Bruce Hoppe has written an interesting article on the importance of name-dropping to bloggers hoping to generate traffic.

Hoppe says that in his experience, and using Google Analytics, he is able to show that most of his traffic is related to Googlers searching people's names.

Hoppe suggests that:

you read Martin Kilduff and David Krackhardt's paper, "Bringing the individual back in: A structural analysis of the internal market for reputation in organizations." The abstract includes this provocative quote: We found, as predicted, that being perceived to have a prominent friend in an organization boosted an individual's reputation as a good performer, but that actually having such a friend ... had no effect.

An ideal Enterprise blogging system (and eventually a full blown Web Office system) needs to be based on the idea that it is the experts and the people who have client relationships that matter most, not the content or the "knowledge". Everything in the system needs to focus on linking to people and identifying experts.

As part of my Turning Knowledge Workers into Innovation Creators paper, I argue that if a company wants to create an environment that fosters innovation, they need to focus not on the inventions or the ideas, but instead on enabling their innovation creators. To this end, innovation creators need to know who is who in their company, they need to own a piece of the pie, which means their name needs to be attached to their efforts, and most importantly, they need to feel that they are working in an environment of reciprocal altruism: If they work hard, they will get noticed.

All of this is directly related to Bruce Hoppe's point that one of the most effective ways to encourage connectedness is to focus on people and names, not facts or knowledge. The same goes for generating innovation.