October 2007 Archives

We're amazed and excited by the incredible turnout for yesterday's online seminar, Enterprise 2.0: Using Social Media in the Workplace, which we co-presented with Forrester. The hundreds of enthusiastic responses and active participants who attended really show just how much potential there is for businesses to make the most out of social media tools such as blogging.

6A: This really depends on your community and the conversation at hand. Inside an organization, if you're blogging on an intranet, people will generally be pretty civil because of the social pressure to act appropriately around coworkers. On a public blog, you can often keep even a contentious conversation from becoming uncivil by simply requiring some form of identification from your commenters. But platforms like Movable Type have very robust tools for moderating conversations -- if you see a topic that's really becoming heated, you can always set comments to be moderated by default, and then publish only the comments that are appropriate. It's a lot easier to err on the side of being more restrained and then open up over time than it is to try to shut things down after the fact. For more, see "Control Your Comments: It's Your Lobby", or consult the Six Apart Guide to Business Blogging, which has an entire chapter on creating a commenting policy.

Q: When should we use blogs or wiki software? What's the difference?

6A: Blogs and wiki software are very complementary tools, with slightly different goals. Platforms like Movable Type give you the rich ability to easily update web pages, host conversations, store media assets, and create standalone web pages, all within the easy experience of a blogging platform. Wikis are a great supplement to these kinds of tools if you want to add in the ability to have a number of people collaborate on a document to reach a consensus. In contrast, blogs are a great tool for providing status updates or for discussing topics where multiple individual viewpoints can be useful.

One major social consideration in deploying these tools is that since most wiki tools allow anyone to edit a document, contributors can be concerned about getting appropriate credit (or blame!) for their contributions, and discussions where people have opposing viewpoints can become difficult, resulting in successive edits to replace other people's content. Those caveats aside, wikis and blogs enhance each other's functionality, and page 9 of the Business Blogging Guide offers a more in-depth compare-and-contrast look at the two technologies. If you're looking for a platform that integrates these tools, you should consider SuiteTwo, an Intel-led Web 2.0 suite for the Enterprise which incorporates wikis as well as using Movable Type as its flagship best-of-breed blogging component.

6A: The right techniques for promoting a blog vary widely, depending on what audience you're trying to reach. Inside an organization, you should take advantage of the other channels that people are already using to get information. Include links to your blog in company newsletters, list your blog's web address in your email signature, and display recent headlines from your blog on your company's intranet homepage. (Most portal software applications let you include RSS feeds pretty easily.)

If your'e trying to reach an audience outside your company, you'll want to use all the traditional methods for promoting any communications channel. Make sure all of your staff members who talk to customers or the public know about your blogs and are comfortable describing them to others. Don't be shy about including your blog's address on your business cards, in any materials that are included with your products, or even on direct-mail communications or in print ads. Every channel that you reach your audience with now has the potential to become a two-way ongoing conversation through your blog.

Thanks again to everyone who participated in the web seminar yesterday. Please be sure to check out the seminar resources we've posted, and if you want to be the first to know of similar free events in the future, subscribe to our feed and we'll keep you in the loop on upcoming events.

Every so often, we get some great feedback from our community that's thought-provoking and challenges our assumptions in a good way. And then sometimes, we get blog posts from otherwise-clueful folks who've, well, missed the mark. Fortunately, people with a lot of talent are usually pretty good at taking criticism, and that's certainly true of Khoi Vinh, design director for NYTimes.com and author of the popular Subtraction blog, and Jason Fried, a principal of 37Signals and one of the key voices of their Signal vs. Noise blog.

The conversation got started in earnest last week -- Khoi posted "If It Looks Like a Cow, Swims Like a Dolphin and Quacks Like a Duck, It Must Be Enterprise Software" on his Movable Type-powered blog. The title's a playful jab at an odd little Lotus Notes ad campaign, but overall the essay does a great job of showing what's traditionally been wrong with enterprise software. Jason picked up the baton from there, with characteristic humility, offering up "Why Enterprise Software Sucks".

Honestly, their criticisms are mostly fair, though picking on these hundred-year-old companies for making software that's not very usable seems like kind of taking a cheap shot. But let's place the blame appropriately: If Enterprise software sucks, it's because the people who know how to do things right haven't gotten off their asses and fixed it.

We say this because, hey, what do you know -- we're trying to fix it. As Khoi, or Jason, or anybody else can attest, Six Apart's background is undoubtedly in the world of being real, credible, serious long-time contributors to blogging and social media. (That's part of why we've been glad to see the successes of these two, among so many others, who come from that world.) But we have an ambition, an actual mission, to honor that community by bringing the potential to everyone who can benefit. And that mission doesn't stop at the door to your office.

