Community Communications

Hello,

I think this is an interesting question. BLUF: It will be hard to contribute something valuable regularly, so you might want to think about how you might engage the community to start conversations among themselves, in public, and based on your initial input.

Everyone is getting so much e-mail -- your contributions would have be to very well-written and substantial to be seen as valuable. Things I Think I Think really stands out in terms of regular depth and quality, and I doubt that it will be possible to sustain that unless you really have a lot to share in terms of professional experience.

That said, I'm thinking it might be much more powerful for you to contribute to a sort of platform that allows the members of the community to engage WITH EACH OTHER ("social software"). Unless what you're thinking of sharing is sensitive information, you could -- for example -- start a blog or a LinkedIn group, or even a Facebook group if that's a medium that many of your community members are actively using. That way, you could provide your regular updates as an impulse, and the members of the community will hopefully take it from there. If your initial posts are inspiring, I'm confident that valuable dialog and discussion will emerge.

Does that make sense for you?

Best
Jochen

I like Jochen's suggestion, and wonder if you have an internal web site that could be used. Our CEO writes a weekly blog on our internal company intranet site, and those posts regularly receive 50+ comments from other employees. It's a good communications method for our company, because our intranet is updated daily and it's a major information source for the staff. I agree that email is more likely to get overlooked.

Good luck!

Chris