Via Micro Persuasion: McDonald’s has launched a new blog called Open for Discussion that will offer perspectives on the company’s “aspirations, activities, and challenges … to make a difference on corporate social responsibility issues that matter.”
Via Micro Persuasion: financial consulting giant Deloitte & Touche is podcasting. The first show talks about the aging consumer.
I have the pleasure to inform you that we finalised the deployment of Traction’s TeamPage Enterprise Weblog platform for SITA (Société Internationale de Télécommunications Aéronautiques).
The solution implemented at SITA headquarters in Geneva (Switzerland), as well as in other locations, provides the company with a professional space for knowledge sharing and on-line collaboration. Departments in Geneva, London, Rome, Montreal, Beirut, Paris, Singapore, Rio, Mumbai, are actively using it to centralise documents, share ideas, collaborate on projects, exchange feedback, etc.
A growing community of SITA users, spread across several continents and departments is now blogging internally, without disrupting the existing corporate processes. Traction TeamPage is running in conjunction with SITA’s existing e-mail platform, Intranet and other operational tools for managing digital content. It has been positioned as an additional layer to help users to better organise information and put it into context. Leveraging TeamPage, users actively participate and contribute to the continuous growth of corporate knowledge.
This is SITA’s first attempt to adopt internal blogging on a worldwide-basis to provide a new way of communicating, sharing, and discussing between employees and departments, regardless of hierarchical barriers. Other large organizations in the Travel and Transportation Industry, such as Boeing, have taken similar initiatives to foster collaboration and dialogue, either with their customers or with their employees.
The complete press / news release can be downloaded here [pdf]. Do not hesitate to contact us, should you need more information.
In his article On business, and Blogging on the Road, Christopher Elliott @ New York Times reports on several blogs that cover the business travel beat and claims that their influence is growing.
Excerpt from Companies Go Bloggy For Marketing by InformationWeek:
“Bloggers have become a sounding board for company spinners looking to build word-of-mouth campaigns or head off a public relations disaster. While hesitant to pay for endorsements in the blogosphere, businesses are willing to spend hundreds of thousands of dollars annually for online media monitoring.
[...]
Because these online exchanges come unprompted and unfiltered, they are a perfect sounding board for corporate spinmeisters looking to generate excitement about a new product, gauge reaction to a new advertising campaign, or just hear their customers describe, in their own words, how they behave. Sometimes it’s just as valuable to monitor talk about the competition.”
Via LexBlog Blog.
Rod Boothby @ Innovation Creators has started to publish a very long business case for using Enterprise Blogging, Enterprise Wikis and Web Office Technology. There is already some content available, either as web pages or in PDF format.
I didn’t have time yet to read everything but I can only advise you to take a look at his conclusion, it is worthwhile to read!
“It has been shown that constant innovation can be achieved through a better understanding of emergent organizations, the role of innovation creators and the hurdles those innovation creators usually face. The tactical steps simply require a dedicated effort to minimizing those hurdles and building a structured platform to support innovation. One way to achieve that is through enterprise blogs.
[...]
Lotus Notes, Groove and Microsoft’s SharePoint Services have all taken a swing at the problem. They have failed because they focused on automating workflow, rather than empowering knowledge workers. It is ironic that so many software companies build, but don’t give their final clients the tools to build.
[...]
Enterprise blogging is the beginning of a new phase in knowledge worker empowerment.”
Basically, Innovation Creators is dedicated to three topics: innovation for companies, knowledge workers and enterprise blogging. The site comprises a Web Office Directory too, giving examples of products and good advice that should “revolutionize the way you work”.
I’ll definitely keep this one in my bookmarks!
BusinessBlog Wire links to Roy Peter Clark’s fifty writing tips for the corporate blogger and gives a couple of additional links on how to write.
Via NevOn:
Yesterday, Prime Minister Tony Blair was interviewed by The Sun newspaper in that paper’s first podcast. He uses the medium to talk about cleaning up anti-social behaviour in towns and cities (a hot political issue in the UK at the moment).
On Tuesday, new Conservative Party leader David Cameron became the first UK political party leader to record a podcast by using The Daily Telegraph’s regular podcast service (which the paper launched in November) to speak about broader political issues and attacked Blair’s anti-social behaviour plans. Unlike Blair’s podcast, Cameron’s was not an interview - he simply talked during a seven-minute segment in conversational style.
BMW launched vodcast.bmw.com, delivering on-demand video content.
Some people call it vlogging or videocasting.
Via Vtech.
Via Micro Persuasion:
In an interview for the Bacon’s Navigator, Sally Falkow writes that Jonathan Schwartz, President and COO of Sun Microsystems said that blogging had played a major role in the revitalization of Sun’s reputation. Sun has gone from the 99th to the 6th most popular server company, largely because it has embraced authenticity and transparency in its communication initiatives, according to the piece.
“We’ve moved from the information age to the participation age, and trust is the currency of the participation age”, Schwartz said.
Companies need to speak with one voice and be authentic. Blogging allows you to speak out authentically on your own behalf, and in the long run people will recognize that. Do it consistently and they trust you.”
In May 2003, the consumer advocacy group Ban Trans Fat sued Kraft Foods, demanding that the comestibles giant stop selling its Oreo cookies in California.