Khoi gets the heart of the issue:

[E]nterprise software rarely gets critiqued the way even a US$30 piece of shareware will. It doesn't benefit from the rigor of a wide and varied base of users, many of whom will freely offer merciless feedback, goading and demanding it to be better with each new release. Shielded away from the bright scrutiny of the consumer marketplace and beholden only to a relatively small coterie of information technology managers who are concerned primarily with stability, security and the continual justification of their jobs and staffs, enterprise software answers to few actual users. Given that hothouse environment, it's only natural that the result is often very strange.

We've raised the same point in our own conversations with companies -- having a robust, thriving community of millions of individuals blogging with our platforms in their personal lives makes our business and Enterprise software simply work better. Want to make sure your enterprise blog platform will scale? Take what we've learned from helping scale some of the largest communities on the web. Like the control and flexibility of open source, with the familiarity and support of a traditional software license? Our communities have demanded both.

Put simply, if the term Enterprise 2.0 means anything at all, then it has to mean enterprise software that meets the user experience standards set by the tools we use in our free time. Anything less will fail.

And ultimately, it comes back to our mission. Since both Khoi and Jason are designers, and we're a company co-founded by a designer, we know full well that experience matters. As a company, we think Six Apart has an obligation to provide as great an experience in enterprise software as people get when reading NYTimes.com or using 37Signals' productivity tools. This is a point we've kept coming back to in talking about why business blogs matter so much:

[W]hile those of us who work on our own or for smaller companies can say "Well, I want to work on a Mac." or "I'm only going to use Firefox." or "I'm only going to use open source applications." (and most of us at Six Apart fall into those camps), most non-technical people not only don't have that option, they don't care enough to find out how to do that stuff. You use what your boss tells you to, and even if you have other preferences, they're not worth the fight when you're just trying to get your job done.

So, instead of having to use some horrible "Groupware Knowledge Management Content Solution Server" thing, we think people should be able to use real blogs from a company that actually cares about blogging. And to do that, we have to make blogging tools feel "safe" to bosses and CIOs and CTOs and IT departments and other offices full of people whose job it is to say "no" to anything too new or unproven.

Of course, we owe a big thanks to Khoi and Jason for starting a good conversation, but let's not concede that enterprise software just sucks intrinsically. Let's assume that, just like the web itself has been reinvented and reinvigorated by social software in the past half-decade, the way we collaborate and create at work will be, too. It's a point that all of us who work on enterprise social software at Six Apart take pretty personally, and there might be no better way to show how personal communications platforms can also be serious business tools than to use this business blog post to highlight a point I'd made on my personal blog:

Anyone who creates technologies that aspire to have significant cultural or social impacts on the developed world has to focus on both our lives at home and our lives at work. Anything less is an abdication of potential, or a failure of ambition, and settling for less denies many people the chance to discover tools or technologies that can improve their lives.

So the solution to having to use bad tools at work isn't to merely shrug your shoulders and complain about it -- the answer is to get even more ambitious, raise your standards, and start using software that's both a delight to work with and proven to help build your business.

Still skeptical? Join us on Tuesday for the free seminar we're hosting with Forrester's best Enterprise 2.0 experts -- we'll show you how to make the case for your boss, your team, your employees, and your business.

Some of the most fundamental tools for scientists are numbers and measurements, and one of the most powerful fundamentals of the scientific method is the concept of publishing one's results. It's no wonder, then, that Movable Type is a popular tool for scientists to share information, and that they're eager to celebrate measurable milestones. ScienceBlogs, the vibrant community of bloggers hosted by Seed Magazine, recently marked an amazing accomplishment: Their community, in less than two years, has hit half a million comments submitted on the thriving site. In honor of the milestone, and the remarkable amount of information and education that the scientists and authors on the site have shared with their community, ScienceBlogs is today's Movable Type Featured Site.

What's it finally going to take to convince your company (or just your boss) to use blogs and other social media as business tools? Well, we're providing the chance to talk to some of the experts who really understand these opportunities, for free. We've built our own business using blogs, and helped more companies succeed with social media in the enterprise than anyone else -- now we want to show you how to do it, too.

One of the things that's most gratifying and exciting about helping people start blogging is that it's a truly international effort. That point was vibrantly demonstrated for us recently when we were visited last month by Jian Shuo Wang. The photo below illustrates Jian Shuo stopping by our San Francisco office to celebrate the five year anniversary of his blog, and in honor of his birthday today, it's our pleasure to name Jian Shuo's blog our Movable Type Featured Blog.

At the 5 years of anniversary, I cannot ignore a great team that is behind the software I am using - the Six Apart team who created MovableType. My blog actually started with a trail run of MovableType (my first entry was about it. Then I love the software and I use it every day. It is the only software (besides operating system) that I use everyday. The great architecture, the powerful template system, and flexible archiving features really made this blog possible. More importantly, I am inspired by the team and have strong personal connection with them.