Via The eStrategyOne Buzz:

Rather than create a companion website, email delivery firm Return Path Solutions has decided to change their website into a blog. Listen to CEO Matt Blumberg, who understands how online business is changing:

“This is a different way than the traditional methods of publicizing a company…We’re designing this to be a lot more informative, transparent, entertaining and interactive…A lot of folks aren’t in the habit of doing anything like this at all…It’s something they would do for an individual client. We’re already thinking about who’s writing what, next.”

See this DMNews article for more information, and visit the Reurn Path Solutions website.

Via The Blog Herald:

Panasonic has announced the launch of a blog to “inform and educate video professionals” on the new AG-HVX200 HD/SD DVCPRO P2 camcorder and on high definition technology topics in general.

The blog, written by Tosh Bilowski , provides Panasonic “a forum to express its views and share its opinions on new technologies, products, features, and activities, as well as answer questions in a meaningful way.”

“This web log will serve as a centralized source for accurate information on the AG-HVX200, DVCPRO HD, P2, and on a host of technology subjects, and Tosh allows us to put a human face and personality to it,” said Jim Wickizer, National Manager, Marketing Services, Panasonic Broadcast. “In the past, this type of information has typically been presented in a far-less-interesting manner. The on-line journal’s goal is to be helpful and relevant to video professionals and provide them with a useful reference.”

Via Micro Persuasion:

“I didn’t know they are blogging, but indeed The World Bank has had a blog for a few months that is written by two economists.”

Via CorporateBloggingBlog: Europe’s largest dairy company, Arla Foods, this week became the first major Scandinavian company to start blogging externally. It’s their Danish company (Arla is owned by 11,600 milk producers in Denmark and Sweden) that takes the lead.

Arla now has three different blogs, all in Danish. They want to tell us about nutrition and health, the life on a farm and what’s happening “behind the scenes” in the organisation. They do it to build long-term relationships, to show a more human face and how qualified they are.

Bob Lutz, GM’s vice chairman of global product development, probably one of the most high-profile bloggers in the world (FastLane Blog), is going to write the foreword on Debbie Weil’s Corporate Blogging Book.

Via BlogWrite for CEOs.

Via Photo Matt: Better Desktop, a usability blog by Novell using WordPress.

Via Blogging about Incredible Blogs: museums are starting to blog.

• http://art_at_thekatzen.typepad.com
• http://www.contemporary-pulitzer.blogs.com
• http://blogs.walkerart.org

Via Moonwatcher:

Email service provdier SilverPop has announced RSSDirect, a new product that promises to deliver the personalization, measurability, and targetability of email marketing campaigns with the opt-in, spam-resistant nature and 100% deliverability of RSS.

From the About RSSDirect page:

Essentially, Silverpop has developed a technology that enables companies to supply RSS feeds that are completely individualized, much the same way Silverpop targets, segments and personalizes email messages. RSSDirect recipients receive text, images and promotional offers uniquely matched to their expressed interests and desires. The individualized feeds enable marketers to communicate with subscribers based on demographics, past behavior, or any other segmenting attribute. As with targeted email campaigns, RSSDirect programs are measurable, with the system able to deliver reports that track and analyze the actions of individual recipients.

Les Blogs 2.0 (December 5th and 6th in Paris), the preliminary program has been published.

Via Loïc Le Meur.

Via LexBlog Blog:

This morning’s New York Times has a good article on the power of blogs that cover a consumer product. They’re called brand blogs.

As the number of blogs has grown, more consumers like Mr. Marx [fan of Barq's Root Beer] are keeping Web diaries dedicated exclusively to their favorite brands. Most of them are written without the consent of the companies that own the brands; a spokesman for Coca-Cola, which owns Barq’s, had not heard of Mr. Marx’s blog.

But some companies are starting to pay attention to blogs, using them as a kind of informal network of consumer opinion.

‘In addition to viewing blogs as another media channel, it allows us to keep our pulse on the marketplace,’ said Ken Ross, a vice president of Netflix, the movie rental company based in Los Gatos, Calif. One of the best-known blogs about Netflix, hackingnetflix.com, was started last November by Mike Kaltschnee, who lives in Danbury, Conn.

Lawyers and professional services firms are not going to have fans blog about them, at least not yet, but these businesses can blog about their area of expertise to create their own brand. Brands for professional services businesses are built on their expertise = people hire businesses they believe are experts. A professional marketing blog is an excellent way to showcase your expertise and build your brand.

