Blogs, Wikis, and other Web 2.0 goodies have an important place in a broader enterprise content management strategy... but some caution is advised. As I mentioned in last year's talk "Enterprise 2.0: How You Will Fail," I think it might be more important to focus on the practical realities.

The free-flow of information is great and all, but does it translate into actual productivity? Or are you just creating faddish tools that will eventually be abandoned by users, after the novelty wears off?

Let's take blogs for example... Technorati's State Of The Blogosphere 2008 report claims that there are 133 million blogs in the world... Sounds great so far... but only 7.4 million (5.6%) of these blogs posted an article in the last 4 months! A mere 1.5 million (1.1%) posted an article within the last week, and about 900,000 posted in the last day (0.68%).

If these numbers are reflective of what you would find in a corporate blogging initiative, the outlook is fairly bleak. Assume you have a large push to get your employees blogging, and you succeed in getting 1000 bloggers in your company. If these statistics hold, that means that only 6 blogs out of 1000 will have useful, up-to-date information! Another 50 may have useful information, but it could be up to 4 months old... and possibly stale.

The rest of them could very well languish as "blorphans." One or two posts initially... but then only updated when the author is bored. In general, these posts will be tiny gems of knowledge strewn about your enterprise; usually outdated, and frequently without context.

So much for using blogs to measure the "pulse" of your company!

If you start a corporate blogging initiative, please do no attempt it without a strategy for giving people the tools and encouragement they need to keep going:

• Have lots of helpful info on how to blog, perhaps coupled with a training program.
• Give incentives for blogging... not monetary, but have public rankings of hot topics, hot bloggers, most linked content, most forwarded content, and the like.
• Have a "blog for blogs," where people can exchange tips on blogging, and teach each other on the benefits of blogging.
• Have a "president's club" for bloggers, elected by their peers, for bloggers that genuinely helped them. This could be for the best tips and trick, best breaking news, or the best analysis.
• Use blogging tools that are easy to use, and which allow people to track their popularity, and how people tag their blog.
• Rate improvement in blogging skills on yearly employee review forms, and be sure to give them time to blog.

Most people agree that public blogs help companies by making them more "transparent." Even if customers love your products, they will always have the fear that you might "go away" and not be able to help them in the future. Blogs from real people with real passion can help your customers feel more connected to the "pulse" of your company... even if that "pulse" is filled with stale information.

However... for internal people, the best way to keep everybody up-to-date is likely a more formal knowledge sharing process. Or you can just stick to rumors an innuendo, since company rumors are 80% correct anyway...