Feb
17th
Wed
17th
Must Every Company Employee Engage in Conversation?
Last week, a New York Times op-ed criticizing Microsoft’s innovation and creativity sparked discussion on the Web, including a post on Microsoft’s official blog, here. In my view, the big takeaway from the official response was that innovation shouldn’t always be measured merely by speed-to-market (Innovation at Speed), but rather can also be measured by the number of people it ultimately impacts (Innovation at Scale). Microsoft tends to be good at the former and excellent at the latter. Over the weekend, my colleague Lewis Shepherd was leading a panel discussion at the Gov 2.0 Camp LA, and the topic surrounding the op-ed arose. I pointed someone to Microsoft’s official response on Twitter. One of the responses to that can be summaried as, Thanks for the info, but what’s more interesting is that they don’t allow comments; I think we’ve come to expect conversation. Now, on some level, it’s possible that if no input is allowed, the website owner might have a variety of reasons for not engaging in two-way conversation in that forum - from technical to corporate policy to…anything, really. It seems like the official Microsoft blog does not ever allow comments, and maybe there are good reasons for that; I’m not going to criticize that decision. But the more interesting question to me is whether it really has to. The irony to me is that this person was criticizing one person at Microsoft for not being conversational to one that was! Must every company employee who creates online content engage in public conversation? In my opinion, the answer to this is “No.” I think the very most important thing in communications is creating great content for your audience, proactively, generously. That said, I think that engaging audiences multi-directionally on multiple platforms and being part of a conversational community is the way you truly get ahead of the game. (This one hour Mediabistro Q&A video by Gary Vaynerkchuk is by FAR the single best thing I have seen on that topic. Watch every second of it.) But I don’t think that every single company employee needs to be “working the room” of conversation. Some people truly don’t have the time, some people have more important work priorities, some people just aren’t good at it. The important thing is that a company has some people engaged in both content creation and community conversation. Microsoft and many other companies will have influencers in public, and influencers behind the scenes. That’s fine. The other important thing is that the people in public take the information gleaned from those two-way conversation and relate them back to others in the company. The second part of the equation - conversationalists having meaningful intranet conversations with non-conversationalists - can often be the biggest challenge for people working at any large organization.
