When you start a blog, you should consider relationship building as one of your goals. When defining that relationship, it’s important to consider more possibilities than simply adding more customers and clients. They are only one aspect of the blogging process.
We’ve seen lots and lots of political blogs these last months (e.g. Margot Wallström, Vice President of the European Commission) and new ones are created almost every day.
Via CorporateBloggingBlog I discover this morning what is, to my knowledge, the very first moblogging initiave in a political environnement. Christofer Fjellner, a Swedish Member of the European Parliament (MEP) is moblogging, using his phone camera in the meetings and sessions.
In an interview in the Swedish magazine Dagens Media he claims to be the first moblogging MEP. He “didn’t want to be the last to start a blog”, he says and decided to go for moblogging instead.
With the moblog he wants to tell the public what’s going on in the Parliament and perhaps make us more interested. Someone needs to do something, says Fjellner, about media’s lack of interest in the Parliament.
Some companies, uncomfortable with the openness of public blogs, use them as an internal communications tool. Dresdner Kleinwort Wasserstein, the German investment bank, has set up about 120 internal blogs to promote discussion and distribute information, including some that encourage users to share ideas, requests and criticisms of in-house information technology systems. Traders use the medium to share information and research. “We think of it as the open-source marketplace for ideas,” says JP Rangaswami, chief information officer. “It lets us expose concepts or issues to a wide audience and discuss them dispassionately.”
Microsoft’s Longhorn, the next version of Windows, will support RSS at the OS level.
Longhorn will store all data downloaded to a computer via RSS in a single place. It will maintain a central list of all of a computer user’s RSS subscriptions, from Web log entries to photos pulled from an online family picture gallery.
It will include a feature called simple list extensions that will let Web sites use RSS to publish lists of content that users can subscribe to, like a weekly run-down of chart-topping songs or an online gift registry.
Via Knowledge-at-work:
Even the best documentation does not capture deep knowledge
I guess the point I’m trying to make is documentation alone does not = knowledge. To retain knowledge against attrition, you have to have a community that can appreciate the context, understand the issues, share the tricks, interpret and adapt the explicit stuff to changing circumstances.
Agreed we need to know how to make things and deliver services, but that knowing does not come from documents, it emerges in the dialog around the practice. To capture and preserve the knowledge, not the data or information, but the meaning and the shared understanding, you need to sustain the community rather than store the document.
It really is around the tacit stuff, what you may feel, observe and never ’see’ or read, the relationships, the mentoring, the validation by talking, by ‘being’ and through doing, that creates and preserves the knowledge. If we loose community we revert to information and have to bring forth the knowledge in another community to validate and refresh it.
Brilliant article on BusinessWeek online: The Power Of Us. The journalist takes a closer look at the democratization of industry, in others words at the emergence of an economy of the people, by the people, for the people.
Most telling, traditional companies, from Procter & Gamble Co. (PG ) to Dow Chemical Co., are beginning to flock to the virtual commons, too. The potential benefits are enormous. If companies can open themselves up to contributions from enthusiastic customers and partners, that should help them create products and services faster, with fewer duds — and at far lower cost, with far less risk. LEGO Group uses the Net to identify and rally its most enthusiastic customers to help it design and market more effectively. Eli Lilly & Co. (LLY ), Hewlett-Packard Co. (HP ), and others are running “prediction markets” that extract collective wisdom from online crowds, which help gauge whether the government will approve a drug or how well a product will sell.
At the same time, peer power presents difficult challenges for anyone invested in the status quo. Corporations, those citadels of command-and-control, may be in for the biggest jolt. Increasingly, they will have to contend with ad hoc groups of customers who have the power to join forces online to get what they want. Indeed, customers are creating what they want themselves — designing their own software with colleagues, for instance, and declaring their opinions via blogs instead of waiting for newspapers to print their letters.
… What’s driving all this togetherness? More than anything, an emerging generation of Net technologies. They include file-sharing, blogs, group-edited sites called wikis, and social networking services…
Also, read some comments on The Tech Beat.
Subaru launched a weblog about… the Tour de France! It is called Race To The Tour.
Via Blogspotting.
Businesses are warming to using web logs as marketing and internal communications tools, but management at many big companies remains skeptical.
Companies might do better to start the blogging conversation inside the firewall, via dark blogs, according to Greg Lloyd, president of Traction Software, a vendor of enterprise weblogging software. Dark blogs are those that aren’t seen by the public.
Create blogs that correspond to various stakeholders and audiences within the company and among your partners, contractors, consultants and customers. Rather than using the blog format to publish corporate documents, businesses should deploy internal weblogs that convey the “human value” added to enterprise resources, as well as links to those resources. Such blogs show the timeline for opinions, issues, notes and comments about topics within the company.
