I digress…back to the ones and zeros…

As my French friend is contemplating my financing of his next vacation, I started to think about the possible connections between recent press on Wal-Mart’s buyer blogging, my post about transparent development, and Jay’s post about sound corporate blogging. And henceforth the following idea came to mind:

Buyer blogging for government. More specifically, stakeholder blogging for donor-funded international development work.

In the same vein that Wal-Mart’s buyers are openly sharing opinions as to the quality or usefulness or value or whatever of consumer products, what if recipient countries, government contracting officers, or implementing partners could openly blog about their project experiences? Couple this with an exposed representation of project execution and I believe you start to truly realize transparent government. It would almost be like a preemptive FOIA request.

While MCC has taken a novel step (for a US Government Agency) with their CEO blog, they may suffer from the same early criticism Wal-Mart did for their Working Families for Wal-Mart efforts.

“Critics dismissed both as thinly veiled extensions of Wal-Mart’s P.R. department, and Wal-Mart shut them down The lesson seemed clear: create an authentic blog or don’t create a blog at all…” (NYT)

By expanding the scope of their blogging to project managers and recipient country stakeholders, MCC has solid ground to stand upon when defending burn-rate criticisms. Well, at least their defense is less “tell”, and more “show”.

Interestingly enough, I think my industry may institute a widespread fear-mongering campaign in response to something like this. Similar to the irritation of Wal-Mart suppliers, the massive government consulting machine might look unfavorably upon government contracting officers openly discussing their inability to execute a project or the latest empty solution. Perhaps if professional services firms were to seriously think about decaying IP combined with sound blogging policies, the government wouldn’t be unpleasantly surprised by “proprietary incompetence”? Expectation management is consulting 101. If you are a transparent consulting firm, the government will know what they are getting in advance. By extension, if they knew what they were getting in the first place, they have little ground to stand upon when complaining about it later. Maybe you wouldn’t have even been hired in the first place? (Sacre bleu!)

I assume there are multiple legal reasons this is impossible, but I still think it is a neat idea. What do you think?

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But, when corporate blogging goes bad, the results can be more then stiff – they can turn off customers, or, even worse, be ignored. This seems to occur when large organizations what to harness the marketing potential of social media, but otherwise only pay it lip service. Examples include corporate blogs that clearly have been edited by the legal or marketing department, and blogs that aggressively moderate comments – removing unflattering content. Only allowing blogs that have a voice from upon high – Cx0s, etc., and not line employees, is also a problem.

I won’t name any specific offenders, but if you look at my own industry – consulting – there are a few. To solve for this problem, companies need to a create a sound public blogging policy, acknowledging the contribution of the individual, stating that employees are entitled to their opinions, and emphasizing that the enterprise can only benefit from allowing a diversity of opinions to flourish. Without this, corporate “blogs” will always seem artificial and of limited value.

Companies that do this right, and create an employee blogging “bill of rights”, will see employees generate valuable content, and offer thought leadership in their fields. Combine a permissive policy with a slick enterprise blogging platform , and you’ll really start to see things happen.

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