The old saying “You can lead a Horse to water, but you can’t make him drink” hits me quite often at work. I thought the introduction of two new WordPress-powered P2-themed blogs at work would be better received but as it is, the only people actually engaging with them are the core people who started the boulder rolling for social media itself here in our office.

It’s just a little dismaying when you park the Horse in a field of water and oats and it just stands there looking at you. I think my expectations are just too much for a lot of my coworkers, and I can’t really blame them. There is only a scant minority of people here who have a true addiction to shiny, and I’m one of them. I think one of the reasons why the adoption rate is so low is because of how WordPress arranges user accounts. People get invited to partake in a blog and the first thing that they are faced with is a very forward WordPress presentation urging them to create their own blogs. There is a part of me that wishes I could create usernames and passwords for my coworkers to use our WordPress.com blogs FOR THEM. Alas, it’s just one more attempt to get the horse to drink the water or eat the food. I kind of think of it as “Ok, we’ve got the Horse in the water, the food is right here, lets strap a huge weight on his head and force his face into the water and food, maybe that’ll do it.” and all I get is a kind of annoyed glare from the horse.

So what’s the value of these WordPress Blogs? Why continue them and maintain them if nobody is going to use them? I thought about that as well. There is a minimum value in these blogs, in a way I’m a horse that wandered along side the other one and saw all the water and oats and is effectively pigging out. Really, seriously, these P2 blogs are excellent log-keepers, much like “Captains Log” on Star Trek. I can use these and smile wanly that my response rate was about 5% for anyone else to use these resources. At least I don’t have to worry that my horse will explode from eating and drinking, yay for metaphorical bottomless horses.