Does your corporate social site inadvertently lock out compelling contributors?

To me, the primary objective of any company blog site should be to tear down all communication roadblocks (firewalls, difficult tools, overly rigid policy, etc.) that stand between employees & the world to enable free flowing human to human conversation. The Children’s Healthcare of Atlanta has done that with their blog site.

The content, in multiple formats (video, blog posts, etc.), as told through compelling stories by their employees is heartfelt — like this (they need a video embed feature).

Though the underlying recruiting objective of the site is obvious, the site’s design & functionality is super comprehensive & efficient to use — which is paramount considering the focus of the employees/medical practitioners is likely not blogging, editing HTML, etc.

When decision makers choose a new media platform for their employees, the employees’ skill set, work style & time available for blogging, is often not considered because the platform decision makers (usually in IT) are primarily focused on the technology — which can be just as important as considering the users capabilities to successfully utilize the tool. The level of effort involved with supporting less tech savvy, or time available individuals (CXOs, practitioners — as in doctors & nurses in this example, etc.) should not be under-estimated. Trust me on this one.

If the tool is too cumbersome & time-consuming to use (especially by the employees with the most compelling stories to tell), then what’s the point? And believe me, you want their contributions.

@kevinokeefe, Lawyer, on Companies who block Social Media

By now, you know how passionate I am about the proven goodness that companies see via the use of social networking (see the fine print here for one example). So, it’s no surprise that my stance on companies that block social sites is not one of support.

Kevin O’Keefe, my most recent favorite blogging lawyer, (but not my 1st favorite — sorry Kevin), has an excellent blog post on the topic titled “Companies and law firms blocking use of social media : Insanity is rampant“.

A few of my favorite quotes from his blog post:

“Maybe things have changed since I started practicing law almost 30 years ago. Back then law firms got their best work by word of mouth. Both lawyers and non lawyer personnel were expected to represent the law firm well in all they did (some things we were more proud of than others). We knew the more our employees came in touch with other people, the greater the opportunity people got to know them, and when the need for a lawyer arose, the people our employee’s met would think of us. Novel concept? Hardly.

Now we have one of the most effective mediums – the Internet – for time and cost effective networking and we’re telling lawyers and other legal professionals they can’t use it. Can’t use it because of fears born out of ignorance. That’s nuts.”

Have a look at the full post. Well worth the read.

Blog Action Day Oct 15: Climate Change

Via @stoweboyd, here’s a neat global community thing we can do together on October 15th to help drive awareness of climate change & improvement ideas (it takes just a minute to register your blog)…

Checking off the “Be a guest blogger” box

Since my 1st official blog post 5+ years ago, I’ve been a sole blogger (only blogger contributing to a blog), a soul blogger , a group blogger, a behind-the-scenes blog helper (for friends, interesting people & high profile people with a blogphobia), a blog trainer, a blog site admin, but never an invited guest blogger…until now!

Thanks to another “serendipitous connection via social networking”, as I call it, I can now sport around the badge titled “Guest Blogger”. It all started when @KylePLacy, Author of Twitter Marketing for Dummies, tweeted the following to me “I really think you should do a guest post on my blog. What do you think?” To which I responded “What if my neglected blog finds out? What did you have in mind?”.

I went with a topic that is often discussed: Corporate Social Media Policies — something Sun, specifically the Sun Blog Founders, nailed several years ago and continues to be a solid template for other companies social media policies. Have a look at the guest post “Do Tight Corporate Social Media Policies Help or Hinder?” & let me know what you think.

Happy 5th Birthday Sun Blogs!

It’s been five amazingly successful years for blogs.sun.com as of today. The success of this site has often been the focal point of corporate blogging done well and while the physical site, statistics, and sensible guidelines are impressive works of art, it’s the the less tangible accomplishments that matter most to me.

Similar to the sentiments attached to my childhood home address, “http://blogs.sun.com/lskrocki” is not only the cornerstone for my digital footprint and where I first blogged, but it’s where I learned that protecting ones professional voice is worth fighting for. It’s a place where I am encouraged not only to communicate openly with the market place and the world about my focus at Sun, but as stated on the front page of this site it’s also a place where I’m welcomed to “write about anything”. It’s through many of us writing about “anything”, that I’ve met people near and far whom I respect, admire, learn from and consider friends.

