… why in the world would CEOs take on the extra task of blogging - a communication medium with a tentative ROI that remains largely unproven?

Marketing pundit and best-selling author Seth Godin says they shouldn’t. According to Godin, blogs work when they are based on candor, urgency, timeliness, pithiness, and controversy. “Does this sound like a CEO to you?” Godin asks. “Short and sweet, folks: If you can’t be at least four of the five things listed above, please don’t bother . . . save the fluff for the annual report.”

As blogging evolves, however, many of today’s CEOs-turned-bloggers in fact are making the time - and having a good time - using the very characteristics Godin lists as what makes blogging successful.

Read more…

As we know, the thing about the Web 2.0 is that it is not one thing. It’s blogs, it’s technologies such as AJAX, it’s tagging, it’s remixes - it’s all that and more. All visualized in this map.

Via CorporateBloggingBlog.

Also, look at the summary of Dion Hinchcliffe.

A whole new Web is emerging from the wilds of cyberspace. It’s no longer all about idly surfing and passively reading, listening, or watching. It’s about doing: sharing, socializing, collaborating, and, most of all, creating [...] No longer content to be merely viewers and consumers, people increasingly are taking an active part in creating their online lives.

Really Simple Syndication, or RSS, lets people subscribe to blogs and other sites, so they get customized bundles of material sent to them as they’re created [...] Pretty soon, you won’t need to be a programmer to tailor the Web precisely as you like it.

Read more…

Via BeConnected.

Noone needs much proof these days that e-mail is broken, but here is an article from InformationWeek on the costs associated with managing email applications, suggesting that it costs $117.34 per user per year for companies with fewer than 2,500 employees to “secure” the email system - mostly from spam. What the article doesn’t say is how much additional money is wasted simply because the information captured in the messages and transmitted via email simply can’t be shared or distributed or leveraged in any other way.

It’s pretty clear for quite some time now that weblog publishing systems decrease this dependence on the use of email as a publication mechanism - lowering the costs associated with managing email systems. The other half of the equation is that the communication in the form of a post or discussion creates a corporate record that is searchable and can be shared on the existing intranet. So, while it might not be the ultimate cure for corporate Alzheimers, its certainly the best medicine currently available.

Source: Scott Scott Young’s Radio Weblog.

Enterprise tool turns the online craze into a collaboration platform.

Collaboration tools can benefit almost any organization. But what can you do if your users are spread far and wide and are not all techies?

TeamPage 3.6 from Traction Software may provide the answer. Technically, TeamPage is enterprise-level blogging software. Blogs, short for Web logs, are amateur news and feature sites where a single author reports on events of the day to either inform or entertain an audience. It is a one-to-many broadcast format in its most popular form.

But TeamPage puts your entire organization into the content-sharing mix. The end user does not have to be technically savvy to use TeamPage [...] Only named users can modify data, though an unlimited number of visitors can look at the information.

Levels of access

The real value of TeamPage is that anyone - from your security guards to your database engineers - can use the system, but each interacts with TeamPage at a different level. Once users log in, they can view, edit, erase or reclassify information based on their permission level. Some users may only be able to read the data and perhaps respond to it, for example, while others may be able to create topics and post new content.

Content is managed by a system administrator responsible for setting up groups and forum areas, which the software calls projects. Users can be given a lot of authority over who can read the information they post. For example, an administrator who wants to comment on ways to lock down servers to increase protection against a new virus could make it so only other administrators could read that post. Anyone else looking at the page would see other comments, but it would be as if the ones they lacked permission to read didn’t exist.

You can also configure the system to run dynamically, targeting automatically generated newsletters to particular workers even if they aren’t logged in. For example, you could have all security-related news generated by the system sent each week to your security guards, while accountants got a separate newsletter on financial or budget issues. As with the blogs themselves, newsletters only go to people who are allowed to see the content.

The newsletter feature, and in fact the entire TeamPage system, uses the Atom and Really Simple Syndication (RSS) formats. This means users can configure the system to provide Extensible Markup Language summaries of articles, news and other updates. Subscribers view the summaries and visit the main TeamPage if the summary interests them. You host all your graphics and dynamic links from the main Web page. The newsletter component to TeamPage can pull the Web page with its suite of graphics and charts into a PDF file and send it to users if they prefer that format to standard HTML e-mail.

Advanced users can use TeamPage with Web-based Distributed Authoring and Versioning, a protocol for making Web pages readable and writeable. Using WebDAV, we created several shared folders where we could upload files and drop them into the system for everyone to view.

You can also add Lightweight Directory Access Protocol security, although we used a normal Active Directory system and it worked just fine.

There is also a built-in search engine. Users can look for topics or roll back the calendar to see what was posted on specific days.

The system is easy to use and could be extremely helpful in any environment where distance or culture prevents one hand from knowing what the other is doing. And though it sounds complex for the administrator, we were able to get up to speed with a one-day training session.

TeamPage runs on a variety of server operating systems, including Microsoft Windows NT 4.0 and higher, Red Hat Linux or equivalent, Sun Solaris and Mac OS X 10.2 or later. It%u2019s also flexible on the client side. Users can access the application from Internet Explorer, FireFox, Mozilla, Opera, and from mobile browsers such as AvantGo and the Symbian version of Opera. According to the company, a typical configuration can support up to 500 users.

In short, TeamPage is a fairly powerful collaboration platform built around a popular new syndication technology. With its authentication and encryption capabilities, it could find its way into agencies looking to share informationmore easily.

Source: Government Computer News.

After The power of us, BusinessWeek has another terrific package, as Steve Rubel says, up on the participatory web. Highlights: a story on personal blogs/social networks, a piece on how marketers are studying del.icio.us and another on Ajax.

Content management systems will always have their place in the publishing world, but they’ve never been the best tools for business collaboration. A simple open-source app called the wiki may soon rule the knowledge management roost.

Read more…

Via Weblogger.ch.

As you already know, b-spirit.com is an official partner of Traction Software Inc since the beginning of this year. After only a few months, the collaboration is very promising and we are about to deploy Traction solutions for some big organisations in Europe.

In order to better promote and demonstrate Traction TeamPage, the #1 enterprise weblog software, we have set up a test platform for our partners and prospects: http://b-spirit.tractionsoft.com/. There is some public content (mainly fed by our weblog) with read access for visitors; the rest of the platform is secured.

If you have a leading role in your company and if you are interested to deploy a professional weblog solution, internally or externally, just let us know. Please include your full details, your company name and your position. We will tell you more about Traction TeamPage, start a live test or even organise an on-line demo.

Vicki Warker, Vice President, Product Management & Marketing for Sprint Business Solutions, is blogging on Things That Make You Go Wireless.

Via Micro Persuasion.

If you’ve considered starting a blog as a business and marketing communications tool, you certainly need to make sure you gave a goal in mind for its use.

Read more…

… nearly 70 percent of companies have no policies or guidelines in place for employee bloggers, and that not having a policyt is a clear liability for both companies and bloggers themselves.

Read more…

By the end of this year, CRM and other enterprise applications that don’t offer standard RSS feeds will be a big step behind…

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Via Moonwatcher.

Corporate blogging is not only about companies having their own blog, internally or externally. Corporate blogging is also about meeting and engaging customers and/or enthusiasts who have already created their own consumer blogs.

Ward’s Dealer Business, a trade publication serving auto dealers, published and interesting post beginning of August about the future of advertising with respect to car dealers.

What about blogging? [...] It is the future of advertising. It’s a future that, in many ways, already is here. [...] there is a cultural shift in how people communicate with each other, how they shop and how they get their news and entertainment. This shift is going to change advertising spending — not just moving money to the Internet, but also how that money is spent online.

With more and more broadband access, people will spend more and more time online. But people are going to do more online.

