Every now and then there is a blogversation around the issue of corporate blogging. It’s one of these topics that pop out every time a big company starts blogging or publicly oppose the idea, and then all gurus, evangelists and D-lister bloggers ranting about it. And every time the issue of control is at the core of the conversation. The common mantra is that corporations, big or small, are reluctant to blog because they fear of loosing control.
Drawing on some psychological theories, lets a have a look at the issue of control. There is some good learning from the psychology of personality, if we make an analogy between business behaviour and individual personality.
Locus of Control refers to an individual’s perception of main causes of events in life. More simply, do you believe that your destiny is controlled by yourself or by external forces such as fate or other people?
According to Philip Zimbardo a prominent American psychologist,
“A locus of control orientation is a belief about whether the outcomes of our actions are contingent on what we do (internal control orientation) or on events outside our personal control (external control orientation)."
Locus of control is understood as bipolar construct, ranging from external to internal:
External Locus of Control:
Individual believes that his/her behaviour is guided by fate, luck, or other external circumstances.
Internal Locus of Control:
Individual believes that his/her behaviour is guided by his/her personal decisions and efforts.
We all want control, thats a natural human and business instinct. Question is how do you get it. If we apply this theory to business blogging we can start seeing that corporations with internal locus of control attribute their success or failure to their own actions and efforts. They are confident enough in what they do and understand that the only way for them to “control the conversation†is to participate, contribute and enrich the conversation. They realised that only honesty, openness, and dialog can build trust and integrity, which lead to good business.
The majority, on the other hand, still have external locus of control when it comes to blogging. They are trying to control the conversation by ignoring it as they see opening up as invitation to potentially destructive external forces. Attributing their failures to external forces like negative comments and bad publicity they ignore the fact that it’s their own actions – their products, services, communications etc. – that will determine their success or failure.
[You can, of course, counter this argument by saying that deciding NOT to blog is internal locus of control - my action and decision (not to blog) contribute to my success - that my friends, uncle Fraud called denial...but that's complately different issue for a completely different post...]
Post a Comment