Dave Lakhani mentions a report of Interland research stating that web presence playing an even larger role in small business advertising. 69% of small businesses report that they consider their website to be critical in driving business. Dave then gives some advice to leverage the power of a site.

“Develop your blog, even if you don’t have a full blown website, set up a blog. Get your ideas, thoughts and opinions known. Blogs have a lot of credibility because most of them are opinion oriented rather than sales oriented. Be sure and lead with your best information and then encourage the reader to take some next step.”

Blogs are good for business, Microsoft chairman Bill Gates has said.
In a speech to an audience of chief executives, Mr Gates said the regularly updated journals, or blogs, could be a good way for firms to tell customers, staff and partners what they are doing.

He said blogs had advantages over other, older ways of communicating such as e-mail and websites.

More than 700 Microsoft employees are already using blogs to keep people up to date with their projects.

Write now
Mr Gates’ blessing of blogs came during his keynote speech at Microsoft’s CEO Summit held on the company’s campus in Redmond, Seattle.

The speech was a canter through many of the forthcoming technological developments Mr Gates and Microsoft believe business bosses should know about.

The speech covered mobile phones, new wireless technologies, RFID, digital cameras and broadband, as well as all the uses such things can be put to.

Mr Gates made a point of dwelling on blogs and said that although they started in the technical community and have come to be a broader social phenomenon, businesses can use them too.

They had advantages over more traditional ways of keeping in touch such as e-mail and websites, he said.

E-mail messages could be too imposing or miss out key people who should be included, said Mr Gates.

Websites were a problem too, he added, because they demand that people visit them regularly to find out if anything has changed and require regular updating to avoid going stale.

These problems could be solved, said Mr Gates, by using blogs and Real Simple Syndication (RSS), that lets people know when a favourite journal is updated.

“What blogging and these notifications are about is that you make it very easy to communicate. The ultimate idea is that you should get the information you want when you want it.”

Many Microsoft employees have already embraced blogging and more than 700 people at the company maintain blogs.

Most Microsoft blogs are about development projects for new and old products, some are aimed at academics and students and others are more personal.

Microsoft currently does not make any individual blogging tools but it is widely expected to move into this space soon. If it does the move would pitch it into even sharper competition with Google and others such as AOL.

By writing The knowledge worker, mobilised for the next millennium, people from Toshiba Europe take a look back at the technologies and trends which have influenced the role of knowledge workers since 1998. They even have their own predictions until 2008.

An interesting article by Michael Schrage, The Virtues of Chitchat. It is about plogs (project logs), a proposal for using blogs to keep IT teams and management up-to-date on implementation.

“Why wouldn’t it make sense for an IT project manager to post a blog - or “plog” (project log) - to keep his team and its constituents up-to-date on project issues and concerns? Is it inherently inappropriate for an individual to post constructive observations about a project’s progress? IT organizations that can effectively use blogs as managerial tools (or communication resources) are probably development environments that take both people and their ideas seriously.”

We created two new animations to let you discover all the advantages of:

• a business weblog vs a corporate web site, based on the example of a fictitious company;
• an internal corporate weblog vs a traditional intranet site.

You can pause, move forward or backward by using the commands in the top right corner of the animation’s window.

Susan Feldman of International Data Corporation wrote an excellent article published in KMWorld about the high cost of not finding information.

She gives some examples of information disasters which underline the financial need for entreprises to provide good information delivery. Hereafter a few excerpts.

• “In an increasingly information-based world, we turn out complex products that are less tangible than they are knowledge-based.”
• “There are all kinds of information disasters. Some are caused by wrong information. Some are caused by outdated information. Missing or incomplete information plagues many projects.”
• “Disasters happen every day to enterprises that are dependent on good information delivered in a timely manner to the people who need it. There are several reasons for this dilemma. First, information is scattered in multiple repositories and databases all over most organizations. No one knows what exists or where it is, and there is no single unified access point to it.”
• “Every professional worker has become a searcher, but without either search training or a roadmap of what he or she is searching. Without information training and skills, most people don’t know where to look, how to ask for what they are seeking or when it is OK to stop looking. One answer looks very much like another unless the searcher understands what constitutes valid information.”
• “Most professionals are inundated with too much information, and they have very few tools to help them handle the flood. Everyone seems to be working longer hours and getting less and less done. We are bombarded by e-mail, copies of presentations, alerts of new interesting articles, meetings and all of the other information trappings that go with being a knowledge worker. We spend hours trying to track down something that we found only yesterday, but it seems to have disappeared. We try to reach colleagues who have missing pieces of the puzzle, and they and their computers with the notes from that meeting in September have disappeared for vacation or, worse, left the company altogether. In short, we spend a lot of time spinning our wheels looking for things and not finding them.”
• “Roughly 50% of most Web searches are abandoned. That translates into 50% fewer online sales, 50% more frustrated customers trying to solve a problem or get information, and 50% more phone calls that must be handled by a person rather than by automatic systems.”
• “Searchers are successful in finding what they seek 50% of the time or less. Only 21% of respondents said they found the information they needed 85% to100% of the time. 40% of corporate users reported that they can not find the information they need to do their jobs on their intranets.”
• “Recent research on knowledge work shows that knowledge workers spend more time recreating existing information than they do turning out information that does not already exist. Some studies suggest that 90% of the time that knowledge workers spend in creating new reports or other products is spent in recreating information that already exists.”

