Outstanding NPR Series on Blogging

See http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=17613637

It's a very interesting and valuable contribution. Very helpful to have the material in text with podcasts.

Happy New Year -- May your blogging contribute to that happiness.

Psychological climate benefits . . .

We can consider psychological climate as individual employees’ experiences of organizational climate. (I know there is a distinction.) Recent research in India by Biswas & Varma (2007) found that organizational citizenship behavior and job satisfaction mediated between psychological climate and employee performance. The survey questions and constructs are similar to ones in my investigation on social media and organizational climate.
I’m looking for opportunities for surveys in US firms to add to my surveys of MBA students. There is no conflict between research and theory on the one hand, and practical employee attitude surveys on the other.

The reference is
Biswas, Soumendu & Varma, Arup (2007). Psychological climate and individual performance in India: test of a mediated model. Employee Relations, 29(6), pp. 664 – 676.

Listening to customers

Marianne Kolbasuk McGee wrote a good article in the Nov. 26, 2007 Information Week about the efforts of Fedex, eBay, Schwab and others to get ideas from customers. Communities and networks are approaches frequently used to find out what the customers want and then make it easy to get the products and services. A relatively small group of active customers can provide lots of insight. But let’s not neglect employees too in the focus on customers. Follow the Southwest philosophy: Treat (and listen to) your employees well and they will take care of the customers well.

FedEx’s Rob Carter is quoted about customers wanting services that span several companies. Reminds me of an experience I had this past week pleading with some vendors for a unified proposal that did not force me to do a lot of work putting together a multi-vendor solution in which nobody would take responsibility.

She also wrote about one highly-resourced blog that few people read – a reminder that just because it’s a blog or online community does not mean that it’s useful.

New Article: Trust & Empower

Another recent study is consistent with my hypothesis that blogging and other social, participatory media promote behaviors that increase productivity. Jossy Mathew (2007) found that mission, agreement, concern for employees and trust, customer focus, organizational learning, empowerment, and high performance work orientation all significantly correlated with perceptual measures of quality and productivity. Both qualitative interviews and surveys were used.
I would put it as, clarify the mission, set clear goals, set high expectations then trust and empower the employees. Inexpensive facilitating technologies include social media. Sure it takes courage but less than say 360 evaluations in which employees evaluate upwards anonymously.

Mathew, Jossy (2007). The relationship of organisational culture with productivity and quality: A study of Indian software organizations. Employee Relations, 29 (6), 677-695.

Free organizational climate surveys

One of my dissertation surveys is now "on the street" so to speak. It feels good to be collecting data.
If you would like a free, professionally-done organizational climate survey for your company, just contact me. You get anonymous results for your firm and I get de-identified data for my research on blogging and social media -- Web 2.0 -- use. Customized questions can easily be included, for example on evaluation of your employee blogs.

Blog Conferences Galore!

There are social media, blog, and Web 2.0 conferences galore. It's like the California Gold Rush and like that event, the blogging infrastructure providers, including conference organizers, will be among the winners. A few miners got rich but the vast majority did not.

At the Blog World Expo in Vegas (Nov. 8-9) you can take your chances on getting good workshops after you put your money down. With limited space at the good sessions, it is indeed a gamble.

A better bet seems to be the Executing Social Media Conference in Atlanta Nov. 14-15. Pricey for students even after the big discount but you know what you will get to hear and that you will be able to interact with substantial industry people.

My excursion to Atlanta last week to learn about Iridium satcom left me with lots of information but many new questions about the data service.

Catching Up on Iridium Satcom

I need to catch up on the physical technology that enables the social side. So I'm off to Atlanta and SITA for only two days to find out more about the Iridium communication satellite services. The voice quality is like a mobile phone. The data rate is low. But can it do text messaging? That may be enough.
The networking side of the trip is key. But do they blog?

Informative seller of social media consulting

This is not a commercial endorsement but www.vocecommunications.com certainly shows its competence and benevolence by all the interesting social media info, blogs and contacts on its web site.

Blogs are a subset of . . .

We may recognize a blog when we read it. But what about in the future? My research may be dated if it is just about blogs. We are certainly well beyond the basic blogs of 5 -10 years ago. Perhaps "blogs and other social media" would be adequate.
In a related concern, I'm working on some scales to rate the social and informational dimensions of blogging in organizations. There may be other dimensions such as mobilizing social resources. Following Lin (2000), we may find instrumental and expressive returns to blogging.
The scales can be used to construct a "blogging index" or a "social media usage" index.

Dissertation Proposal Approved

Got some good advice and approval 9/28/07. The main needs are to further narrow the focus and define the type of internal organizational blog that I ask about.
Grudin & Efimova make the point in their HICSS 2007 paper about blogs at Microsoft that corporate blogs and employee blogs are different. Team blogs are were said not to be common.
Juech & Stobbe have a 2005 paper on the Deutsche Bank Research site with a classification scheme from a German-language paper by Zerfass. It's suggestive but I don't think that it illustrates the full overlap of information and social purposes of blogs.
My proposal did suggest some dimensions of blogging experience for individual respondents. I'll be refining my definition and in the process I may define a blogging index.
I'm grateful to be "launched"

Organizational Climate and Blog Policy

Blogger or not, please take a moment for one of my surveys. The links are in the left sidebar.
Mahalo!

Uses of Blogs

Coming soon -- my review of Axel Bruns & Joanne Jacobs (2006) Uses of Blogs book at the Resource Center for Cyberculture Studies (http://rccs.usfca.edu/). I recommend it as a good overview of blogging from mainly academic perspectives.

Interaction and Trust

Why blog in a company? My hypothesis: Builds trust. Similar idea at


http://www-03.ibm.com/developerworks/blogs/page/rawn?entry=from_communities_to_encouraging_innovation

Edelman Trust Index 2007

Edelman Trust Index Due Out this Week
Was scheduled for last week. Edelman is a great site for PR and employee communication issues. It appears that they attract customers by sharing their research, demonstrating their competence. Mahalo!

In Blogs We Trust: Research

See the Dec. 2006 Edelman(.com) study of internal communications -- "New Frontiers . . . " Very interesting data on internal blogs and wiki's.
Today (Jan. 20) at the open source conference at UH I had the opportunity to talk with a Sun employee who started blogging recently. (Mahalo, Sun, for the lunch and Barton George's talk!) Sun is of course famous for its CEO blogger. Blogging definitely gives peers and managers insights into what employees are thinking. Sun bloggers can choose to have their blogs internally or externally visible.