In my post one year ago today, I wrote “What’s in store for Sun Blogs in the future? More great blogging, of course.” Facing that same question today amidst micro-blogging and a pending acquisition, I can’t really begin to venture a guess at what’s next for this site, but what I do know is something I’ve said in many conversations when asked about providing social tools in the corporate space — whether tools are conveniently placed in front of them or not, people will find a way to connect and communicate. It’s in our DNA.

A million thanks to the Sun Blog founders and anyone who has contributed to this great conversation via a blog post, a comment, or even a leisurely read!

More posts on this topic.

How Roller Uses Email Data Elements

Roller, the open-sourced blog engine used on this site, collects email address settings in three different places. This causes some confusion and I hope the following offers some clarity.

Weblog Settings page

“Email address of weblog owner”: Used by site admins to contact the blog owner.

“Default from e-mail address for notifications”: Used as the from address for messages sent by the comments feature. For example, if a user posts a comment on a blog and checks “Notify me by email of new comments”, the from address in those emails will show the email address specified in this field.

Your Profile page

“Email”: The email address of the blog entry author who will receive email notifications of new comments left on the post they authored if the “Email notification of comments?” feature is enabled on the blog’s settings page.

The Common Misunderstanding

Many users think the “Email address of weblog owner” is where comment notifications are sent — when, in fact, email notifications about new comments posted on an individual blog entry are sent to the “Email” address defined on the “Your Profile” page of the blogger who authored the post.

Has the vast number of social networks slowed down Sun blogging?

One would think that with all the Twittering, Facebooking, FriendFeeding, etc., the Sun blogging growth would have slowed, or at least plateaued. I’m happy to report that it hasn’t for Sun.

The steady growth, in my opinion, is primarily due to Sun’s culture of openness and transparency. Our team of 5,139 self-appointed bloggers is also a source of inspired growth as they help internally evangelize the value of open conversations in the market place — specifically, via the use of blogs, wikis, forums, etc.

I’m really happy to report that my good friend, Sun fellow & neighbor, Shereen Fink, is our newest blogger and check out who was first to post a comment on her blog (hint: it wasn’t me, but someone you probably know.).

5,000th Sun Blogger!

This is a great year for Sun blogging milestones. In March the site reached it’s 100,000th comment, in April it turned four and reached it’s 100,000th blog post, and today, we welcome our 5,000th blogger. That’s ~15% of our employees/interns blogging directly on this site with many more blogging on their own non-Sun sites — if they’d like, we syndicate their blogs too in the “Recent Posts” section of the main Sun Blogs page.

Please welcome to our 5,000th blogger, Alexey Ilyin, blogging from Russia at the Sun x64 – High Availability blog. Alexey tells me that the blog will have content in both Russian and English.

Congratulations to the 4,999 of you who led us to this milestone by initiating such rich conversation!

PSSST…yeah, YOU, the blog-less Sun employee…

We’ve seen you lingering around here for a while — reading blogs, commenting on blogs, dreaming about being one of the cool kids on the “Popular Blogs” list, thinking about starting a blog, but never pulled the trigger.

Granted, blogging isn’t for everyone, but if you have a desire to engage in conversation about your work, hobbies, thermometer collection, etc., why not click the Register link and be on your way already? It’s not only good for Sun, but it can also be good for your career and a great contribution to your digital footprint — the thing that some say is the new resume.

Here’s the express route:

1. Register/Login
2. One the Main Menu click “Create new weblog“
3. Click on “New Entry“
4. Compose your first post
5. Click the “Post to Weblog” button and you’re in the club!

P.S. My not-so-hidden agenda is to get just 3 more Sun employees/interns to start blogging so we reach our 5,000th blogger milestone. If you are our 5,000th blogger, I’ll write a post about it and send some link love your way! I know, it’s not the fanciest prize, but that’s all I got.

Thick vs Thin eco-tech debate streaming now

http://blogs.intel.com/technology/2008/06/ecotechnology_great_debates_at.php

The guy on the far left (the sharpest dressed panelist) is ThinGuy.

