I had the priviledge this weekend to meet with a number of bloggers as part of the BlawgThink conference run by Matt Homan and Dennis Kennedy. While I'm not in the legal profession, this conference had several attractions for me: 1) it attracted some interesting and interested bloggers, 2) it was an innovative conference and 3) there was some aspect of brainstorming and idea management involved.
What I came away with was that we bloggers have a lot of energy and excitement about what we are doing. There were discussions at the conference on how to use blogs to help clients, how to use blogs to help make law firms more productive and innovative, and how to use blogs to demonstrate knowledge and thought leadership. What impressed me the most was that all these bloggers had real passion for their ideas and how the communicate them.
The BlawgThink conference struck me as a great example of a critical mass. What happens when you identify and bring together a lot of people who have the same vision and commitment to that vision? For a positive vision, you can create such a groundswell of emotion that those people and others become infected by your vision and drive, and they jump on the bandwagon as well. It was clear to me that most people leaving the BlawgThink conference were trying to consider how to take blogging even further in their organization.
Why? Well, I think the critical mass did (does) three things:
1. You no longer feel like John the Baptist. Evangelists and true believers often feel like they are the lonely voice in the wilderness. Every once in a while it helps to get together with others who are like minded and get reminded that there are other people who have the same beliefs with the same intensity as you do. Whether that is for blogging or duck hunting, a face to face confab is valuable.
2. You learn while you get infected. I was able to pass along some of the mistakes I've made along the way to people who were just getting started, and I learned some tips and tricks from those who've been blogging a lot longer than me. Rather than experience all the possible mistakes by myself, I can learn from others and move ahead even faster.
3. There's power in a network. By meeting and creating a network of interested users, we create a new power. I can now tap into other bloggers not just about blogging, but maybe even about some expertise they have that I don't have. These networks are not one dimensional and are not one way.
I learned a lot about blogging at BlawgThink, but I think I learned a lot about driving change in an organization as well.
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