Hungry? How about some filet of slimehead in Chinese gooseberry sauce?
You get the same reaction from many CIOs if you ask them “How about installing blogs, wikis, instant messenger, Skype, social software, collaboration tools, Web 2.0 mash-ups, and maybe some open software.”
Slimehead is more palatable if you call it orange roughie, Chinese gooseberries better if you say kiwifruit. Same fish, same fruit, new labels.
It’s time for us to come up with a vocabulary that’s not an obstacle to installing learning technology. Take the word blog. For some people, the word sets off alarm bells. They envision amateurs, threatening hackers, neo-nazis, the Drudge Report, people obsessed with kittens, semi-literates, unverifiable nonsense, spammers, porno freaks, political extremists, teen age confessionals, MySpace flirts, people who are out of control and lawsuits waiting to happen. It’s enough to give disruptive technology a bad name.
So let’s not speak of blogs or slimeheads. Let’s talk about Project Logs. Or Collaborative Project Documentation. Or Knowledge Logs. Or professional journals.
A couple of years ago, Lee LeFever, who’s currently taking a year to travel around the world with his bride, wrote this plea for showing the boss the benefits of the whatchmacallits.
First, think about the value of the Wall Street Journal to business leaders. The value it provides is context — the Journal allows readers to see themselves in the context of the financial world each day, which enables more informed decision making.
With this in mind, think about your company as a microcosm of the financial world. Can your employees see themselves in the context of the whole company? Would more informed decisions be made if employees and leaders had access to internal news sources?
Weblogs serve this need. By making internal websites simple to update, weblogs allow individuals and teams to maintain online journals that chronicle projects inside the company. These professional journals make it easy to produce and access internal news, providing context to the company — context that can profoundly affect decision making. In this way, weblogs allow employees and leaders to make more informed decisions through increasing their awareness of internal news and events.
What has helped you sell Web 2.0 benefits to non-believers? What stories have worked? Care to rename any technology? We’ll ponder this in the ongoing Unworkshop, but your comments and email will be greatly appreciated.
{ 8 comments… read them below or add one }
I don’t think it’s necessary to abandon the word “blog.” I think it’s only going to become more commonplace, as it has in recent years. For those of us who have been blogging for years can attest, no one even knew what a blog was back in 2000, but now it’s become an even greater part of our lexicon, and will only continue to do so.
There’s the personal blog (“p-blog” maybe) and there’s the business blog (“b-blog”). Just as there are always going to be print publications that are rags, the same is true in the digital publishing world.
Let’s not abandon the label just because there’s so much noise out there.
Gabe, I don’t want to abandon the word “blog.” Far from it. I’ve been a Johnny Appleseed for blogging for six years now. But if an IT department says “No blogs,” I’d like to have an alternative description, for example, “These are professional journals.”
jay
Finding new language to offset the xenophobia of CIOs is an interesting concept. I don’t want to abandon “blog” as a term. I like the idea of it as Collaborative Performance Support System. A take off of EPSS. It is a convenient, cheap, and effective tool for employees to find and use the knowledge. I’ll go out on a limb and say it is more effective that metatagged KMS. I’d rather read someone’s experience than sort through ranked documents hoping to find something of use.
Mike, you rock. Collaborative performance support system. I absolutely love it.
Once again, I don’t want to do away with the term blog, but if that’s what it takes to get a CIO to buy in, I’ll sell the project under its pseudonym.
jay
Well Jay,
Can’t say I agree with you on this one. The logic of sanitising and hiding behind a range of nebulous terms just makes it hard to know what anyone is talking about especially since we’d lose the tool name that identifies which tool you are using for the job. (I could use various tools as a professional journal – a blog, a wiki, a web page, podcasts). Following your logic would mean Americans should rename “drug stores’ because some people use illegal drugs? Or rename cars because some people drive dangerously and they are associated with stealing, joyriding and bank robbery get-aways.
How about using the same name for the technology as everyone else and doing such good things with them that they make the headlines. You wouldn’t change the name word processor just beacuse people write bad things with them, would you? Where would you draw the line?
Lindy
Lindy, my hope is to accelerate progress, and sometimes that’s accomplished by tagging something new with a familiar name until it becomes established.
To your examples of drugs stores and cars, it’s not the consumers who’d do the renaming; it’s the sellers. Anyway, renaming drug stores and cars isn’t the same deal, for these are accepted products. (They once were pharmacies and horseless carriages.)
How about Jägermeister, the herbal liqueur from Germany that tastes like cough syrup? How can you sell Jägermeister to American youth? You might offer the guys shots so cold (4 degrees F) that it has no taste whatsoever. You invent mixed drinks for women like the Sexy Alligator, Red-headed Sister, and California Surfer.
Wikipedia notes that a “Bundesliga” is 1 part Jägermeister and 3 parts Mountain Dew. A “Marion Barry” is equal parts Jägermeister, Kahlúa, bourbon and Coke. A “Meaning of Life” is one part Jägermeister and two parts Dr. Pepper.
The point is that the distiller is selling Jägermeister by not selling Jägermeister, just I’m proposing selling blogs by not calling them blogs. Not always. Not most of the time. But when you want your date to toss down several ounces of 70-proof stomach bitters, it helps not to tell it like it is. And if you want your CIO to install open software, it might help to mix it with project management and collaboration.
jay
I agree that using new languag sometimes clouds the understanding of a topic. However, in order to gain more usuage in a sector we must align our language with their language. Calling a blog soemthing else, only promotes the use of it in the specific sector. Like Jay writes, it is the business environment, not the consumer, renaming things. Language controls the relationship and the relationship controls the acceptance of a product or service.
Essentially, if someone buys it under the blog label, great; if someone buys it under a different label, great. The point is they are using a tool that will boost performance.
I had a client recently who did not not like the term blog. Few people in the organisation knew about blogs and many were new to using IT in their work. However, blogs were an integral component of the new community of practice for training. We therefore changed some labels in the software and voila – we had “Professional Journals”.
Bottom line – it doesn’t matter what we prefer; the client decides.
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