Why bloggers?
Jeremy C. Wright gives 3 reasons why companies would buy bloggers.
Via Corporate Engagement.
Promotion tool
“Blogging is now considered an innovative marketing tool that corporations can use to better service their customer, employee and supplier relations. It’s no longer perceived as merely a medium where computer savvy techies share their daily thoughts with others with similar interests. Business blogs can be added to a corporate website or be an attractive, low-cost alternative to having a corporate website, especially for small business.”
More to read at CNEWS.
Via The Blog Herald.
Nick Denton
Nick Denton of Gawker Media, who became famous with blogs such as Art of Speed, Gizmodo, Wonkette and many others is interviewed by The Independent.
The one common theme is to take an obsession, say a gadget obsession, and feed it - produce more content than the people could ever dream of having or consuming.”
Via Loïc Le Meur.
Blogging courses
Will colleges and universities soon offer “Blogging” as a required course for business majors?
Mid-90s
An excerpt of an interview of Matt Mullenweg (creator of WordPress) by Digital Web Magazine:
“Blogs certainly have had a lot of exposure, but it’s a fraction of what’s coming. Where we’re at now is similar to where the Internet was in the mid-90s.”
HP bloggers
Via Steve Rubel: HP makes a shy start in corporate blogging with these four blogs related to software development at HP.
Corporate blogging @ Google
Google which implemented an internal Web log system behind its firewall about 18 months ago, has seen tremendous benefits from it and may in the future consider providing tools and expertise for this purpose to interested clients.
Jason Goldman, Blogger product manager at Google:
“Since then, we have seen a lot of different uses of blogs within the firewall: people keeping track of meeting notes, people sharing diagnostics information, people sharing snippets of code, as well as more personal uses, like letting co-workers know what they’re thinking about and what they’re up to,” Goldman said. “It really helps grow the intranet and the internal base of documents.”
Via NevOn.
Conference call
Paul Chaney (Radiant Marketing Group) who was recently invited in a conference call about blogging for entrepreneurs, is organising his own conference call this time to discuss whether or not a business blog chamber of commerce, association, or alliance might be a good thing.
RSS for PR
Guillaume du Gardier publishes an interview with Fergus Burns, CEO of Nooked about the daily usage of RSS by PR pros. The article ends with “2005 will be the year of RSS adoption growth.”
J.Schwartz
Jonathan Schwartz, President and Chief Operating Officer of Sun Microsystems, who became one of the most famous CEO bloggers through his weblog, has just started a second one on ZDNet.com using WordPress this time!
Via Photo Matt.
Customer manifesto
“Customers simply aren’t taking it anymore. And if an organization is not opening up to them, and not interacting with them, and not meeting their needs, those customers are going to make sure the organization knows about it. Maybe not today, but soon…and that’s if the organization is lucky. More likely, those same customers will just go away and never come back.”
In case your business is not complying with the Social Customer Manifesto, do not panic. A corporate weblog will help you to improve your customer relationships. Just contact us and we will tell you how.
Via CorporatePR.
CEO blogs
As you may have read / noticed, CEO blogs are becoming more and more popular. If you are interested in this particular type of weblogs and you are looking for good examples and resources, take a look at the links hereafter:
Blogging for entrepreneurs
Andy Wibbels who defines himself as a blogging evangelist and trainer for entrepreneurs, has interviewed Paul Chaney of the Radiant Marketing Group about business blogging for entrepreneurs. It is rather a teleconference because other people can join and ask questions. Andy hosts these teleconferences on a weekly basis. The 55 minutes interview is available for download (16Mb).
As you may want to jump to a particular subject of the interview, here are a few milestones:
- 01:10 background about Paul Chaney
- 04:52 what is a blog?
- 06:20 what is a business blog?
- 09:50 how can an entrepreneur use a blog?
- 13:45 example of Cheryl Miller
- 16:33-17:03 [cut]
- 18:44 building a network with colleagues, create a reputation
- 20:45 what is a trackback?
- 25:00 how do you get people to read your blog?
- 32:25 tools for statistics
- 34:50 Google and PageRank
- 38:40 domain mapping
- 42:50 a blog as a marketing tool
- 50:10 what to blog about?
- 54:20 the future of blogging
3 CommentsBlog. Don’t blag.
Blog. Don’t Blag: a piece of blog evangelism from a business owner who has seen the benefits to his business of blogging.
Via PublicMIND and CorporateBloggingBlog.
Change management
Blogging Your Way Through Corporate Change Management, in other words why weblogs can / should be used to support changes in an organisation.
- A blog is familiar and easy to use.
- It helps people feel they are not alone.
- it focuses on the audience but it is centered on the blogger.
- A blog can put a real face on change.
- It is simple and inexpensive to launch and efficient to manage.
- A blog is persistent.
“… blogs are another one of those grass roots Internet trends that are destined to find their way into the mainstream of corporate technology alongside the browser, Linux, instant messaging, and good ‘ole web sites. Their value is rooted in the human desire to connect, collaborate, share and persuade. And the real winners will be those that embrace blogging in the corporate setting to leverage both the relevance of the technology along with the willingness of their constituencies to participate.
Blog monitoring
In reaction to BlogSquirrel recently launched by CyberAlert, Fredrik Wackå publishes a short method to do it yourself instead.
BlogWrite for CEOs
Debbie Weil just created BlogWrite for CEOs, a new blog on how to write a thought leadership blog. The categories are:
- Blog writing style
- Fear of blogging
- Finding your voice
- Useful downloads
If you have a leader or managerial position, it is about time for you to start your own corporate blog and to speak out!
CMO Magazine
One-pager on the subject of blogging in this month’s issue of CMO Magazine. They also cover the topic of RSS in the same issue.
Via Dana’s Blog.
Blog to publish your ezine
Denise Wakeman, contributing writer at webpronews.com, publishes the Top 10 Reasons to Use a Blog to Publish Your Ezine.
“Blogs are the hottest thing going these days when it comes to marketing on the Internet.”
News monitoring
Fewer than 20% of public relations professionals are very satisfied with their news monitoring services. Over 40% of PR professionals expect to change media monitoring suppliers in the coming year. PR professionals are least satisfied with paper-based press clipping services and in-house news monitoring by staff, but spend the bulk of their media monitoring budgets on those very services. PR professionals continue to focus on newspaper articles even though consumers have switched their attention to cable TV and the Internet for news. More interesting findings of the 2004 Worldwide Market Survey of Media Monitoring, an online survey of public relations and marketing professionals (US), can be found on Yahoo! News.
“… only 16% of PR professionals are very satisfied with their paper-based press clipping service and that nearly 47% of those PR professionals who are not very satisfied plan to change services in the coming year.”
“Despite a variety of relatively inexpensive news monitoring services available, over 20% of business organizations rely on in-house staff who read publications and use free Internet search engines as their primary provider. The time spent and salary/benefit costs of such in-house media monitoring by staff are largely hidden and unmeasured.”
Unfortunately, as Steve Rubel noticed too, Internet-based media such as weblogs are largely ignored by PR professionals when it comes to media monitoring.
Via Micro Persuasion.