Terry McKenzie, Employee Comms Director, on Blogging at Sun

Sun Blogs Turns Four! What’s next?

Yup, Sun Blogs celebrates another birthday. Today, it’s four. Looking at the stats on the front page, I’d say this site proves to be a wildly successful conduit for engaging in conversation:

• Total weblogs: 4257
• Total users: 4787
• Total entries: 100824
• Total comments: 104064

What’s in store for Sun Blogs in the future? More great blogging, of course. Tho’, according to a recent article by CNET, Jonathan, our CEO, “sees an end to blogging”. I wasn’t present at the Web 2.0 Expo keynote, but I’d wager the comment referenced was more about seeing an end to the common use of the term “blogging” since, in actuality, the purpose behind blogging really boils down to “communicating”. Jonathan explains it best in this quote from a July 15th, 2007 blog post:

“I’d love it if we one day eliminated the term “blogging” from the web lexicon (and that we stopped pursuing “CEO’s who blog.”). CEO’s who have cell phones aren’t “cell-phoners,” those who have email accounts arent “emailers,” those who give interviews on television aren’t “TV’ers” – they’re all leaders using technology to communicate. Communication is central to leadership – using words, written or spoken, to articulate strategy, guide organizations, engage in dialog, and… lead. Leading two or 200,000, you can’t do it without communicating. Using technology just leaves more time for everything else (I’m not saying stone tablets can’t be effective, they just take way longer to distribute).”

Blogs, as well as countless other internet services, make that communication super simple — much like the telephone. Had the telephone been called the “Social Machine”, many companies may have blocked it’s use much like they do social networking sites. It’s not about meaningless socializing. It’s about about building useful relationships that are conducive to fruitful collaboration and anything that enables easy information sharing is goodness in my book — especially in the corporate world. Will blogging be around forever? Will anything be around forever? I hope we continue to see the box of information sharing tools continue to expand and I can’t wait to see what’s next.

On that note, here’s to more great blogging…er, I mean communicating!

WOOHOO!!! Sun Blogs sees it’s 100,000th blog post!!!

A few weeks ago, we hit our 100,000th comment and today we reached our 100,000th blog post! If you’re curious, the first post on the site is here and it all started with these guys (not quite four years ago):

Next up? Reaching our 5,000th blogger milestone!

Here’s to more great blogging!

Sun Blogs sees it’s 100,000th comment

Blogs.sun.com isn’t quite four years old yet (it turns four on April 27th), but it reached it’s 100,000th comment this week (rejected spam comments not included, of course — for the detailed thinkers out there). When you contrast the 100k comments against the 97,395 blog entries, that amounts to a whole lot of conversations happening.

And to this I say “W00t! Looking forward to the next hundred thousand conversations!”

Busy News Day: Welcome MySQL

By now many of you have heard about Sun acquiring MySQL and a promising Q2. Details posted here: http://blogs.sun.com/jonathan

The analysts are a flutter (via Twitter). Best read from the bottom up…

Freedom isn’t free

Major Andrew Olmsted, based in Fort Carson – Colorado Springs, was killed in Iraq on Thursday, January 3rd. He had been blogging for the Rocky Mountain News about his experiences in training the Iraq Army.

He also had a personal blog where a friend posted a final entry that Major Olmsted wrote in the event he was killed. In his final post, he asks that people steer clear from raising political rants in relation to his death.

I appreciate the slices of transparency and insight Major Olmsted offered via his blogs about his daily experiences and challenges — challenges related to the importance of understanding cultural differences and how there never seems to be enough time for training, a need for soccer ball air pumps, and of course, challenges of the all too frequent event of losing team mates.

Rest in peace Major.

Cross pollination blogging: # of Sun blog entries that link to other Sun pages

Sun’s Search feature is one of those services like running water that we tend to take for granted. Low Bit, Sun Search and Blogs Engineer, showed me this great search query:

Search for this on Sun blogs: link:sun.com

It’ll tell you that, as of this moment, of the 85,238 blog posts, 34,909 of them have at least one link driving traffic back to another sun.com page (includes the main website, other Sun blogs, other sun.com sites like wikis.sun.com, developer.sun.com, etc.). Some might say “big deal”, but that’s ~35k more cross pollination links that wouldn’t exist if it weren’t for Sun bloggers engaging in open conversations.

