But I'm really liking the spelling mistakes, grammatical errors and typos I see in our online community's blogs. At first, I admit, it bothered me to see the CEO publish a blog post with several little errors in it. I wanted to edit it quickly and clean it up for him.
But, as with many other things when running an online community, I have found that staying relaxed and adopting a laissez-faire policy is paying off. Rather than see mistakes by executives as inexcusable failures, I now see them as friendly invitations to everyone else in the company to publish, too.
We don't have a tone of perfection and correctness in our community. We don't focus on appearance and format. The errors send the message that what counts is the quality of your thoughts: "If management's posts contain errors, I don't need to be perfect either -- I can just pitch in and share my ideas."
In a global organization such as ours, this is even more important, since the vast majority of our community's content is in English, even though that's not the native language for many of our employees. Fear of embarrassment about their imperfect English creates a barrier to participation, so it has been wonderful to read informative and insightful, if error-filled, blog posts by some of our executives in Asia, and see the enthusiastic response to them from employees both in Asia and elsewhere in the world.
It's a great message: What you have to say is what counts, not how perfect you are in saying in it, so don't hold back -- speak up!
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