel’s site.

In contrast, at my BusinessWeek blog (which has only been around for about a month and has ten posts) … well I have twenty comments on a post I did there (including my own comments) on ethics – the comments include many more people in the discussion.

A key difference in my blog at BusinessWeek is that my blog is part of a blog community, as opposed to being an individual blog (like the one here) that sits out on an island connecting to context and other users. Of course, another key difference is that the blog there leverages from the BusinessWeek reader base.

But I keep coming back to this … nine months on individual blog with seven comments as a high versus one
month and ten posts on blog as part of blog community with twenty
comments as high. Which method had a better efficiency in creating
dialogue? Just stepping back at a very crude level, the blog as part of a blog community seems to win out.

One could make many other arguments that I have not controlled for factors that level balance the two blogs. Nor I have sought out disconfirming evidence to explain the difference.

But I wonder whether blog use as we know it will shift given the stats and observations I’ve made above. For me, individual blogging has been a substitute for a electronic newsletter. But is it really that way for the majority of people? Is it more about conversations? If a community framework provides a better way to generate that dialogue, should we see more of this?

Disclosure: I am a gun for 21Publish, a provider of turnkey group and branded blog communities. BusinessWeek is a 21Publish customer.

Update (10/19/05): The comparison is nine months and 300 posts (individual blog) versus one month and 10 posts (blog community).

Interesting Article Pointing Out Why Corporate Ventures (Versus Startups) May Have Higher Mortality Rates

Accenture’s Outlook Journal has a somewhat older article (vintage 1999-2000) describing the benefits of "fast ventures", a strategy to bring a new eCommerce company to market fast using new company and new equity structures.

I have been involved with a number of internal venture and new business
initiatives within large corporations (not generally eCommerce though) and resonate with some of the pressures cited in this article that
must be compensated for or actively managed (I cannot speak factually on
the comparative findings on incubation and return timeframes). The passage that caught my interest from the article is as follows:

One research review by Patricia G. Greene and Candida G. Brush, "The
Corporate Venture Champion: A Resource-Based Approach to the Role and Process"
(Entrepreneurship Theory and Practice, Spring 1999), suggests
that compared with entrepreneurial startups, corporate ventures require a much
longer incubation period before commercialization and take twice as long to
reap a profit.

It’s unclear why this is the case, but experience
suggests five answers.

First, corporate executives tend to have a much smaller
universe of ideas to choose from than does the typical venture capitalist.
Second, they may have less objectivity about which ideas should succeed; this
may be due to internal politics or hardened views about their particular
industry. Third, internal initiatives are limited by the company’s own
capabilities, which may fall far short of best- of-breed.

Fourth, getting the green light for an internal venture
typically requires layers of approval that sacrifice swiftness for a certainty
that is rarely attainable in today’s fast-moving markets. Staffing allocation,
annual budgeting and political power struggles all conspire to limit a
company’s ability to innovate.

Fifth, and perhaps most important, corporate initiatives
suffer because managers are seldom personally on the line. To paraphrase Samuel
Johnson, nothing so concentrates a manager’s mind as the prospect of an IPO in
just three months.

In a corporate environment, a fast venture can minimize or
eliminate these impediments. New-venture teams tend to make decisions motivated
less by career advancement or company politics than by the opportunity for
personal and financial gain, creating powerful incentives for success.

Random Stuff On Business Ethics (And Competitive Intelligence)

Some good comments over at my BusinessWeek blog post on "Teaching Ethics In the Business Schools:What Do You Think?". Kathleen also has a post that touches on leadership and ethics here.

When contemplating what my life would be like if I were a full-time competitive intelligence person (as opposed to doing competitive intelligence as part of general startup efforts or management consulting), I found the following PDF (from Competitive Intelligence Review) to be excellent on highlighting some concrete cases of how competitive intelligence can walk a fine line with ethical behavior. Here’s a snip from early on in the article that demonstrates a situation with Marriott:

For example, a 1988 Fortune magazine article outlined Marriott’s practice of using headhunters to interview regional managers from each of five competitors’ economy hotel chains when it was investigating that market. Marriott was able to obtain information regarding salaries, training, and managerial expectations. Some people may view such tactics as unethical. Marriott maintained that they were ethically acceptable because job candidates were told no jobs were currently available, but might be available in the future, and because several of the interviewees were later hired (Dumaine, 1988).

Not making any judgements here, I also have an interesting article that my wife uses in marketing class that outlines how ex-law enforcement agents are used by a company to survey the frozen pizza production capacity of one of the major pizza players and how that intelligence, while it clearly uses deception on the ground floor by the intelligence person, it enabled the vendor to become the #2 player in the market. Company gone bad? Agents gone bad? Or in the spirit of winning the game? Seems like the original PDF I pointed out (did I say it was a good paper?) can help one to decide (and also get a perspective on how one’s opinion may fit within a cross-section of other professionals).

Union Square Ventures Turns Website Into Blog

Fred Wilson posts that Union Square Ventures has turned its front webpage into a blog. Although Infectious Greed has some mixed feelings on the subject as to putting a blog on the front page, I think it’s a great thing for small organizations. Aside from blog hype, etc., I suspect most people click by the blah, blah, blah on the front pages of many small org. websites anyway, especially venture capital websites. Why not make information on the main page fresh like a newsletter? So long as people can find out what you are about and who you are in one-click, I say just optimize the web flow to the audience. What will be interesting to see will be how Fred Wilson divides his posts between the firm’s blog and his personal blog. The division will probably be far from representative of a typical corporate blogger, but I see it as a small test case of a prominent blogger moving to an organizational blog. We haven’t seen many cases like this as to whether the shift can be successful. For Fred, it may be business as usual (as I suspect it will be), but who knows. For one thing, cross-posting in Web 2.0 is a pain in the neck. That’s going to have some impact I’m sure on either the author or reader base. Make sure to check out Brad Burham’s rationale for the switch to a blog.

eBay/PRTM Benchmarking Study On Internet Software Industry

Pittiglio Rabin Todd & McGrath (PRTM), my alma mater in terms of the management consulting industry, has just released a benchmarking study done jointly with eBay. The study, authored by Director Joe Lo, focuses on uncovering the best product development practices within the internet software industry, and the study is purported to be the first of its kind – it contains a good amount of numerical and factual information about the sector and a functional area within that sector. Note that the internet software industry consists of companies like Yahoo!, Google, and eBay.

Some of the key findings which strike a chord close to me (being involved in the Web 2.0 space):

  • Best-in-class (BIC) companies spend on average 5% more time in the concept/requirements phase and 5% less time in the test/rollout phase compared to worst-in-class (WIC) companies
  • Internet software companies have a tremendous advantage in that they can simply launch new products or features on the website and see how customers react. The companies can track page-views, click-throughs, etc. This is tracking actual usage. If the product does well, invest more. If it doesn’t, pull it from the site.
  • BICs have development cycles of eight weeks, while WICs take 22. Note that eBay has an R&D process that enables the company to launch 80 projects per "release train" (think of the train leaving the station as one release) with 26 trains per year.
  • The study goes further to illuminate that shortening the cycle time has other positive effects not immediately obvious – defects decline by 25%, and worker productivity increases 20%.

The report by Joe Lo is a very nice piece of work. Check it out here (registration required).

So how is your company going to change towards becoming best-in-class? One doesn’t always need a change management consulting firm to accomplish change, but a company still needs that capability and fortitude to improve itself.