How Do You Know What You Know?

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Something as simple as a blog tool can help your employees share what they know and learn from each other. However, though blogging is straightforward, there are still ways to do it wrong. And right.

By Ethan Yarbrough and Ken Efta, Allyis Inc.

It is critical to any company's success that it gain and maintain an accurate awareness of the expertise present in the organization. As Hewlett-Packard Chairman and CEO Lew Platt famously said "If HP knew what HP knows, we'd be three times more profitable."
 
 And today it is easier than ever for an individual to publish his or her own content, a development with great potential for companies looking to access and make available institutional knowledge. However, studies have shown that the mere introduction of user-generated content tools into a community of knowledgeable professionals is not likely, in and of itself, to spur active participation in knowledge sharing. Simply giving engineers a blog platform and asking them to dump the contents of their professional brains into it for the organization's good will not work. Even if the employees are inclined to want to share, it proves nearly impossible for them to access their latent knowledge in the abstract.

Interestingly, though, when they are able to use those tools to engage one another's ideas and interact with each other in the flow of their work, professionals become able to transmute latent knowledge into the explicit knowledge that becomes a resource to the organization. Therefore, when designing user-generated content systems for the enterprise, it's essential that both content discovery and consumption be given consideration equal to content production. If you give employees the ability to speak without building a correspondingly intelligent way for others to hear, then your content creators are the trees falling in the forest when no one is around.

Our thoughts on this topic have been shaped by a recent analysis conducted by one of our consultants, on a client's intranet-based blogging environment. A handful of design flaws in that system threaten to obscure, rather than highlight, ideas generated by employees. While access to the system, built in SharePoint 2007, is unrestricted so that anyone who wants to start a blog can do so simply by clicking the "start a blog" link, certain other design choices, if left uncorrected, are likely to render the blogs largely unused simply because the content creators are not connected effectively with content consumers:

1. Content Organized Only by Author, Not by Topic: On the current home page of the blog platform, there at last count a total of 30 employee blogs (out of about 180 employees). All blogs are listed by employee name, but no other information is visible when scanning the list of blogs. In a widely dispersed workforce, employees don't often know each other by name, so the list of names is not a relevant way to present blogs to the user base. Our colleague's short usability test revealed that users would prefer to see content organized by topic rather than by user.
2. No "New Post" Indicator: There is no indication of which blog was updated most recently, and no indication of what content exists in any of the blogs. Nor is there any indication of which blogs are generating comments by the readers. For someone who wants to have an at a glance view of what bloggers are saying and how readers are responding, it all has the feel of a party going on behind tightly closed doors.
3. No User-controlled Categorization or Rating Features: It is common in most consumer blog platforms to allow the writer to add tags to each post indicating through the use of keywords what the post is about. Additionally, many platforms allow users to quickly rate blog posts to show how useful it was to them. Our client's blog platform doesn't allow any such user-controlled definition or rating that could help represent the community's view of which blog materials are most interesting or most relevant to the goals the organization is pursuing

What this client has built is a content repository. What they need is system that promotes user interaction with that content.Our advice to our client? Highlight content on the blogging platform's home page via some organizational content features that will entice content consumers, driving them to the posts that will matter most to them:

a.  Most Popular Posts: Show which content is most popular among readers according to qualitative ratings of each post
b. Highlight Recent Posts by Category: Allow content producers to have finer control over categorization and show blog posts on the home page organized by those categories to give content consumers an at-a-glance view of what content is most relevant to them.
c. User-Generated Tags and Tag Cloud Navigation: Beyond giving better control to creators of blog content, we recommend building some intelligence into the system itself: empower the platform to capture and track tags submitted by content consumers which then feed an alternate, user-generated navigation like a tag cloud.
d. Highlight Content Consumers by Showing Comments: Highlight how consumers of blog content are interacting with the authors of the content by showing the top one or two comments for each of the posts on the homepage. You expose the conversations happening for the rest of the content consumers, encouraging them to participate or at least give visibility to what their peers are discussing.
e. Highlight Most Visited Posts: Because a large percentage of users may read posts, but will never comment or rate a post, include a section on the home page that highlights the most visited blog posts based upon the user traffic. This would lend insight into what the organization as a whole is reading and thinking even if they leave no other trace of interaction with the content.

The result of such changes, we feel, would be to attract new readers and to increase the engagement of existing readers. Readers will be much more likely to find new content (and unforeseen connections between existing content), which can in turn inspire comments and more new content in response to existing posts. Although our client would need to evaluate this in terms of their own success metrics, we hypothesize that these approaches would produce more to indicate to users that the blogging platform was truly a useful, dynamic and relevant knowledge source. At any given moment, the people consuming content would be engaged with the people producing the content. They'd be actively connected. That active connection would draw out latent knowledge that would otherwise remain untapped. And over time, the organization as a whole could better begin to see and to benefit from what it knows.