The social computing papers that come out of HP Labs’ advanced research group are always worth a look, and the most recent study, 'Blogging at work and the corporate attention economy' is a good read for any brand looking to build a conversational company from within.

The paper notes that “while many corporations are looking to adopt Web-based communication tools like blogs, wikis, and forums, these efforts will fail unless employees are motivated to participate and contribute content […] employees expected to receive attention when they contributed to blogs, but these expectations often went unmet”.

It mirrors an earlier HP study, 'Crowdsourcing, Attention and Productivity', which looked at how public content sharing is more frequently motivated by a personal need for attention than a sense of the common good: “attention is the main driver of contribution to the digital commons [...] productivity exhibited in crowdsourcing exhibits an strong positive dependence on attention”.

If brands want to motivate both their consumers and employees to create high volume, sustained and enthused content, they must make them feel that they have attention and appreciation – both from the brand and each other. Creating online hubs to aggregate and highlight peer to peer brand conversation, and building a self-consciously supportive tribe of brand evangelists, are two big steps towards achieving this. It’s common people sense.