“Blogging itself is the leading indicator of what customer interaction will be like in an always-on internet world, where customers must be listened to because they are easily able to listen to each other. It is easier to find out what individual shippers think of UPS compared to FedEx than it is for me to find the official UPS position on the topic. Treating the broadband-connected customer as a consumer of information, viewer of keywords and clicker of links will be a market-share losing strategy in two or three years.”
Via Micro Persuasion.
Interesting comments by Jonathan Schwartz, Sun’s president, on internetnews.com:
“Everyone is now on the network, via e-mail, cell phones. To me the fundamental thing about blogs is that they are critical if you want to lead. But authenticity is paramount. I’ve seen other executives hiring people just to write their blogs. If that’s how you intend to communicate with your customers, employees and staff you want to lead, then don’t bother. It’s the same thing as having somebody read your e-mail for you. But at the end of the day, it’s about the speed with which you can communicate information, especially across different company hierarchies.”
But will blogging transform Sun?
No, Schwartz said, adding that there are plenty of other things Sun needs to undertake in order to transform itself. But it’s one of a few major trends transforming how we use and deploy the “great database in the sky” called the Internet, he said. Enterprises would be wise to pay close attention as they form their IT strategies and investments.
If blogs will help every person in the world connect to the Internet, then more power to the blogs, and even more power to smartphones and smaller form factors for connecting to the network, Schwartz noted. This bodes well for Sun’s strategy of providing the plumbing and infrastructure for those devices.
The IULM University in Milan has recently carried out a research on the Italian blogosphere, with 600 online interviews. Italian bloggers are mainly young: 40% are students, 20% employees and 15% self-employed. Half of them are “mature” bloggers active for more than 6 months, while 9% are newbies who have just started blogging.
The Italian blogosphere grows at a 5% monthly rate, which is dramatically low in comparison with other countries, but - on the contrary - is rather high if you consider that Italy is one of the European countries where Internet penetration amongst individuals is lower.
Also, it is interesting to read Italo Vignoli’s description of how it works in Italy with respect to branding, PR agencies, web presence and blogs.
“… some PR professionals are beginning to argue that targeting niche publications or communities can be more effective than taking a mass-market approach.
… most PR professionals target the major business press, but that strategy is more complicated now due to media fragmentation. The challenge is for PR to be more creative and work with all marketing… going beyond “the media” and targeting all manners of influencers.
Via Micro Persuasion.
What makes the internal blogs really useful is RSS - it isn’t like subscribing to an internal distribution email alias - the thoughts, links and comments become an archive of knowledge and conversations, captured in the blogs - filtered and distributed by the magic of RSS in a spam-free method. All potentially discoverable through search applications. Internal blogs can also an effective venting and ranting platform, pointing out the good and the bad of the internal workings of a business and the competition in a safe, behind-the-firewall, environment.
Now we are seeing companies choose to work in ways that’s much closer to the original vision of the Internet being a medium that is genuinely peer-to-peer, is loosely coupled and sparks different kinds of interactions. The great step forward is not the technology itself — the blogs, etc. are wonderful, but technologically minor — but rather one of new perceptions or how people see fresh possibilities and may be willing to invest in them in new ways. We have come full circle.
Blogs have been labeled next-generation marketing tools by a few because of its use as a powerful vehicle for voice and influence in delivering business level communications of a wide variety. Also, the voice of the customer has been heralding a new era of customer control and evangelism that is weighing heavily on business decisions and influencing business behavior. Consumers are having their say and the businesses that are listening are also winning. Blogs are now a major force at the center of this dynamic relationship between businesses and customers.
Unlike traditional mass media communications, the micro media marketplace focuses on new forms of personalized, or consumer generated media such as blogs (Web logs), podcasts, RSS (really simple syndication) and new mobile marketing applications in which individuals transmit media content directly to a few or many end-users.
Via Micro Persuasion.
Through the central blog dashboard at the intranet W3, IBMers now can find more than 3,600 blogs written by their co-workers. As of June 13 there were 3,612 internal blogs with 30,429 posts. Internal blogging is still at a stage of testing and trying at IBM but the number of blogs is growing rapidly — and they are appreciated, with everything from water cooler talk to discussions about IBM’s business strategies.
Today, Suw Charman at the Corante Research blog posted the first Dark Blogs case study about the corporate-wide use of Traction TeamPage enterprise weblog software for a competitive intelligence project within a large European pharmaceutical group. Competitive intelligence was a crucial component of business decision support for them, and effectively gathering, sharing and updating this information was a key challenge for the CIO. He solved this problem by instituting enterprise weblog software, TeamPage by Traction.
The case study examines the reasons why blogs where chosen, project planning, implementation, integration with other business systems, editorial process, launch and promotion, training and adoption.
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