Internet technology has progressed to a point that average people are able to take control of the Web and create their own personal media worlds. People will be able to avoid the traditional advertising. The challenge for businesses and advertisers is to find ways to get invited into these new channels. The channels creating the most interest — and angst — are blogs and podcasts.

“Consumers are creating their own content online and you’re going to have to connect to them through that content they create,” Gayle Troberman, director, branded entertainment and experiences for MSN, tells a group of automotive executives at a Microsoft meeting.

Read more…

Via The eStrategyOne Buzz.

On August 23rd, Gartner released its 2005 Hype Cycle for Emerging Technologies, assessing the maturity, impact and adoption speed of 44 technologies and trends over the coming decade. It provides not only a scorecard to separate hype from reality, but also models that help enterprises to decide when they should adopt a new technology.

The Emerging Technologies Hype Cycle covers the entire IT spectrum, but Gartner has identified three key technology themes businesses should watch as well as highlighting some of the individual technologies in those areas. Technologies that will enable the development of Collaboration, Next Generation Architecture and Real World Web are highlighted as being particularly significant.

[...]

Podcasting. Podcasting offers a way to ’subscribe’ to radio programmes and have them delivered to your PC. Gartner predicts that podcasting subscriptions will grow increasingly important as the market for content continues to fragment, which will lead to a massive shift in radio, and ultimately TV content delivery. Podcasting is an extremely efficient method for delivering audio and spoken-word content to niche audiences and as such could become an important corporate communications tool.

Really Simple Syndication (RSS). RSS is a simple data format that enables web sites to inform subscribers of new content and distribute content more efficiently by bypassing the browser via RSS reader software. RSS is widely used for syndicating weblog content but its corporate use is only starting to be tapped for activities such as corporate messaging. Its simplicity makes it easy to implement and add to established software systems. Gartner predicts that RSS will be most useful for content that is ‘nice to know’ rather than ‘need to know’.

Corporate Blogging. This involves the use of online personal journals by corporate employees, either individually or in a group, to further company goals. It reached the peak of hype in 2004 although mainstream firms have not yet got involved. Its impact will be on projecting corporate marketing messages primarily and secondarily in competitive intelligence, customer support and recruiting.

Wikis. A simple, text-based collaborative system for managing hyperlinked collections of web pages; it usually enables users to change pages or comments created by other users. Wikis are becoming available from commercial vendors, in addition to many open-sourced products, but not yet from established enterprise vendors. However, they are widely used as collaborative, distributed authoring systems for online communities, especially those using open-source projects. Gartner predicts that Wikis will impact ad hoc collaboration, group authoring, content management, web site management, innovation, project execution and research and development.

Via Micro Persuasion.

Via internetnews:

Andrew Nash, CTO for Belmont, Calif.’s Reactivity, said he and his team have modified the company’s XML appliances to let users access, secure transport and encrypt RSS feeds and transform RSS data to and from other XML formats.

The machines offer tracking, alerting, reporting capabilities to help RSS feeds to work as intended. Moreover, businesses may use the Gateway to respond to improper identity usage.

Read more…

Via MarketingVOX:

Euro RSCG Magnet has formed a new unit - its PopWorx division - for nontraditional media, such as blogs, buzz marketing and street theater, reports AdWeek. PopWorx will partner with specialized agencies for clients; the first partnership is with Night Agency, a New York-based viral and guerilla marketing firm. Euro RSCG Magnet SVPs Marvin Mack and Jason Schlossberg will head the group, which will launch projects for Atkins Nutritionals this month.

Deutsche Bank Research, the think tank of the Deutsche Bank issued a report Blogs: The New magic formula for corporate communications? [PDF].

Via PR Thoughts.

A new conference is being held in Austin, TX, on November 2nd, called The Blogging Enterprise.

“The Blogging Enterprise is a one-day conference that will explore blogging, podcasting and video podcasting and their potential benefits and value in building brands, educating prospects, making sales and cultivating customer loyalty. Attendees will depart with new ideas and a better sense for how to implement this new technology successfully.”

Via Business Blog Consulting.