Those of us blogging at work don't seem to be building up the readership that we'd hoped, despite the captive audience. There are lots of possible explanations for this, including that the content being produced isn't engaging - too rambling, not interesting enough, blah blah blah - but I'm attacking a different angle of the problem: that it's not easy or natural for people to visit the blog sites. I certainly never used to go to blogs myself, until shortly before I started this one up. And that was on my own time, whereas these are (mostly) busy individuals at work who are even less likely to think to do so when they have a few free minutes.
So PeterJ has been kind enough to whip up a nice user interface for people to use, in order to subscribe to/unsubscribe from whatever blogs (and forums) they choose with the click of a mouse button. With that small an effort, they can have the content of any number of sites e-mailed to them. I'm the only one piloting his efforts so far (that I know of) but we're going to expand it shortly, and then blow the doors wide open by introducing it to the whole damn company.
I've already started prepping my boss for the fact that, once we've done what we can to get the mountain to come to Mohammad, those key bloggers at work - including him, and PeterJ, and probably me - need to commit themselves to providing content on a reasonable basis, in order to make them relevant. I've been doing my part so far - I blog once a day, almost without fail - but I think the last entry the VP posted was over 2 weeks ago. And that's just not going to engage anyone, especially when I know there are tons of topics he wants people thinking and talking about. So we'll see if that message makes any difference.
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4 comments:
I don't have the fear of too little content, rather too much. I see the content starting slow and eventually building its way up to a reasonable amount (a sustainable pace, you might say).
I fear too much content is likely to drive people away. I've heard from enough people that they "don't have time" to check-in/participate, not that they don't know how.
I think to have an engaged readership it needs to find it's own equilibrium - we'll be successful as long as people feel that their voice is being heard (and not drowned out in a sea of content) and the blogs don't turn in to a preachers pulpit.
I wonder if people recognize the difference between "their voice being heard" and "something being done about whatever they're complaining about?"
There's one early early adopter so far; this afternoon she found one showstopper that I broke in the last change and one misfeature inherited from my generic webserver config, and suggested a change that makes the icky part of the interface a little nicer. (I definitely need to get some automated tests in place.) I also watched as she subscribed to several sources and then immediately configured her mail program to filter all of that new content into a separate set of folders. :)
As for content delivery, I must admit I'm never going to use the service myself. For the last several years I've actively tried to rid myself (and the company, to a lesser extent) of as much email as possible, particularly the stuff that is sent out automatically to wide-ranging mailing lists and I guarantee is ignored by 98% of the recipients.
I don't know if my sense of context is particularly heightened, but I find I can't read blogs in my mail program. The one exception was when I used nntp//rss to convert feeds into a newsgroup-style interface, but even then the posts were in a separate area of my mail program. In any case, having posts appear in my inbox next to "real" email is just impossible to deal with.
I don't find the amount of content that comes from work sources in a day overwhelming; of the 250-odd non-spam email messages I receive in a day I read and discard at least 95%, and I don't auto-file any in the trash. I also glance at something like 100 daily wiki updates and drill down to several, plus I follow all of the forums and bookmarks and blogs (including comment feeds).
(And people wonder why I've always got 100 tabs open. :)
Finally (GOSH!) I disagree somewhat with mikem's idea that our internal blogs shouldn't be a pulpit from which to preach: that's exactly what they should be, from time to time. Sometimes, as he's found, you've got to be deliberately provocative. I don't have a problem scolding people (continually) for things like bad checkin comments, but that's not all I post, either; it's all about finding a balance.
Man, let a guy off work for a couple of days and suddenly it's like he's in a word count competition with Fyodor friggin' Dostoevsky.
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