Via Radiant Marketing Group: Businesses in Japan are beginning to embrace blogs as internal and external communications tools just like their counterparts here in the states.

For instance Nissan Motor Co. is using a blog to promote its Tiida compact car, which went on sale in September. In the blog, sales team members introduce the car’s selling points by writing about the vehicle using more casual, everyday language than is usually seen in official Web sites.

“Since they are much easier to establish and maintain, blogs help both big and small companies save on the cost of managing Web sites.”

Many companies also have started using blogging as an internal communication tool on their in-house networks. Having each worker write their own blog makes it easier for them to share information, including to-do listings and daily business reports, allowing news to be made known to all workers at the same time.

Via the excellent Hobson and Holtz Report #15 we just discovered that Cisco Systems are now blogging too on their High Tech Policy Blog which is part of the Cisco Worldwide Government Affairs (WWGA).

As indicated in the very first post, it is Cisco’s first ever external web log. It is (very) integrated in Cisco’s web site so there are few chances to see it unless you search for the keyword “blog”. Still, the High Tech Policy Blog has all the typical features: RSS/Atom, categories, permalinks, comments, trackbacks, daily archives. However, when you click on the trackback link (which apparently is not the trackback address itself but should display the trackback address) of some posts, you only get a blank page… I’m sure that this will be fixed quickly.

Via Sandy Hamilton:

“One of the characteristics of larger organization is the propensity to make issues larger than they really are or to make things more difficult than they need to be. RSS doesn’t stand for Really Simple Syndication for nothing! This is not Rocket Science - I repeat, this is not Rocket Science! This is a very simple, easy to understand, breakthrough technology that could help you differentiate your company from the pack.

RSS has been a huge tool for communicating across the web; now it’s turning into one of the most effective ways for companies to communicate. It’s very easy to have RSS be the foundation for employee communications, knowledge management, content management, and collaboration.”

In the rest of his post, Sandy gives some examples of how RSS can be used to organize incoming information whereas e-mail has become too problematic because of inefficient (or too efficient!) anti-spam protection systems:

1. On-Line Press Room
2. Inform your Partners
3. Inform your Customers
4. Put your events to work for you
5. Corporate Intelligence
6. A feed for Special Promotions
7. Secured Feeds

Guillaume du Gardier, one of the founders of the New Communications Forum Europe 2005, announced that the event is postponed.

“We have discovered that it is just too early in the technology adoption process here in Europe for PR and marketing professionals to invest in a two-day conference dedicated to blogs and other new tools.

We firmly intend on holding the Forum once we have judged the market is more ready, hopefully towards the end of this year. We are exploring a variety of partnerships as well, in order to broaden the audience and share the risk. If you are interested in talking to us, please drop us a line.”

Blog to the Future is an interesting article showing how web diaries are moving from the personal to the professional without losing their personal touch. It’s that inherent chatty format that makes blogs the ideal way to build credibility with customers.

One of the marketing application of weblogs is…

“… to encourage a wide range of employees to start blogs. Sun Microsystems has taken that road, and so far close to a thousand employees have accepted the company’s invitation. One group of these blogs is tied directly to existing Sun products, such as Solaris or Java. They tell readers the most important things that have happened in the world (in the opinion of the author, of course) since his last posting about a given product or product application. Other examples include the blogs on Solaris security, storage management issues and “predictive self-healing” (a Sun network maintenance feature). There is even a blog devoted entirely to Solaris blogs.

Even for companies forgoing employee or corporate blogs, the medium has much to offer marketers. The transparency and selectivity of the domain makes it easy to find smart, up-to-the-minute commentary on clients, competitors, developments in the client’s subject field and even new twists in the art of marketing itself.

These same features can be used to identify possible marketing partners. Recently, Near-Time Flow, a collaboration software maker, used blogs to identify opinion leaders in knowledge management, distributed advance copies of a new product to those leaders and was able to use the comments that appeared in their blogs in its marketing campaigns. Prominent blogs are also a candidate for advertising buys (as in Andrew Sullivan’s blog).

Most important, though, is the quick access to a small number of opinion leaders a blog can offer. That can be critical if something needs to be clarified in a hurry, especially since whatever has to be addressed is probably being spread by blogs in the first place. The pace with which rumors fly around the world is increasing steadily, and not many companies can afford to wait for a retraction or the clarification cycle of print media. Blogs get the word out much faster than print.”

Philippe Borremans, PR Manager at IBM Belgium & Luxembourg, explains what blogging represents at IBM. A lot: 2′800 internal blogs (on a total worldwide population of about 330′000 IBM’ers.) with about 12′700 entries. However only 200 blogs have more than 10 posts on them. Editors can come from any part of the company: engineers, communications, research, software, etc. As Neville Hobson says, few people know how deeply IBM has embraced blogging within the organisation.

“I have used my internal blog for project management with a team of colleagues a couple of months ago. We were testing a new product and needed to keep a virtual team updated on the progress we made. Through RSS feeds this was automatic and (very important at our company) didn’t clutter the mailbox.

The easy way to comment on milestones or issues increased the interaction in the team compared to regular phonecalls or sending out update e-mails.”

Fredrik Wackå is probably right: BBC is not only trying blogs and podcasting as tools in their core business - publishing - they’re also way ahead of most companies when it comes to internal uses of social media.

According to Euan Semple from the BBC DigiLab, the first thing they did was to put in a bulletin board: “Work related questions get sorted in minutes on the bulletin board…” After that came a social networking tool that lets users set up a page of info about themselves.

Then they started blogging…

“We then put in a blog server and now have around 70 blogs being written by about 100 people. They are being used for a variety of tasks from group blogs for project teams to operational logs to pass on info between engineering shifts to personal blogs capturing individual learning and experiences.

And last the wiki…

“Lastly we have implemented a wiki. We chose a tool that allows us to manage access a bit. I know the principle of wikis is to be totally open but that is not always possible or approriate in current corporate culture and we have to acknowledge this and work with it. The people most attracted to using wikis are those involved in writing formal documents, policy, manuals etc.”

You can read the interview of Euan Semple by Jamas Enck on Blogger Me, the link to the original interview on the Broadband Blog seems to be dead.