Via e-Business in the Past, Present, & Future:

“Blogs have attracted a lot of attention lately and seem to be a new trend in Web. Yes, blogs enable users to collaborate and exchange ideas on an informal basis. Yes, it is easy to use and cost-effective. However, I have wondered if blogging can benefit employees and corporations.

So my Question is…

To answer this question, I would like to explore the benefits for both the employer and employees…”

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When it comes to new technology such as blogs, some communicators are wringing their hands over how to use it, when to use it, and whether or not they will ever get approval to use it.

Other communicators are just doing it.

Teala Kail, a communicator at PNM Resources, an Albuquerque, N.M.-based utility, is one of the latter.

A year ago - before most communicators even knew what a blog was - Kail was blogging daily from Florida, where she was with the company’s utility crews helping to restore power in the aftermath of Hurricanes Ivan and Jeanne.

“Employees found the blog useful and engaging,” says Kail. “That got us thinking. We wanted to try and really get our heads around other ways a blog could bring value to the organization. We didn’t want to do one just because we could.”

Kail and her colleague Larry Smith eventually turned their thoughts to PNM’s CEO Jeff Sterba. “We wanted to see if he could blog in a manner that would be valuable to our employees,” she says. “And we got a chance to test what our employees thought of a CEO blog when he was invited to travel with the New Mexico governor to North Korea for diplomatic discussions.”

The idea: Have Sterba provide employees with a running commentary from North Korea, mixing his personal insights with news on the discussions. A good idea, but of course, you have to get the CEO on board, first. And surprisingly, that wasn’t a problem.

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Via Corporate Engagement.

Via bobjgraham:

Like many other businesses, my law firm is grappling with information and e-mail overload. I’ve been on the lookout for tools and processes that will enable timely and effective information sharing, without the drawbacks of e-mail.

At the KMWorld 2005 conference, I came across a product called Traction TeamPage (from Traction Software, http://www.tractionsoftware.com). The vendor describes TeamPage as “Enterprise Weblog software for information sharing within and among business teams. They claim their software “makes collecting, organizing, and publishing information to the web or intranet as easy as using email”.

Within Traction, information is organized into a series of projects. Traction users participate in one or more projects as both information producers and consumers.

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Via Knowledge-at-work: What are the 5 most critical issues facing Knowledge Leaders today? [ranked by importance]

1. Cultivating awareness of the knowledge imperative and advantage in our connected, global economy
2. Connecting (local) knowledge actions with the (overall) business direction
3. Building a culture that encourages the creation of new knowledge and making sharing happen
4. Moving conversations into virtual space to surface assumptions, extend reach, improve brainstorming and leverage many to many communication
5. Selecting a suitable, stable, scaleable technology to support a people centric knowledge strategy

What are the 5 most critical issues facing Knowledge Leaders over the next 3-5 years? [ranked by importance]

1. Taking a successful KM strategy to all stakeholders (suppliers, customers and investors)
2. Making knowledge work invisible - i.e. so well integrated it becomes a part of who we are and what we do!
3. Building relationships so knowledge can flow, but keeping key inventions tacit to prevent leakage
4. Crafting ontologies (taxonomies) so firms can use the emergent technology of meta-inference and apply advanced search & intelligent agents
5. Keeping the focus on core KM issues(learning, collaboration, relationships, dialog, critical thinking) when the next management fad (complexity?) arrives

IBM thinks blogging is the next wave in marketing, and it’s preparing its employees to ride that wave, according to a published report.

With an eye on blogging’s potential to influence future employees and business partners, the technology bellwether began offering blogging tools to its workers six months ago, according to AdAge.com.

“Other companies have fired people for blogging, but IBM is encouraging it,” Christopher Barger, IBM’s unofficial “blogger in chief,” said in the report.

According to AdAge.com, IBM employees who blog are advised to follow the company’s business of code conduct, respect copyright laws and to not reveal proprietary information.

The report said IBM now has 15,000 registered internal bloggers, and more than 2,200 of those workers publish external blogs.

Blogs are an effective tool for finding ways to be relevant to customers, Pete Blackshaw, chief marketing officer at Intelliseek, told AdAge.com. “It’s a bonding technique with your consumer,” he said in the report.

Tech giants like Microsoft and Sun Microsystems already have established employee blogging programs, the report said.

IBM says it doesn’t want to use new media as traditional sales and marketing tools, but it has succeeded in starting talks with “outsiders” in the healthcare and video gaming sectors, which could result in new business relationships, the report said.

“This is a way to get our expertise out there, not by shoving it down people’s throats, but by just starting conversations,” IBM’s Barger said in the report. “It expands our reputation, perceptions and reach of IBM, at the same time expanding the number of people we can learn from,” he said.

Via CNN/Money via pointblog.com.

The 10 Most Powerful Women in Blogging.

Via Weblog Tools Collection.

These companies show that it doesn’t take a tech leader to exploit cutting-edge uses of the Internet to improve their business

With all the excitement about Google, Apple, and blogs these days, we tend to miss the companies that are quietly deploying these same Internet innovations to reinvent their operations. With the Web Smart 50, we shine a light on some of the projects that are taking place in every industry across the globe, from a vineyard in California to an Italian electricity giant. These companies’ creative approaches to using the Web provide plenty of lessons.

[...]

No. 2: Open the Doors During Marketing Campaigns

These days, it seems like everyone is creating and publishing online podcasts, videos, and blogs. Tap that creativity during marketing campaigns. By enlisting people to submit their own works, companies can get new ideas and create a buzz around their products or services.

Converse is a classic example of how to make this happen. Last August, the shoe company created an Web site where it solicited 24-second films from anyone with a camera and an idea. The pitch: Converse would put the best ones online — and as ads on MTV. Each creator whose ad was chosen for TV will get $10,000. Submissions have flooded in, with 1,600 films sent so far. The site gets around 430,000 visitors a month, and traffic to the overall Converse.com site has jumped 80%.

No. 3: Unleash Collaboration

The Web is redefining relationships, and one of the best ways to take advantage of this is to encourage collaboration through new technologies, such as wikis and blogs. These virtual workspaces enable employees and clients to create, comment on, and revise projects in real time. Procter & Gamble, which has turned to outside scientific networks for help on R&D projects, now gets 35% of its new products externally, up from 20% four years ago. At financial firm Dresdner Kleinwort Wasserstein, nearly 1,500 people are using wikis instead of e-mail to collaborate on projects.

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Podcasting News reports that IBM has announced an internal initiative for employees to publish podcasts. As part of this initiative, they’ve expanded their corporate guidelines to cover podcast-specific issues.

You can find the full text of the updated guidelines here. The part on podcasting flows at the end.

Via Micro Persuasion.

There’s more happening with corporate blogs than the career-threatening blunders that tend to grab headlines and amuse us all.

Serious companies are taking blogs seriously, and in the process are finding surprisingly innovative uses for an application that many still view as a plaything.

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A growing number of American chief executives rate blogs high as employee communication tools. A survey by PR Week and Burson Marsteller indicates that chief executives see blogs as useful for communicating new ideas and news, providing an informal channel of communication and getting instant feedback.

• About 59% of CEOs surveyed said they find blogs useful for internal communications.
• 47% see them as tools for communication with external audiences.
• Of the 131 CEOs surveyed, 7% are actually blogging.
• About 18% of these CEOs say they plan to host a company blog over the next two years.

Via Micro Persuasion.

Corporate leaders who ignore what bloggers are saying about them and their businesses could have serious consequences.

IBM today introduced its ‘Public Image Monitoring Solution’, a new software that monitors and analyses blogs, wikis, news feeds, consumer review sites, newsgroups and other community-generated content to keep tabs on their image.

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As the COO/President of Sun Microsystems, Jonathan Schwartz is one of the more prominent c-level blogging execs. Wander over to his blog.

Throughout the recently held BLOGGING ENTERPRISE conference, Jonathan’s blog was mentioned as a benchmark blog for c-level execs.

In the November issue of Harvard Business Review (HBR), Jonathan has written a must-read article for any business wrestling with the idea of starting a company blog. Some key highlights:

Many Sun Microsystems top-level execs blog. In their blogs, they talk about business strategy, company values, products in the pipeline, successes, and failures. Sun realizes this may seem risky but Sun believes it is riskier not to blog. Sun wants to be a part of the conversation that will go on whether or not Sun participates.

By participating in the blogging conversation, Sun is able to communicate its corporate culture to not only customers but also to current and future Sun employees.

For companies interested in blogging but not knowing where to start, Jonathan recommends first reading Sun’s blogging strategy and guidelines document. He goes on to make more recommendations for blogging companies.

• use an honest, humorous, and open voice
• show respect for the audience
• don’t treat blogging like advertising
• don’t micromange … communicate the guidelines and let company bloggers loose
• revisit and modify your company’s blogging policy if need be
• listen to feedback
• respond to legitimate feedback
• “Authenticity is paramount.”

Via Brand Autopsy.

Web logging, or “blogging,” has become a part of our daily lexicon, with many Americans reading personal, political, and sports-related blogs. However, just as e-mail and instant messaging (IM) first gained purchase in the consumer world and rapidly demonstrated their business relevance, now blogging is making the crossover to the world of business.

Blogging is in a relatively early state of adoption in the business community, and business people are still slightly confused about its utility, especially as compared to e-mail and IM.

Most of those executives who blog are treating the medium as a marketing and public relations channel. There’s nothing wrong with that.

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Nivi has a good post on defining the different types of Web 2.0 customers. Basically, he breaks down Web 2.0 customers into the following fuzzy hierarchy:

1. Creators
2. Linkers
3. Commenters
4. Surfers

I think that this type of reflexion makes a lot of sense, particularly from a marketing perspective. Not from a traditional marketing perspective.

Do you get 10x more customers at each level of this hierarchy? My guess is that the number of customers grows geometrically as you move down each level of the hierarchy.

What are the customers in each level of this hierarchy worth? Would you make more money if you helped Creators or Surfers?

Via Minding the Planet.

Peter Burrows, Cliff Edwards and Arik Hesseldahl at BusinessWeek have just launched a new blog: Byte of the Apple.

Via Blogspotting.

Lift is an amazing conference that is going to take place in Geneva, Switzerland (where the web was born) on 2-3 February 2006.

Lift is about teaming talented observers, explorers, and builders with people whose work depends on understanding current challenges and creative solutions presented by emerging technologies. Attendees will face cutting edge business models, bold predictions, radical thinking - ideas to inject into their own part of the planet.

Lift has a simple goal: connect people who are passionate about new applications of technology and propel their conversations into the broader world to improve life and work.

Some of the most talented observers, explorers, and builders of the moment will gather in Geneva to share their passion for technology. You are invited to hear the likes of Cory Doctorow, Euan Semple, Robert Scoble, Jeffrey Huang, Xavier Comtesse, and a lot of other amazing speakers talk about the important topics of our changing world. The Internet, emerging technologies, global solidarity, design, and big ideas, be prepared for two days of intense ideas sharing and networking.

But enough talks, visit the lift06.org website, check the speakers roster, the program, and sign up!

EUROBLOG 2006, the first pan-European survey of this kind, will provide a comprehensive overview of who is using blogs and for what purpose. Run by EUPRERA, the European Public Relations Education and Research Association, a community of leading researchers from universities and institutions from more than 30 countries, it will both inform academic debate and present tangible, practical findings that will be of great value to Public Relations practitioners across Europe.

If you work in public relations or communications we would be very grateful if you would complete our online survey. Don’t worry - it shouldn’t take more than five minutes.

Participants can sign up to receive a free advance copy of the EuroBlog 2006 report.

All information supplied will be confidential and anonymous, and used for academic purposes only.

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