Poll: Is it still spam if the spammer is posting their own comments relevant to the topic?

Is it still spam if the spammer is posting their own comments relevant to the topic?
	YES, their primary agenda is still to drive traffic to their site.
	MAYBE NOT, most non-spam commenters also post a link to their site.
	NO, as long as they are posting original thoughts relevant to the conversation.
pollcode.com free polls

Sun Blogs Acknowledged in the ’07 Corporate Social Responsibility Report

If you haven’t checked out Sun’s recently released Corporate Social Responsibility Report, it’s worth a look.

In addition to shining the light on Sun’s involvement in Eco Responsibility, Global Citizenship, How we work, etc., it also mentions our Culture of Transparency via communication channels such as Sun Blogs:

“Our culture of transparency continued to grow in fiscal 2007 with the creation of new employee blogs. These blogs provide insights into Sun from numerous sources — our CEO, executives, engineers, marketeers, and many more. And while Sun does have a policy on blog content, our employees are not required to obtain approval for their blog content, even though Sun, as a company, may not agree with everything written. That fact alone clearly demonstrates how important maintaining transparency is to Sun.”

I couldn’t agree more with that last sentence. My favorite example of Sun blogs being “accessible to any Sun employee to write about anything” (the site’s tag line), is Kelly’s blog, “Transgender @ Sun“. I love that I work at a company where diversity and acceptance is not just talked about — it’s demonstrated through consistent action. The passion and behavior of Sun employees based on this trust is apparent.

I find it interesting that although trust is a two way street, the focus in the blogoshpere is often on companies going out on a limb by trusting employees to blog on a corporate sponsored site, but the fact is, employees also go out on a limb for companies when they contribute content to the company blog site (whether it’s personal or not).

To me, seeing Kelly’s blog highlighted in the report is a shining symbol of Sun acknowledging the mutual trust (and gain) involved in building a successful corporate blog site.

HAPpy Birthday, Mr. Skrocki :-)

Today is Mr. Skrocki’s 40th birthday, so instead of making a fool of myself and attempting to sing him the Marilyn Monroe rendition of Happy Birthday or attempting to write him a song, I thought I’d limit the corniness to posting the following video of one of his all time favorite singers (& I’m sure it has nothing to do with the tight pants she had to be sewn into in “Grease” ):

US Government Blog Site Launches…

…with Roller (the same open source, Java-based blogging software that this site uses). Check it out. Congrats to Henry, USA.gov IT Specialist, & team.

Side note: I just noticed the Roller site has a new look. Nicely done, Dave!

World’s 1st LOL Zucchini

You’ve heard of lolcats. Check out the world’s first lolzuke:

Igor put a lot good stuff into the wikis release. Full release notes here.

Sun CEO Blog Syndication on Yahoo Finance Pages

I had the opportunity to collaborate with Charles S. and Matt G. from Yahoo on a neat little project to syndicate our CEO’s blog entries on Sun’s Yahoo Finance page. Now, when Jonathan posts a blog entry, you’ll see it under the Financial Blogs section:

It’s a pretty cool and first of it’s kind setup.

Major event at the in-laws

My in-laws favorite pass time is watching televised sports, so the television set is a major part of their lifestyle — and by “major”, I mean ginormous! Every few years the necessity to replace their television becomes a major thing. All extended family members are pulled into numerous discussions prior to a decision being made.

When they were forced to make the jump from a television in a faux wood cabinet that sat on the floor to a television that sat on a console, it was a big deal — and by “big”, I mean ginormous! (OK, I’ll stop with the ginormous thing).

Now…they are forced to go from a television that sits on a console to a television that hangs on the wall. Only…it’s not going to hang on the wall. It will sit on the console…

…just as the good Lord intended.

10AM PT Ustream: Sun’s Eco Innovation Initiative Announcment

More info about the Eco Innovation Initiative here (be sure to check out the data center tour video).

Announcement via Ustream begins at 10AM PT: