On FeedForAll:

Blogs vaulted RSS into the limelight but are unlikely to be the force that sustains RSS as a communication medium. The biggest opportunities for RSS are not in the blogosphere but as a corporate communication channel.

Even now, businesses that were initially reluctantly evaluating RSS are beginning to realize the power and benefit of the RSS information avenue. The inherent capacity for consumers to select the content they wish to receive will be the driving mechanism for keeping advertisements to a minimum and content quality consistent.

Read more…

Via Micro Persuasion.

Shel Israel and the well know Robert Scoble are the authors of Naked Conversations (ex Red Couch?), a book (and a blog) on how blogs are changing the way businesses talk with Customers.

Several time in their book they mention the Kryptonite affair, the story of this lock company who became immensly famous im September 2004 for ignoring bloggers, and in particular one of them who published a video showing how a lock could be easily opened just by picking it with a bic pen.

Since then the story was used (and still today) by numerous experts and pros in corporate blogging to illustrate the influence of bloggers and the risks for organisations to ignore them.

This being said, I’ve never seen any interview of a Kryptonite manager since that time Surprisingly nobody dared to contact Kryptonite and to publish an interview. And apparently wrong information was published, says Donna M. Tocci, Kryptonite’s PR manager: “There is a lot of incorrect information out there about the issue in September and, personally, that gets frustrating to read over and over. For example, all of this didn’t start with a blogger at all. What I find interesting is that so many people in the blogosphere have told our story with such certainty, yet have never contacted me or asked for any of the correct information.”

Mrs Tocci finally took the initiative to contact the pros by herself. She exchanged several e-mails with Shel Israel who offers some excerpts of his e-mail conversation with Mrs Tocci. The first part is a description of the affair from the point of view of Kryptonite; the second is made of questions to Mrs Tocci and her answers.

The post and the comments are worthwhile to read!

Update: Shel Israel asks two more questions on reaction to his Kryptonite analysis for the Red Couch:

1. Has Donna Tocci’s comments changed your opinion of Kryptonite? If so is it for the better or for worse?
2. If you had a bike would you buy a Kryptonite lock for it?

You can post your comments here.

Interesting question by Stephen Baker: how do companies track internal bloggers?.

Of course, the blog search engines such as Technorati or BlogPulse make it relatively easy to track employees who blog anonymously about work.

I tend to do some informal research in the background when I visit enterprises and prospects. Just as an example. Then I confront them with my results. They are harmless most of the time. The reaction I’ve experienced so far is that companies don’t imagine or realise or even think that their employees could write about theirs jobs, their employer. They usually look completely puzzled… Time to wake up?

Also, read the post of Mark Cuban about using blog search in your business and replace upset customer with upset employee:

It used to be an old customer service mantra, that “One upset customer can tell 20 people about how poorly your company performed, and those 20 people could tell 20 more and your business could really suffer. Keep all your customers happy, and you won’t have to worry”. Those numbers are miniscule compared to today.

In today’s world, one upset customer can write in their blog about how upset they are about your product or service and it could be linked to by any number of other blogs, which in turn are linked to by any number of blogs, which is in turn picked up by a tv news show. In 24 hours or less, tens to hundreds of thousands, if not millions of people have heard the complaint and your business and brand are at risk.

Via Blogspotting:

“To me, this post by Randy Baseler, Boeing’s vice president of marketing for Commercial Airplanes, is a good example of a company effectively using a blog to discuss directly some critical points made by a Boeing fan about the next generation 787 Dreamliner passenger plane.”

Paul Wormeli is Executive Director of the Integrated Justice Information Systems Institute and explains why and how they adopted Traction Software for their web site as well as for collaboration among workgroups.

At the IJIS Institute, we adopted a secure enterprise blogging software package made by Traction Software which we use for multiple important purposes. First, it totally defines our web site using a customized ’skin’ that we had Traction create for us. While our web site looks and acts like a conventional web site, it is actually built with the blogging software and everything on the public web site is just composed of articles (posts) in the Traction software. This makes the update and maintenance of the pages trivial, as MS Word documents can simply be copied into the web pages and uploaded with a mouse click eliminating all the work of HTML encoding and placement (although it is very easy to add HTML formatting).

The even bigger value in this kind of software is the ease of collaboration among workgroups. Particularly because of the highly flexible security administration, we set up secure workspaces for each of our 16 different committees and projects, and give read, write, and comment capability only to the members of the group. Group members can then post articles freely and easily, comment on each other’s work at the paragraph level leaving in-line comments for all to read, and never worry about partially developed ideas getting too much exposure before they can be refined. Once a white paper or other work product is complete, they can publish it to the higher level audience of all of our member companies, or with one more mouse click publish it to the news page of our public web site. We have several hundred people involved in our committees and work projects and they have taken to using this medium to communicate and share ideas and avoid endless meetings and teleconferences by doing it this way.

What makes all of these kinds of applications work the best is the ability to implement the ‘publish and subscribe’ model. This is the information sharing part. People can use RSS or ATOM to subscribe to their individual committee work and/or the larger group news pages and avoid the task of having to go to the site to see what has changed or been added since their last visit. With our software, there is also an Executive Digest that automatically generates a newspaper-like, e-mail message unique to each user with an account, presenting headlines of what new has been added since the last notification. By default, we set this up to run at 1:00 a.m. every Sunday morning, so when users come to work Monday morning they have on their desktop a news summary of what happened during the last week in every part of the enterprise to which they have the authority to be so advised. The Executive Digest approach is more readily accepted by the large percentage of users who just can’t be bothered with setting up an RSS aggregator.

The combination of the ease of collaboration, the security of controlling access to your work by others before it is ready for release, and the ease and convenience of subscription to changing information is what allows us to define this as our ‘Knowledge Management System’ and effectively serve a large number of direct enrolled users as well as the public at large.

This kind of software is going to find increasing settings for its use in law enforcement and justice as well as many other domains as users insist on having this capability to replace the endless round of meetings.

Via Paul Wormeli’s TechNotes.

GameTomorrow is about the future of gaming, and how it will impact our lives beyond the confines of the console or the PC. The contributors are IBM leaders who are involved with games and game-related technologies - whether it’s inside the consoles, within a massive online environment or the business of gaming. They’ve come together on this blog to spark more discussion about the long-term implications of gaming and third-generation user interfaces.

Via Micro Persuasion.

“… Far more beneficial, however, may be the gains in employee productivity and creativity that can come from an internal company blog. “If you look at the modern business system, I would say the current structures create bottlenecks,” Ms. Cronin-Lukas says. “You have a clash of top-down structure and the bottom-up dynamics that are needed for creativity….My theory is that if you look at any successful company, you will see that innovation happens despite the formal structure.”

Rather than trying to generate ideas in meetings, Ms. Cronin-Lukas advises, companies should create an internal blog on which employees can share ideas. A blog allows employees to show tangible evidence of their thinking and expertise, getting ideas out of their heads and putting them to work for the company.”

Read more…

Via The big blog company.

Via The eStrategyOne Buzz:

“Ecommerce Times published a fine article today including this insight from Dave Taylor, a business strategy consultant and writer. Taylor dismisses the business blog as diary and says instead of blogging: %u201CIt’s a sophisticated content-management tool, allowing anyone to separate the content of their site from the delivery of that content to the visitor.” In other words, Taylor says that blogs are easy to use and empower authorized employees to respond immediately to customer concerns without technical bottlenecks. (Goodbye blog as diary of teenage angst, I knew your days were numbered.)”

Whether they’re leading or following the bandwagon, enterprises are starting to realize that the strengths of RSS are great fits for the corporate environment. Email, web browsers, and databases often fall short when an enterprise wants to send a message to hundreds of thousands of global employees, to measure buzz about its products, to filter industry news for relevancy, or to synchronize employee’s web needs between work, home, and travel use.

Read more…

In The New York Times: Blogging While Browsing, but Not Buying, a story about how online merchants are starting to test Web logs.

Via Rex Hammock’s Weblog.

“It’s enough to drive a PR guru to drink: The company president is writing a blog about corporate vision, the stock price, his vacation to Colorado, and his new golden retriever puppy. What will the shareholders think?

Sound far-fetched? Guess again. Some of the highest-ranking managers at companies like Sun Microsystems, General Motors, Hewlett-Packard, and Boeing have entered the blogosphere, writing weekly or semimonthly entries in their online diaries. Any curious reader can learn why Sun’s President and COO Jonathan Schwartz suffered two months of bad hair days (hint: Never let your 2-year-old’s barber trim your ponytail). Or find out what Bob Lutz, vice chairman of global product development for General Motors, has been driving lately (preproduction models of the Pontiac Solstice and G6 Coupe, and a Hummer H3). You can read the thoughts of Randy Baseler, vice president of marketing for Boeing Commercial Airplanes, about why Airbus’s strategy is dead wrong (come on Randy, tell us what you really think). And you can find out how all of these executives view important trends in their industry.

What’s driving these busy executives to carve hours out of their busy week to cast their views into the sometimes hostile world of Web logs?”

Read more…

If you are thinking about launching a corporate blog, remember that the blogosphere is still largely uncharted territory for companies. By way of preparation:

• Figure out what you want to achieve with blogs. Internal blogs serve a different purpose than public ones.
• Learn the rules. Blogging is a new form of two-way communication characterised by an informal tone, timely updates and frank discussion.
• Make sure to devote the time and/or resources to keep the blog up-to-date.
• Study the legal ramifications of launching a blog and establish guidelines so that executives and employees understand what material is off limits.

Read more…

Via Micro Persuasion.

Bob Lutz, the Vice Chairman of General Motors, gives advice to would-be corporate bloggers. Writing in Information Week, Lutz says a blog provides no better opportunity to engage in an open dialogue and exchange of ideas with customers and potential customers, illustrating his experiences with the GM Fastlane blog.