Via Tech-Confidential:

One of the producers of the BlogOn conference finally took the stage as a speaker this afternoon at the Copa. Suw Charman gave a spirited pitch for the internal use of blogs and wikis by companies. Her speech included some statistics, including the fact that 34% of e-mail received by business people is occupational spam (work-related e-mail which has nothing to do with the person receiving it). No filters can stop that. But, says Charman, an internal blog could.

She used a couple of case studies to illustrate her points. In a nutshell, this is what she said internal blogs and wikis can do for your company:

- Cut down the amount of e-mail
- Improve quality of information
- Keep employees on the same page
- Provide transparency
- Unlimited capacity (blogs don’t slow servers down)
- Searchable archives
- No spam
- No occupational spam
- Easier to ignore than e-mail

I spent a couple of minutes looking for a hole in her argument, then realized I couldn’t. Internal blogs would probably solve a lot of problems facing IT departments and companies as a whole. The problem, as Charman said, is that there aren’t too many CIOs out there who are brave enough to say, “OK, we’re going to scrap this $200,000 infrastructure we bought last year and replace it with MovableType for $350.”

Take a look at the data from Guidewire Group’s BlogOn 2005 Social Media Adoption Survey to see that business blogging isn’t just about to take off – it already has.

The survey found that 55% of corporations have adopted blogs for both internal (91.4%) and external (96.6%) communications. More than half of these organizations launched their blogs within the last year, and most of these started within the past three months. That’s a hockey stick. And it suggests that corporate communicators will drive future growth of the social media market.

Read more…

Via Blog Business Summit.

Via BlogWrite for CEOs:

McDonalds’ COO Michael Roberts was live blogging last week during a Ragan seminar on internal communications. He was “fielding dozens of questions (from employees) from around the globe,” reports Steve Crescenzo of Corporate Hallucinations, who was leading the workshop.

The COO also does a podcast and a regular internal blog that he updates weekly (or almost). AND one of McDonalds’ internal communications managers, Lisa Grover, has the title Blog Czar. The company is planning to roll out a blogging program for all employees to participate in.

Bloggers are gaining a higher profile alongside traditional news sources with Yahoo including blogs in its expanding news search system.

Read more…

Via TubbyDev.

When European competitor Airbus edged Boeing in passenger plane sales last year, the U.S. aircraft manufacturer decided to take its pitch to a growing audience in a mostly uncorporate space: the blogosphere.

(more…)

Two public weblogs @ Boeing are already well known:

• Randy’s Journal - the blog of Randolph S. Baseler, Vice President Marketing, Commercial Airplanes
• The Fly Test Journal - where the engineers and test pilots of Boeing’s new 777-200LR Worldliner talk about their work

Now Boeing launches another weblog called InFlightHQ that dispenses tips, tools and techniques for inflight productivity.

As Steve Rubel said, weblogs can be used for much more than attracting new buyers. They can also help build customer loyalty once they have purchased a product.

Via Micro Persuasion.

Two senior IBM executives are featured in an informative and engaging series of audiovisual presentations that present the case for blogs as strategic business tools.

Presented by Harriet Pearson, IBM’s Chief Privacy Officer and Vice President for Corporate Affairs, and Willy Chiu, Vice President of IBM’s High Performance On Demand Solutions Group, some very interesting facts are included in this communication about IBM’s own blogging initiatives:

• IBM now has between 12-14,000 active employee bloggers from 73 countries
• The company’s internal Blog Central has over 12,000 users who post regularly
• Over the past year, the number of users and blog posts have quadrupled
• “Blogging is the glue that brings all the experts together within the company”

Via NevOn.

BusinessWeek proposes a nice and short self-diagnostic tool for your company or your business unit to find out its capacity to innovate.

The questionnaire has four sections:

1. Innovation history and results
2. Innovation infrastructure
3. Innovation insights
4. Innovation Development

We have updated the page about our services. It is more complete and gives a better flavour of the types of service we can provide to companies.

Just read it through and do not hesitate to post a comment or to contact us.

Managers and professionals are running as fast as they can to keep pace with a business world turbocharged by technology. Here’s how companies can ease time pressures on their knowledge workers - and boost productivity and innovation at the same time.

Use new technology to foster collaboration Develop programs that make it easier fo find out what colleagues in other parts of far-flung companies are working on - thus helping to identify resources and avoid duplication. Also, learn from newly developing, nontraditional forms of organization, such as blogs and open-source software.

Source: BusinessWeek online.