Castrol Syntec has a podcast series on racing, music, and a little bit of motor oil. Most of it is entertainment. It demonstrates that marketers are beginning to realise that they too need to become content producers.
Via Micro Persuasion.
eastwikkers is starting a series called “33 Wikis”, featuring best practices in wiki-based collaboration. They will briefly describe what the wiki is for, why they like it, and everyone can learn from it. The first example is available.
Via eastwikkers via NevilleHobson.com.
Thinking Outside the In-Box is an interesting BusinessWeek interview with Chris Baggott, co-founder and chief marketing officer of ExactTarget, an e-mail marketing firm. Whilst the interview focuses on e-mail marketing techniques, some of the responses indicate clearly that a marketing-oriented weblog would be more productive or at least a perfect complement to targeted e-mails.
“It comes down to the Holy Grail of marketing: one-to-one communication.
… sending bulk e-mails to millions of people misses the opportunity to be relevant.
A lot of business owners are still very mass-marketing focused. It’s a difficult transition to understand that a successful marketing campaign is not about volume and return on investment, but long-term customer return. And the great thing for a small company is that it can compete equally at that game.
… on Fridays, so there’s less of what we call “in-box competition”.
E-mail open rates have been declining steadily since quarter one of 2004… with an average decline of 1.8% per quarter. Where it used to be that open rates for e-mail marketing campaigns were about 50%, that rate has dropped to about 35% currently.”
Via Micro Persuasion: Voice of a City, in association with Eurostar, is a blog featuring the views and opinions of people living in Paris.
Via Micro Persuasion: the President of Russia has feeds. He’s using it to stream news summaries, photos, speeches and more.
Via Micro Persuasion:
There are some companies where the people are the sole assets: consulting firms, ad agencies, PR firms, law firms and even VCs are selling their people. The best way to showcase them is to have them get out there and be part of a conversation. Blogs do a killer job.
Union Square Ventures shed its web site entirely in favor of going all blog. Hill Holliday, an ad agency, has done the same.
Neville Hobson reported on March 20 about Cogenz, a new not-yet launched service that concentrates on social bookmarking, i.e. how employees can best tag pieces of information and connect with their co-workers.
“Tagging and social bookmarking - two phrases much in vogue today as the means with which individuals can track information online and connect it with their own and other people’s interests.”
The quoted list of benefits mentioned by Neville as well as some recent features presented on the Cogenz blog itself led me to the following thought.
Now, imagine for a second the amazing richness and power a big organisation could obtain from Web 2.0 capabilities, if they were accessible on a wide scale. While all units, such as R&D, marketing, product development, sales, PR, HR, management, etc, you name it, could tag and share pieces of information about their specific activities, all the content would nonetheless be accessible company-wide. Just the idea of fully interconnected departments and open information flows gets me excited.
If you are in a position that has somehow an influence on the way your co-workers collaborate, I urge you to think about the amazing things you could accomplish! Let me know if you need more details about it.
Wells Fargo has become the first US bank to launch a corporate blog. The blog is called Guided by History and it is devoted exclusively to earthquake and disaster preparedness.
Via Micro Persuasion.
Analysis firm Cymphony and PR agency Porter Novelli have partnered to conduct research into how companies are executing their corporate blog strategy with a research survey called Corporate Blog - Best Practice.
A good introductory strategy by Suw Charman on how to make people adopt social software in a company. Below the structure of her strategy.
Fostering grassroots adoption
Management support
Understanding time-scales
Remember what your goals really are
Debbie Weil reports about Charlene Li’s speech last week at the NewComm Forum in Palo Alto. Charlene is a principal analyst for Forrester based in San Francisco.
She announced a personal ROI of 5000% on blogging! That’s based on her calculation that her $14.95 / month account with TypePad triggered $1 million in new business for Forrester last year.
As one commentator wrote, this figure somewhat understates on the investment side - perhaps Charlene’s time is worth something, likely more than the TypePad fees. A lot of other parameters should probably be taken into consideration to calculate the ROI for a weblog. Nevertheless, the idea behind it is that every revenue generating employee in a company can easily boost his / her impact on the market with a weblog.
PeopleSoft consultant Brent Martin has created a proof of concept showing RSS feeds being dynamically created from PeopleSoft data.
Via Moonwatcher.
Do you remember when Dresdner Kleinwort Wasserstein, the German investment bank, launched their internal blogs? It seems that there is one guy behind all this: JP Rangaswami, the CIO.
He’s into wikis, blogs and RSS to make things easier for his staff. Well he started blogging too. It’s called Confused of Calcutta and it’s not a typical corporate blog.
Customer service blogs are one of the most powerful types of business blogs, for keeping open the lines of communication, between company and customer. As a means of starting and maintaining conversations between all interested parties, blogs are almost without equal. Business, public relations, and customer service blogs are even more valuable when problems arise.
When something goes wrong, as it always does in the real world, there is a natural tendency for many business people to keep quiet. By clamping down on suspected media leaks, dissidents, or those employees simply acknowledging an everyday problem, the company is taking exactly the wrong approach.
Leading story on Financial Times website FT.com is that Walmart is hiring bloggers to shape public opinion in a PR campaign.
Also on the front cover of yesterday’s issue is news that the FT has launched a new daily podcast - The Lex Podcast.
A Learning Circuits Blog post titled “Blogs as knowledge management” speculates that “Blogs are knowledge objects that can make bottom-up (i.e. useful) knowledge management a reality.” To explain the point the post inserts the following quote from David Weinberger’s blog:
“I continue to believe that for many companies the best path to blogging is by using them internally as a knowledge management tool. The dream of KM has been that people will write down what they know. KM regimes, however, have assumed they would have to discipline people into doing that. Blogs entice people to write down what they know and to share it widely. A project blog or a department blog not only surfaces and shares knowledge, it also makes it searchable and archives it. And once a company gets used to internal blogs, it’s only natural (if anything about a corporation can be said to be natural) to open up some blogs to trusted customers and partners, bringing them into the intellectual bloodstream of the organization. And then why not open some blogs more widely? Thus companies inch their way into the blogosphere.”
Via Smart Mobs.
The individual opinions blasted out in cyberspace are becoming an increasingly powerful force. Together, they form the fabric of online word of mouth that can determine the hottest new product, make or break a TV show, or set off a customer revolt. Eager to tap into the buzz, a growing number of companies are turning to sophisticated new technologies that track what’s said on Internet social networks, blogs, message boards, product review sites, “listservs” — wherever people congregate publicly online.
Following online conversations is the latest attempt by companies to grapple with the growing clout of their customers.
They use software that collects hundreds of thousands of comments a day. The technology can scan for specific companies, products, brands, people — anything searchable. It can slice data into a range of categories to quantify the number of times a subject was discussed online, the individuals who mentioned it and the communities where it appeared.
They also assess the tone of opinions by analyzing writing style and even individual words used. For example, if a blogger is discussing a new sport-utility vehicle and says he loves it but isn’t pleased with how it handles, the software is clever enough to score the posting as an overall positive with a negative on the handling.
Via Micro Persuasion.
Jonathan Schwartz wrote a great piece on executive blogging for the Harvard Business Review (November 2005 issue) titled “if you want to lead, blog.”
“Remember when, not long ago, CEOs would ask their assistants to print out their e-mails for them, and they’d dictate responses to be typewritten and sent via snail mail? Where are those leaders now? (The last of my contacts of that breed just retired.) In ten years, most of us will communicate directly with customers, employees, and the broader business community through blogs. For executives, having a blog is not going to be a matter of choice, any more than using e-mail is today. If you’re not part of the conversation, others will speak on your behalf- and I’m not talking about your employees.”
Via Blog Business Summit.
Via Micro Persuasion, a list of ten tips for corporate blogging.
Good news: Traction Software, the world leader for corporate weblog solutions, was selected by KMWorld for the second year in a row as one of the 100 companies that matter in knowledge management. The list was officially released on March 1st.
KMWorld’s panel posted a note on the meaning of such a list in 2006.
“When we first presented our list of 100 companies in 2000, many of the firms were noted for their dazzling technology—you remember what things were like six years ago. Some of the software was simply breathtaking in its design. But, in fact, some of the technology was all shine and no substance. A number of the companies on our first list are no longer doing business.
I don’t expect that to be the case with the companies mentioned below, because this year, more than ever, we heard from customers, which, after all, is clearly the most important constituency for consideration.”
See the complete list.
Your company still doesn’t have its corporate weblog? Your colleagues don’t know how to capture or to organise key information? Just let us know.
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