2. Attention economy Defined an approach to the management of information that treats human attention as a scarce commodity, and applies economic theory to solve various information management problems1 In an information-rich world, the wealth of information means a dearth of something else: a scarcity of… the attention of its recipients (Herbert Simon, 1969). If the Web and the Net can be viewed as spaces in which we will increasingly live our lives, the economic laws we will live under have to be natural to this new space…What counts most is what is most scarce now, namely attention (Goldhaber, 1997)2 1http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Attention_economy 2http://firstmonday.org/htbin/cgiwrap/bin/ojs/index.php/fm/article/view/519/440
3. Guiding questions We know how attention economy works on the web. How does it play out at work ? What are the breakdowns in the corporate attention economy? How does the corporate attention economy differ from the social web? How do these differences affect attitudes toward blogging among employees at FeamCo? How does blog readership influence the community? How does blogging impact corporate culture and vice versa?
4. The Study SITE: Large internal corporate blogging community @ FeamCo TIME: Analyzed log files from server over 12-month period from 7/07-7/08, phone interviews over 6 weeks in 2008 PARTICIPANTS: 96 employees worldwide: 76 Male, 21 Female, 9 managers, 3 VPs
13. FINDINGS: Correlation Can’t infer causality between behavior and attitude No significant relationship between blog attitudes and start date Surprised no significant relationship between blog attitudes and start date or gender
14. Findings: 90/10 rule at work Confirmed a power law curve in direct hits by blog For every 1 post, about .006 comments and 77.5 hits 1% posts .1% comments 98.9% reads
15. Findings: Temporal Patterns Email priority At the end of the day, email and blog writing drops, blog reading rises Sr. level employee’s blog peaks during 9-5 workday Prolific blogger’s traffic more evenly spread throughout day
16. Conclusion Most influential factor of internal corporate blogging: recognition Need sense of metrics or management buy-in similar to external web analytics Knowledge sharing at work is complex
17. Before implementing… Understand dynamics of attention allocation in workplace vs. social web Target attention allocation (supply/demand, divert reader to relevant material) Provide feedback mechanism Understand nuances of social vs. work blogging
21. How much of internal blogging is social vs. work-related?
22.
Notas do Editor
Table 4: “not positive” experiences attributed to lack of management support for blogging and other web 2.0 toolsMajority of participants (n=52) posted 10-99 times; 16 participants = 10 posts or less; 10 participants = over 1,000 posts
Blogging has become more gender-neutral
(long tail, 80/20, 90/10 rule)Small number of bloggers write most postsMost active bloggers not necessarily most heavily read blogs
2 factors are most influential on internal corporate blogging:Whether or not a blogger perceives others are reading their post,Management support for bloggingKNOWLEDGE SHARING IS COMPLEXEmployees want to signal know-how to management, but must do so at the risk of compromising personal intellectual property to coworkers who may be competing for rank. The traditional methods of communication where management broadcasts to employees is being supplemented with peer-enabled access to information. As the domain-centered walled silos of knowledge at work are restructured, we need to better understand what information people should pay attention to and when in order to perform their jobs effectively.
WORK VS SOCIAL WEBEmployees want attention for blog participation; no ROI for employees; incentive-drivenExpectations ranged from anticipating large audiences & interaction to content w/ small group blog.Tools like RSS still don’t make it easier to find contentTARGET ALLOCATIONrestrict number of available blog posts and reduce overall amount of info available. Ie: supply & demand says that ratio of blog posts to readers will decrease if cost of blogging increaseddisplay most popular/most recent blogs. This however privileges novelty and popularity over relevancy.Remedy this by targeting reader attention to relevant material. PROVIDE FEEDBACK MECHANISMAmong participants in our study, the content of a reply was often less important than the value of the acknowledgement that someone was reading the post,Reciprocity rule: one cannot see what another is doing w/o being seen themselvesSOCIAL VS. WORK BLOGGINGSocial blog reading is for personal edification and interest and is unlikely to be time-criticalWork blog reading was more aligned w/ time-sensitive material/company changes.Lack of feedback and reciprocity influenced negative attitudesRather than replies or comments, some coworkers provided outeractions—a set of communicative processes outside of information exchange, in which people reach out to others in patently social ways to enable information exchange. Nardi et al.If internal blogging is to encourage bottom-up knowledge-sharing and social relations, must be made clear that contributing is their opportunity and rightWeighting management buy-in within an attention economy implies that the attention of management is worth more than the attention of general employees. This framework downplays the important social value that can motivate a productive corporate cultureweighting management buy-in within an attention economy implies that the attention of management is worth more than the attention of general employees. This framework downplays the important social value that can motivate a productive corporate culture