Taking Baby Steps (part 2): Only one person reads my Blog and I've already won

Overview
My last post entitled "Taking Baby Steps (part 1): Personal, Ad-hoc, KB", suggested that Knowledge Workers should embrace a Blog (at work) as a personal Knowledge Base. The focus was on the Network of One and some of the wins on a, facetiously, "selfish" level. Laying a foundation for productivity-focused collaboration is realizing that the "hidden hand" also works wonders in a collaborative setting.

In this post, I will talk about some ways in which this Network of One also benefits folks One Social Degree away -- even if it's just one other person. This is the Network of Two.

Who is One Social Degree Away?

• People who directly depend on your work
• People whose work you directly depend on
• Your manager
• Your intern
• Your service team overseas
• Your client
  

At work, our "social network" of peers is typically well established. We are hired into teams, we have colleagues, team-mates, customers. Someone depends on what you produce - these people will benefit from the knowledge you share.

Syndicate updates via RSS/Atom
Any good Blogging software already has syndication capabilities built in. Simply advertise the URL to your Blog's "feed". All you need is an RSS reader. Some come integrated with your email client, others are standalone or web-based. Your friendly, neighborhood IT department should have something to meet your needs.

But this is a post on the Network of Two. Your manager is, in fact, the first person to whom you should advertise your RSS feed. Your immediate manager will always be your #1 fan.

Managers love Workstreaming
Once your manager subscribes to your RSS Feed, and you make a selfish commitment to maintain your very own knowledge base, you will automagically keep your manager concurrent with the happenings in your daily work-life.

The Network of Two and effective Workstreaming will emerge when you begin to cater "some" posts to your immediate audience. Hint to your manager that something is especially important to her with Tags such as "important" or "for larry".

The key is to allow the Blog/KB to become part of your natural routine. There are no rules of how much to post or how often. Just keep things relevant.

Completing the Feedback Loop
You know you've established a successful Feedback Loop within your Network of Two when:

• You find a "comment" on your Blog from your manager

I really want that first point to stand out - there are other indicators and emergent efficiencies when this Feedback Loop is completed:

• Meetings between you and your manager are shorter and more to the point
• You spend less time figuring out things you've forgotten
• You manager seems more helpful and, in general, more knowledgeable about what you are working on
  
• Sometimes the last point allows your manager to spot problems early and offer some very timely wisdom.
  

And so on...

Extra Brownie Points
The rarely seen but often sought after "Manager's Blog" where you get to leave comments.

Reverse Mentorship
I read my intern's blog every morning and I learn a book's worth every week. Just yesterday, I received a very in-depth refresher course in Java's SOAP API.

What about the team-mates?
My team works on many projects at the same time. I'm only a lead on one or two of them. This means that I need extra help staying up to speed on projects where I play a secondary or tertiary role. I read my peers' Weekly Update-tagged posts only. Good Blogging software will allow you to subscribe to a filtered subset of all the posts based on one or more Tags. How does my RSS reader know it's a Weekly Update? The Tag is "weekly".

For these secondary projects, reading "weekly" posts is enough for me to stay on track. This is especially helpful when I come back from vacation and dread opening my INBOX.

Non-urgent Information Only
Many folks try to misuse RSS by using it for Alerting purposes. This is not what the syndication medium is for. If you want to catch someone's attention because you require Immediate Feedback, use the phone, send an instant message, meet them at the Cooler.

RSS is best suited for Knowledge sharing that does not require immediate response. Your audience consumes the content at their own leisure, at their own pace. If you use RSS for anything else, it will very soon become as noisy and convoluted as email is today.

Final note of advice here -- turn desktop popups for RSS Updates off. Unless the Alerting mechanism is really smart, it will never know what is truly important to justify the time wasted recovering from the Interruption. I'm busy and need to focus, stop competing for my attention because my feed from pizza.com has an update.

Up Next, Too many Feedback Loops?
Every communication medium will be abused and misused. You may find yourself subscribed to too many feeds claiming importance. My next post will talk about cutting through noise with RSS and Tag-powered Dashboards.