In the suit, the organization claimed that the popular snacks were plugging Californians’ arteries with unhealthy fats called trans fats, also known as hydrogenated oils.
Soon after the suit was filed, public interest in trans fats peaked. And while most people felt the suit was frivolous, the public and government began to focus intensely on the deleterious health issues associated with these processed fats.
Just two months later, Kraft announced it would begin to cut trans fats out of its many snack products, and shortly afterwards, the U.S. Food and Drug Administration began requiring manufacturers to list trans fat content on nutrition-fact labels.
During the months before and after the suit was filed, a word-of-mouth marketing research firm called BuzzMetrics tracked more than 2.6 million comments about trans fats in various online forums, discussion groups and blogs from more than 120,000 people.
How much time does business blogging require? Easton Ellsworth brings a few ideas on how to set priorities and how to make sure you put out content consistently.
Via ClickZ Network: DaimlerChrysler is revving up an online complement to its presence at the Detroit, Chicago and New York auto shows this season. Agency Organic has created three hub sites for auto enthusiasts showcasing the Dodge, Chrysler and Jeep brands.
Each site will aggregate news and images from the auto manufacturers; from media sites and from automotive-focused blogs. Additional content includes blogs authored by the auto show portal team and photo sets posted and tagged on Flickr.com.
“We can put the news, press releases, photos and vehicle reveals into one process,” Organic’s Director of Engineering, John Manoogian, told ClickZ News.
“We’ve created a dynamic doorway into the auto show.”
Site visitors can subscribe to a menu of RSS feeds including feeds for the entire site or specific channels.
There is a report that Toshiba is developing software that will allow people to take a picture of the bar code label of many products, send it to a related service and quickly receive back information related to the product.
Toshiba will send back summary information on how many blogs gave the product positive and negative reviews. Related product information will also be displayed.
Blogs are now visited by some 10 percent of the online population, according to Forrester Research. No surprise, then, that enterprise versions of blogging software are gaining popularity, offering simpler, lower-cost alternatives for some of the same features provided by collaboration and portal environments.
Enterprise blogs are for group rather than individual journals, with content organized by time and topic. They provide a place to share meeting notes, status reports, discussions and information. The software usually has version tracking, permission controls, collaboration features, calendaring and search. Content linking and dynamic real simple syndication (RSS) features are also common. Administrators can keep important elements such as open issues or task lists at a top-level view.
Among the growing list of corporate users is Enel North America, a 200-employee energy company specializing in wind and hydroelectric power. Last March, Enel was looking for a quick way to “give our users the ability to access, post and control content,” says Ernest Kayinamura, director of information and communication technology. The company invested $15,000 in Teampage software from Traction Software, and it had the system up and running within “a couple of days,” he says.
A dozen contributors at Enel now post basic information including HR policies and company news, and they use RSS features to post energy industry news summaries. Work is underway on a collaborative application for some 30 employees who handle due diligence on acquisitions.
Traction and competitors such as Six Apart (developer of Movable Type) are seeing growing interest in enterprise blogging, and the larger vendors are jumping on the bandwagon. “IBM has an alphaWorks project … and Microsoft and Oracle are doing their darnedest to catch up,” says Traction VP Jordan Frank. “There’s no lack of interest from the big boys.”
Toyota has launched a podcast campaign to promote its Lexus IS, in partnership with Vibe Magazine and independent hiphop/jazz fusion recerd label Hidden Beach Recordings. The campaign is supported by blog advertising. The site features downloadable MP3s, and the ability to subscribe to them, of half-hour samples of Unwrapped CD series.
As you know, it is essential for companies to capture employees’ knowledge because of numerous reasons: mobility, shifts, absences, retirements, etc. However, concentrating only on electronic content generated and filed by these people (such as presentations, reports, processes, etc) focuses on individual pieces of information only. You simply cannot bring someone’s work down to a simple bundle of Excel files; on the contrary, it has to be considered as a much wider and more complex set of relationships and rules that involve several people.
“You can’t simply replace an employee who has been with a company for 10 or so years with another employe - even someone with a very similar skills profile - without expecting disruptions in the web of formal and informal relationships that get work done. It takes time for others to understand a new person’s true expertise and when to seek them out. It takes even longer to develop trust in that person’s intentions and capabilities. In short, departure of key people–not just those high in the hierarchy but those central to the inner workings of a network–can significantly impact the relationship structure and consequent functioning of an organization.”
Therefore, managers also need to do some Social Network Analysis (SNA) to better understand the invisible and yet key relationships that exist outside of the official organisation chart. It helps to identify the critical nodes and the vulnerabilities in organisations.
In essence, it is what Robert Cross explains in his post Knowledge Loss in Organizations. He even describes the three main roles that people usually take in an organisation and that managers should take in consideration:
Jack Vinson adds another dimension by suggesting to look at the question of knowledge flows and “socially constructed knowledge” rather than using SNA directly.
“When someone leaves they remove not only themselves but also their linkages throughout the entity, changing it. Similarly, when a new person arrives, they will spend time integrating themselves into the entity, also creating change.”
Via Micro Persuasion: the World Economic Forum announced this week that every participant of their upcoming Annual Meeting - ranging from business leaders to political leaders, heads of NGOs, religious leaders academics and journalists - will be asked to join the Forum blog.
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