Last week I went to the Thursday Blog meeting at Harvard’s Berman Center. Dave Winer first organized this event when he was a fellow in 2003-2004. It was my introduction to blogs in the spring of 2004. The sessions cover topics related to blogs and the web in general. They continue and I recommend them to anyone in the Boston are on a Thursday night.

Andy Carvin returned from Washington this evening to talk about Web 2.0 and National Public Radio. He was recently hired to help NPR become more involved in the participatory web. One of the initial efforts was to create the Rough Cuts blog to provide draft versions of a new radio show they are planning. As the site says:

“We want the new show we’re developing to be one you can’t live without — and we’d like your help. This blog lifts the curtain on our process. We’ll talk about our ideas and play “rough cuts” of pieces we’re piloting. Do you like what you hear? Why or why not? Let us know — and let’s make some great radio!.”

This was a big step for NPR as they have traditionally only wanted to air shows that are very polished to keep up their image. I am also a big fan of their work. Now they are talking in public about what went wrong in a show and what went right and inviting participation. The response from the public has been very positive and they received many helpful constructive comments. Once the current show graduates to airtime, they will put a new work in progress through the same blog.

You may have been thinking, what does this have to do with Enterprise 2.0, if you are still reading at this point. Whenever I was involved in a successful knowledge management or portal implementation in the past, it always involved going through rapid iterations and getting a lot of target audience feedback at every step. We often would go on the road to gather the same type of participation, sense of involvement, and constructive suggestions that NPR is doing through their blog. A number of IT product marketing managers have commented that they now get the same type of customer feedback on their products from their externally facing blog that, in the past, they could only get from road shows.

Why not do the same thing for internal initiatives such as knowledge management or really any internally focused program? Trail balloon blogs inside the enterprise could greatly augment other channels for obtaining user feedback, giving users a sense of participation, and gaining getting commitment from the target stakeholders. I wish that we had access to blogs when I was involved in these past major enterprise implementations of new programs. I will certainly recommend considering this as a part of any roll out in the future.