One Person Will Write. Two People Will Stare at Each Other.

As I’ve been trying to ramp up the blog at Webtrends, one of the things I have to do is shoot out ideas to people and ask them to write something. Often, there’s more than one person who could write it. Or I want to do a Q&A with multiple experts.

Groups Suck
What I’ve found is that sending one email and cc’ing multiple people routinely fails at generating anything. They all stare at each other and assume someone else who is less busy than them will take care of it. And after all, it’s just the blog. It’s not like the earth will stop turning if we don’t post something.

Oops, You Made a Committee
Worse, they’ll turn it into a committee. “Should we be talking about this?” or “Shouldn’t we do more research around this?” or “Perhaps we can come to consensus. Let’s call a meeting.”

Bang, your blog post is dead. Get out the shovel and bury it.

Individuals Do Things
The more successful route is to send a very similar email to one person at a time, asking them to weigh in on something. In it, I usually emphasize a few points:

1. Minimal effort: I just need a paragraph response. I’ll handle the rest.
2. No writing: They can swing by my desk and we’ll write it together.
3. Flattery: They said something about this to me earlier that was BRILLIANT, but I can’t get it quite right. What was it again?
4. Secrecy: I’m working with a few other people, but I’m really interested in YOUR opinion.
5. Leverage + Flattery: I talked to your boss, and s/he couldn’t say enough about how much you totally understand this topic.

The problem with this route is when you’re fishing, and the person maybe isn’t the best resource. And they forward the email to someone else you’ve already sent it to.

This is just one of the many ways to get people off their ass to write something. I’m sure I’ll cover a few more.