Southwest Airlines who surprised the airline industry in May this year by launching Nuts about Southwest, one of the first (the first?) public airline weblogs is taking another innovative step.

A contest will be held on YouTube, with members of a specially created Southwest group on the site allowed to submit 20-second videos of their most embarrassing moments, which the airline will tie into its “Wanna Get Away?” campaign.

The grand-prize winner will be selected by a panel of judges and will also win a trip for four with two-night hotel accommodations to any Southwest vacations destination. Through February 20, the public can vote for first, second and third-place winners, who will be awarded free getaways and travel.

Via MarketingVOX.

Traction Software goes beyond blogs and wikis to deliver technology and best practices supportive of work process, and ensure customer success. KMWorld describes the award criteria: “This award is given to the organization that is delivering its promise to customers by providing innovative technology solutions for implementing and integrating knowledge management practices into business processes. The award-winning organization demonstrates how it goes beyond simply delivering technology to working with clients to ensure that both the technology and knowledge processes are embedded into the work processes. In other words, it helps organizations realize positive business results.”

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Via Traction Software, Inc..

Millions of videos are downloaded every day from YouTube. For Cisco CEO John Chambers it is only the tip of the iceberg as enterprises start to adopt technologies such as collaboration tools and user generated content can do much more.

“That’s our children - wait ’til we get hold of it. We will change business models on this. In the future it will be about producing it yourself.”

He predicts that network traffic will reach new highs; by 2015, Chambers believes that 15 exabytes a month will be travelling around the world.

Via silicon.com via Micro Persuasion.

For the third year in a row, Traction Software is named to the blogging category in the EContent Magazine list of companies that matter most in the digital content industry. In the 2006 EContent Announcement, Michelle Manafy says “We carefully reconsidered last year’s list members and kept only those companies who we agreed continue to lead the industry. For some this means market share, but for most it means thought- and technology-leadership, innovation, and even experimentation.”

Via Traction Software, Inc.

“We make sense of our world and our place in it through stories. It’s the same in business. Your brand story is the core idea or truth behind who you are as a company. A good story stirs the soul, makes the complex simple, inspires your customers and encourages them to connect with you…”

For sure there is marketing speak in the statement, but is the core of it not true?

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“So the vast majority think blogging is an important communication medium, but they are not monitoring the online conversation and they’re not adapting their corporate communication strategy to include digital and social media. But if things go wrong, PR must handle the flap.

[...]

It’s way past time that companies make social media and online PR training a priority.”

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“Knowledge workers are most decidedly not simply “office workers” (or limited to “executives”) rather, they are employees who use information to do their jobs, differentiate their company’s brand, and contribute to the bottom line.

What’s cool is that as collaborative technologies evolve, they are enabling more employees to be recast as knowledge workers.”

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“It has been less than a year since Andrew McAfee’s use of the phrase “Enterprise 2.0″ in an MIT Sloan Management Review article accelerated an already growing interest in the use of Web 2.0 technologies within corporations. Now we need to focus that energy and take it beyond simply the application of consumer technologies on intranets. Enterprise 2.0 is much more because corporations have distinct challenges from public Internet users.

McAfee coined the acronym SLATES (Search, Links, Authoring, Tags, Extensions, and Signals) to describe the technology components of Enterprise 2.0. This is a good start but the opportunities go well beyond these.”

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Financial Times Tech Blog, a new tech blog from the FT.

Via Micro Persuasion.

Excellent piece by Stowe Boyd on the fear of blogging in a corporate environment.

… if companies want to continue to “use techniques that they know, but don’t work, instead of techniques they don’t understand, that do,” then they will ignore the opportunities latent in dark blogs.

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