Imagine a newspaper whose headlines didn’t change very often. That’s most intranet portals. Communities encourage participation by defintion as much as they allow for consumption. And activity streams provide an easy and efficient way to aggregate, consume, share, and engage. With that said, some people like to see a bunch of boxes on a web page in a dashboard / newspaper type view. Fair enough…the activity stream doesn’t have to be the focal point of a community. Nothing wrong with that approach as long as those boxes on the portal home page have dynamic and relevant content for people to consume. Of course the value of that information in the portal becomes much less because people can only consume in a traditional portal vs. taking some type of action to collaborate on or share the information & knowledge you have just gained.
The fact is that content needs to be published somewhere (in a blog, on a site, in a wiki, doc, portal, or whatever you want to call the digital means of publishing). If you look at the consumer web today, the key to reaching people among the noise and sea of content chaos is not only one’s ability to discover but also subscribe or follow updates to that content (or person) – and consume and share that in a Facebook or LinkedIn or Twitter NewsFeed. I’d add even mobile apps like Pulse or Flipboard for example aggregate content & provide a richer experience to consume or share that content as well. Some people won’t understand or embrace social and are happy with business as usual. I say let them publish static content to a portal if that makes them happy. However, give everyone the ability to subscribe and share that static portal content – and it doesn’t have to be a community for this to happen.
If one looks at this personal blog on WordPress, it’s obvious that I don’t publish in it very often. Over the last year or so, I find myself not only microblogging daily, but writing in Communities like AIIM and CMSWire. The reason I write in those communities more often is that they provide much more context and meaning….i.e. the value, reach and relevancy is much greater because that published knowledge is easily shared within and outside the members of the community. In fact, each post in those communities receives a few thousand reads by themselves. That’s something like 3 or 4 times more reads for a SINGLE post in a community vs. the number of reads my entire personal blog receives by itself in the same timeframe. It’s hard to explain that to people who want to publish a document to a portal or post in a standalone blog somewhere. Perhaps the reads and shares and social actions taken are metrics to measure (before and after) to show the value of communities.
So when deciding whether to publish to a portal, a standalone blog site, in a document, or a community…..think about the following. Having been a consultant for part of my career, at times it seemed the larger the document, the better. And we’ve all seen 30 page or 60 page documents and endless powerpoints. We’ve witnessed portals turn into stale dumping grounds that people ignore. And the question is who reads these big documents or visits these stale portals? Who has time to read anything given the overload of information we have today? There is obviously some value in encapsulating knowledge in a large document or pushing information to portal…. but I’d argue the value of “big documents” and stale portals becomes much less than a blog post (400 words or less) within a community because the knowledge in that blog is simply more digestable and more likely to be read and shared. We have also seen something similar with powerpoints changing to include more images, less words, more easily digestable thoughts so the PPTs will be consumed and shared. It all seems obvious enough. It’s about the real value of knowledge….
