PLEASE NOTE that as of April 24, 2010, this list has been moved to my site's Top Posts page, where I'll be making all future updates.
I'll leave this post intact in case anyone's linking to it or it turns up in any search results, but I encourage you to visit my Top Posts page for the current list.
Here are a few posts from recent years that continue to resonate with me. Topics include executive coaching, personal and professional development, leadership, management, motivation, organizational culture, and the process of change. I'll update this list every few months, (Future updates will be made on my Top Posts page) but if you're looking for a post that's no longer shown here, you can always find it using the search box on the left.
Companies and organizations that continue to resist blogging often do so because they view bloggers as isolated individuals with hidden agendas and axes to grind.
Dell initially made that mistake with Jeff Jarvis, but as Jeff noted yesterday, they're taking a different approach now:
...I had a rather infamous run-in with Dell
here at Buzzmachine when I complained about a bad machine and service.
They ignored me, but thousands of similarly frustrated customers did
not. Dell’s attitude toward blogs at the time was “look, don’t touch.”... But things began to turn around when
Dell opened a company blog, which was off to a puffy start until
Lionel [Menchaca], the chief blogger, entered, speaking with customers in an
honest, direct, humble, and human voice. Next they put together a team to reach out to bloggers who had problems...
It is clear, through [Lionel and his colleagues], that at least at some levels, Dell has
changed its culture and certainly its attitude toward bloggers. They
now see value in reaching out. As they’ve said before,
bloggers tend to state their problems clearly, which makes it easier
(and, I assume, more efficient) to solve them. A problem solved is not
only a customer likely to be saved, but also often leads to good PR and
branding as the bloggers recount their happy endings. And the Dell guys
say they get information and data from this; they hear about problems
that may arise before others in the company do, because their customers
are talking about it...
Lionel, who came from years of customer service and PR at the
company, said the team working on the blog and with bloggers loves it.
Aren’t there a few people out there who just can’t be satisfied, no
matter what you do? Lost causes? Bozos? They agreed that there are a
few and the outreach people don’t always say yes to their demands. But
my drinking companions agreed that in an open forum, other folks tend
to know who the bozos are. And the bozos tend to stand alone.
That, you see, was the real moral to my story. Whether or not I was
a bozo, I did not stand alone. My story wasn’t about me but the people
around me, the ones who said, “me, too.” I was merely the agent of
coalescence. That’s what you have to watch for on the internet. That’s
what the internet enables. [emphasis mine]
The "agent of coalescence"--I love that phrase. It may have been easier for Jeff to step into that role because he's a big-name blogger with a sizeable readership, and because he tapped into frustrations shared by thousands of Dell customers, but any one of us can do the same, albeit on a smaller scale.
We blog because we care, passionately, about something. And thanks to the live web, others who share that passion will find us. If we're not bozos, they'll join us--they'll say "me, too," in any number of ways. This is how movements and constituencies and networks of all sorts are built today--they form around agents of coalescence.
Which leads me to two questions: If you're blogging, how might you serve more effectively as an agent of coalescence on behalf of a cause you're passionate about? And if you're a company or organization, how might you identify and engage those agents of coalescence who are passionate about what you do?
Photo of Jeff Jarvis by Doc Searls. Yay Flickr and Creative Commons.
Swivel is a content-sharing application for data and graphs. It's sort of like YouTube meets Wikipedia for people who love spreadsheets. As with YouTube, you can create a user account, upload your content (in Swivel's case, raw data or a spreadsheet file rather than a video), format and tag it, and set it free for others to view, comment upon, embed or otherwise use as they see fit. As with Wikipedia, accuracy is in the eye of the beholder, so read the citations and take the figures with a grain of salt.
There's tight integration with several Google apps, including the ability to make Swivel graphs from Google spreadsheets and a feed from Google Blogsearch showing people posting Swivel graphs, which just this minute led me to my friend Beth Kanter, who posted today on this very same topic, using the very same graph above. Small world!
Companies and organizations that continue to resist blogging often do so because they view bloggers as isolated individuals with hidden agendas and axes to grind.
