By David Creelman

One of my favourite social media thinkers is Euan Semple, author of Organizations don’t tweet, people do. In the spirit of brevity that exemplifies good blogs, tweets and status updates I’ve crafted my conversation with Semple as 10 short questions with 10 short answers.

Creelman: How does blogging help you as an individual manager?
Semple: Blogging, like journaling, is therapeutic. To spend five minutes at the end of the day reflecting in a thoughtful way is a good for clearing the mind. 

How do blogs help organizations?
In an organization where everyone reads and writes blogsz a shared understanding of the world evolves. It creates a new source of connection and connected-up thinking. 

Doesn’t the informality of blogs and the sparseness of tweets make educated writers cringe?
It’s not typo-ridden blogs that make me cringe, it’s professional corporate writing. Corporate writing is turgid, boring and inauthentic. Would you rather read an article from your CEO as processed by your communication department or just a blog she’d written herself? The authenticity of the blog compensates for any weaknesses in style.

The sparseness of tweets reminds of a haiku, and it’s an interesting discipline to learn to say something useful in 140 characters. It sharpens up communication; it doesn’t dumb it down. 

Why do you say that companies don’t tweet, people do?
I got fed up when I got 140 press releases from some company that wanted to be my friend. It seemed absurd. The thing about social media is that it’s personal. I can trust an individual in your organization; I can’t trust the company the same way. 

Doesn’t uncontrolled blogging create all kinds of risks?
The risks are hugely overplayed. One organization I spoke to had millions of threads in their internal social media and only had to deal with 17 that were inappropriate.

People will learn to be less stupid and the world at large will learn that occasional stupid things don’t mean much. If one person at a company tweets something stupid then that reflects badly on them not on the organization as a whole—despite what the mass media would like you to believe.

Why do CEOs like it when employees blog?
CEOs get cut off from the real organization. By dipping into the blogosphere of their company they get a direct feed into what is going on and what people are thinking. 

Are you impressed with the potential of data-mining the information within the company blogosphere?
It’s interesting but it’s not where I’d start. You get more from direct interaction. If you get a sense that there is more talk about a competitor now than in the past you could potentially do statistical analysis to see if that is true. But I’d rather just put the question back into to blogosphere and see what people say. Ask if your impression that there is more concern about this competitor is true. The conversation will be more revealing than anything statistics would show you. 

How has blogging changed your view of the role of a manager?
I never really bought into the traditional vision of a command and control manager. It certainly never worked for me. Blogging brings forth the model of “management by being interested and interesting”. Your own noticing of what works, what doesn’t, and what is happening is a powerful way of influencing your group. 

What is HR’s role in blogging?
Well I can tell you what it should be. It should be to enable people to explore and experiment and exploit a bunch of simple social media tools. Let them find something, fall in love with it, and bring it to life. Instead it seems HR is much more concerned with blocking than enabling. Of course IT is probably even worse in trying to be a gate keeper or wanting to put in some over-arching, over-engineered, over-controlled enterprise system that everyone is supposed to use but no one does. 

What else does blogging do for a company?
When you get collective sense making through shared conversation you also get a collective sense of responsibility. That may be the biggest payoff from encouraging an unrestricted company blogosphere.

Euan Semple is author of Organizations don’t tweet, people do http://www.euansemple.com/.

David Creelman writes and speaks on human capital management (www.creelmanresearch.com); for work on boards and HR see www.creelmanlambert.com.