In the world of bureaucracy, there are two ways to communicate with senior management:

• very short briefs describing novel ideas with clear benefits or costs; or
• great long reports that demonstrate that a lot of very deep thinking and extensive consultation have resulted in findings with fundamental impact.

Unfortunately, David Wyld’s The Blogging Revolution: Government in the Age of Web 2.0 is looong. It’s presented as a research report and, although it has clearly defined sections on blogging by public officials, public sector executives and corporate executives, it buries all the good nuggets of information between graphs, charts and paragraph upon paragraph of descriptive text.

Which is a pity, because he’s included a number of useful case studies and checklists, like this one:

10 Tips for Blogging by
Public Sector Executives

Tip 1: Define yourself and your purpose.
Tip 2: Do it yourself!
Tip 3: Make a time commitment.
Tip 4: Be regular.
Tip 5: Be generous.
Tip 6: Have a “hard hide.”
Tip 7: Spell-check.
Tip 8: Don’t give too much information.
Tip 9: Consider multimedia.
Tip 10: Be a student of blogging.

I guess what strikes me is the information design of the report. It just smells of 1993. It’s a big hunk of text, sitting online, with no energy or interactive elements. The report’s not going to win any converts the way it’s presented.

That said, I’ve long believed that adoption of social media by large hierarchical organizations will rely on heavyweight evangelism.

Much of the traditional executive suite will not buy into the benefits of social media and community building without the approval and reassurance of the same people who put their enterprise architecture into place.

Let’s face it. Senior executives are looking for these qualities:

• suits
• shoes
• combed hair
• an awareness of how the proposed technology will affect the rest of the network
• practical experience working with enterprise applications
• some sort of graduate degree that smells of ivy
• someone who can tie the benefits of social media to key business priorities

That means the big consultancies (IBM, by the way, sponsored Wyld’s report) and enterprise providers. As an advocate for social media, you might have to wrap yourself in big blue or talk about “the guys back in Germany.”

Otherwise, the alternate strategy is to win “big consultancy street cred” by getting articles published in white shoe magazines and newsletters like Harvard Business Review, Strategy+Business, and others.

thanks, Barb, for the pointer.