Since January, I’ve been participating, along with other members of General Motors’ senior management, in the GM Fastlane blog. We’ve found the blog to be a hugely effective communications tool and a terrific way to conduct a grassroots, largely unfiltered conversation with GM fans and nonfans alike.

The key is to leave the corporate-speak behind and keep the tone conversational, open, and honest. Anyone who has read our blog sees the real deal, as produced by us and not polished by several layers of trained communications pros.

Another aspect that helps keep things real is the wealth of comments posted by readers and other bloggers. We don’t filter out negative comments, complaints, or hate mail. All we do is screen for spam and posts from crackpots using language that most people would find offensive.

It’s important that we run the bad with the good. We’d take a credibility hit if we posted only rosy compliments, and credibility is the most important attribute a corporate blog can have. Once it’s gone, your blog is meaningless.

Via NevOn.

Via The Blog Herald:

Sun Microsystems CIO has come out in support of corporate blogging despite problems with lawyers and the possiblity of adverse publicity.

Bill Vass told ZDNet Australia: “So far we’ve had very positive experiences with blogging, and I would encourage many other companies to do it as well,” and cited Sun engineers blogging of technical information and responses to questions about Sun’s Solaris operating system as a particular positive aspect of the strategy.

Another spectacular example showing that companies and trademarks (even the big ones) are influenced by bloggers.

In this particular case, Adrian Melrose has created a blog to complain aggressively against Land Rover. In this post he explains why he’s not satisfied with the Land Rover Discovery 3 he recently acquired for £54k. Followed by other posts such as They are replacing my Discovery, Land Rover isn’t listening, etc.

The car vendor finaly reacted 6 weeks later via Mike Mulholland, head of Customer Relations, Land Rover UK, and it looks like they found an agreement.

See also the summary and analysis by Neville Hobson.

Via Blogspotting.

Update: just read on NevOn that Adrian Melrose’s problems with Land Rover took a turn for the worse. It has the potential to become an uncomfortable PR issue for Land Rover…

Update: … and the saga goes on. Neville Hobson reports that Adrian, the still unhappy Land Rover customer, continues to challenge Mike Mulholland, Land Rover’s Customer Services Manager, to answer all his complaints via his blog.

“Mike, you need to click on the comment link below this posting to answer them. Alternatively, we could do a recorded interview and post it on this site. That would be really appreciated by us all as an open and transparent way of dealing with these issues and questions.”

The car manufacturer is still very embarrassed and obviously does not know yet how to react with a customer who, while clearly very angry and unhappy, still retains considerable loyalty for the vehicle and the brand.

Update: the happy ending to the Land Rover Discovery saga that Adrian Melrose had been hoping for just hasn’t happened. The latest news from Land Rover’s most patient, loyal and suffering customer is that he has finally reached the end of the road:

[...] So I throw up my hands in the air and tell Land Rover that they have a problem - failure of 4 different Vehicles - yet they tell me this fault is somehow connected to me personally. Trying to blame my blackberry device claiming interference!

So they took the car back and refunded my money in full and I am no longer a Land Rover ower - but I continue to get a few hundred hits a day on this site and I am going to make sure that prospective owners are fully aware of the terrible QA problems this car suffers from.”

Via NevOn.

Charlie Wood developped something interesting: Salesforce via RSS. It pulls leads out of Salesforce.com and delivers them in a personalized, secure RSS feed.

He’s now looking for a handful of people who use both Salesforce.com and an RSS aggregator to help test it. He’ll also be looking to those people to help him understand what kind of information would be most useful to deliver from Salesforce via RSS.

If you’re interested, e-mail him with the phrase “Salesforce beta” in the subject. To participate, you must have a valid Salesforce.com login and access to an RSS aggregator that supports secure feeds.

Via Moonwatcher.

Via Corporate Engagement:

“Time spent on your resume or CV could be better spent blogging according to an article in the latest edition of The Economists Intelligent Life (Summer 2005, p141). The article Blogging up the Ladder suggests that an intelligent blog can be an aid to creating and individual online brand, which in turn can be used to further your career.”

The International Federation of the Periodical Press group just revealed the results of their consumer media study, which show that 30% of all [US] consumer media sites are already providing their content via RSS.

Via marketingstudies.net.

Via LexBlog Blog:

“Time Magazine released its list of the 50 Coolest Websites for 2005 and almost one third of them are blogs. That’s pretty amazing when it was only a year ago when blogs were some obscure thing talked about by geeks and innovators.

These babies are going mainstream. Those law firm marketing folks who don’t think lawyers should be looking seriously at publishing a blog for the marketing of their practice are living a fairy tale.”

“Welcome to the world of citizen newsgathering, where technology and the age-old desire to communicate hot information, be it hard news or soft gossip, are converging and forcing traditional news outlets to dramatically change the way they cover big news events.”

Read more…

Via Micro Persuasion.