How to manage your corporate reputation online, an article by Fergus Hampton, gives a few arguments on how online discussion forums, message boards and of course weblogs should be used to support your corporate identity, as well as to shape your future marketing campaigns.

Simply building a blog, and placing out there on the internet, doesn’t guarantee success in internet marketing. Wayne Hurlbert gives some good advice on how to promote a blog using message boards.

Hereafter a few layouts to show that the look and feel of a weblog can be completely customised along with the corporate identity of your business. Not all of the examples below would be convenient for a business blog, it is only a matter of showing the possibilities.

Pink Lilies - Rubric - Human Condition - Aubergine Machine - Dark Fire - Mars Spirit - Toni - Dots - Silver is the New Black - Water Play - Leaves - WordPress New - Cab - Charleen - Golf - Blue Fade - Simple Blue - WP default - Buddha - Gutenberg - Blorange - Bulletin Board - Newspaper - Flower - Splat - Sub:Lemon - Zen - Frank Blue - Frank Green - CSS Compo - WP Newspaper - Plain Blue - Scandinavia - Nebulous - Olive Drab - Toni - Simple Sky - Simple and Happy - Greenish - Metal Dreams - Harbor - Jlinares - Brief - Papayawhip - Drove All Night - Perun - Fresh Mondrian - Blue Green

Quite a number of interesting articles, interviews, studies about RSS and weblogs on this page.

Thanks to Dina, you can discover there and there a few very nice posts which took part in the Perfect Corporate Blogging Elevator Pitch Competition.

For instance, this tought from Brandon Wirtz:

“Blogging to the outside is about building relationships. You don’t have to turn every reader in to a dyed in the wool customer, but you turn them in to some one who is willing to consider your company when they go to spend their hard earned money. You build loyalty, and you show that you do care about the feedback you get. Blogging is like sitting on your front porch and waving to your neighbors as they walk by. You don’t have to have a great dialog with each of them, but they will remember who you are and think of you when they need something, or be there to help out when they can.

Blogging to the inside is about building relationships, but it is also about perpetuating dialog. A blog lets you put your idea out for everyone to see. It is like the ultimate suggestion box. And because blogging happens on neutral ground no one has to take offense to contradictary ideas. You can say this is what I feel we need to be doing, and if some one else says, this is what we should be doing instead, the discussion can be about the ideas not the people. You don’t get that level playing field in a conference room where you worry about rank, or department, or even if you like the other person. Blogs are like coming home after work, sitting down on the front porch and having a beer with your co-workers.”

Or this one:

“Want to get ahead in the world today? Right now? Let’s review our ABCs to see how. A is for audience — your customers, constituents, and otherwise loyal followers. B is for business — the thing that merits the relationship and perpetuates it. C is for connectivity, the glue that unites audiences and businesses in today’s Internet-enabled society.

If you don’t have a web log today, it’s fair to say that you are losing on two fronts. Inside, your employees are learning more and more but it stays locked away for no one to see. Outside, your consumers are seeking that very information and getting it for themselves.

Web logs, they connect, they collaborate, and they communicate. Engage your employees AND customers before someone else does.”

And finally the winner, Lee LeFever:

“First, think about the value of the Wall Street Journal to business leaders. The value it provides is context; the Journal allows readers to see themselves in the context of the financial world each day, which enables more informed decision making.

With this in mind, think about your company as a microcosm of the financial world. Can your employees see themselves in the context of the whole company? Would more informed decisions be made if employees and leaders had access to internal news sources?

Weblogs serve this need. By making internal websites simple to update, weblogs allow individuals and teams to maintain online journals that chronicle projects inside the company. These professional journals make it easy to produce and access internal news, providing context to the company - context that can profoundly affect decision making. In this way, weblogs allow employees and leaders to make more informed decisions through increasing their awareness of internal news and events.”

Why our tools aren’t good enough and what we should do about it is the question asked by Eugene Eric Kim. Hereafter a few excerpts of his excellent article.

“… we seem to think we’ve reached the limits of what software can do for us and what we can do with software. Nothing could be further from the truth.”

“… the predominant method for sharing files is to e-mail them back and forth.”

“RSS is slowly changing the way many of us think about data.”