Adobe- Tapping the Company Groundswell

In this week's reading I found the case study of Best Buy to be really interesting- It surprised me that connectivity between employees online could have such a strong impact on company culture and job satisfaction. It also seemed interesting to consider employees as part of the groundswell. Thus far we've looked at groundswell as an outside audience so this switch on perspective made me curious.

To following up on this idea I decided to take a look at other corporate companies that have great employee engagement online. I ended up finding a list of companies that produce really engaging blogs that encourage interaction between employees and are useful and accessible for customers. High on the list were companies like BBC, Southwest Airlines, Adobe, and no surprise, Dell. Sticking with the theme of technology/tech products (not to mention the innate creativity that I assumed would be a given for these bloggers) I decided to look at Adobe's blogosphere.

Adobe created a within-company blog page that homes posts from executives as well as employees and "official Adobe blogs". The blog page is a deep source of information. It's sorted into a number of categories: Creative Cloud, Digital Marketing, Document Services, Publishing, Corporate, Global, and Others. The underlying categories and options for exploration are pretty extensive, listing A-Z the published blog options. But even more, they feature a page called "conversations" which is further broken down into sections like "creative", "education", "perspectives" and "corporate responsibility".

 Through this extensive blogging network we can see that Adobe has embraced the idea of  "letting go of control and trusting that your creativity will engage the groundswell (p. 216)" as well as "connecting far flung associates (p. 235)". It is clear that adobe has done this from a simple search and scroll down the first page. The posts are not only from different personnel but they're focused on different topics and are even written in different languages. Adobe is showing us that they trust their personnel- that they think people will be interested in their ideas, projects, and suggestions and value their creative input.

The posts allow employees to share their passions, areas of expertise and ultimately learn from and educate each other as well as us viewers. They also have the freedom to discuss things outside of Adobe or Adobe products to really stir up conversation and interest. And to aid in widespread involvement- they link us to all of their other social media accounts (Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, etc.) where the comment section usually occurs.

Adobe's programs can create fascinating and beautiful work, but as many users know the programs can be tricky to learn. I believe these blogs and creative spaces encourage visitors to create work and try new programs while engaging and energizing employees and tapping into their expertise and passion- check them out! Do you think they're working?