Another CEO enters the blogosphere and starts to blog: Bill Marriott, CEO and Chairman of Marriott International, had his initial blog post on January 16, 2007.

Via Business Blog Consulting.

Imagine that current corporate collaboration and communication technologies were exclusively E2.0 platforms — blogs, wikis, etc. — and all of a sudden a crop of new channel technologies — email, instant messaging, text messaging — became available. In other words, imagine the inverse of the present situation. What would happen? How, in the flip-test universe, would the new channel technologies be received?

Read more…

Seven exemplar stories/case studies were commissioned to demonstrate how social software can be used for project management, knowledge sharing and capability development. These stories were drawn from within the Australian Flexible Learning Framework, Corporate Australia and Overseas.

Read more…

Middle managers spend more than a quarter of their time searching for information necessary to their jobs, and when they do find it, it is often wrong, according to results of an Accenture survey released on January 4,2007.

Among the key findings: managers spend up to two hours a day searching for information, and more than 50 percent of the information they obtain has no value to them. In addition, only half of all managers believe their companies do a good job in governing information distribution or have established adequate processes to determine what data each part of an organization needs.

Read more…

PR Agency Edelman just published its Corporate Guide to the Global Blogosphere - The new model of peer-to-peer communications (accessible here).

Basically, it presents the Edelman Omnibus Blog Study about the different populations of blog readers and the different ways of approaching weblogs around the globe. Certainly worth reading!

Marketing Sherpa has just released their “Marketing Wisdom” report for 2007.

Marketers from 110 organizations contributed test results and lessons-learned stories, including BMW, Motorola, GMAC and Savvy Tot:

• Email campaign segmentation tests and results
• Blogging, podcasting and mobile marketing tips
• Search marketing tactics and offline advertising
• Web site design and social networking done right

Plus, B-to-B marketing campaign lessons and getting around office politics.

Via WOW Feed :: Tracking New Media and Technology.

Nowadays, there a tons of events around web technology, technique, strategy, usage, etc. I am pleased to see that there are also a few events focusing on intranets, such as the Intranet Leadership Forum. It is in Sydney (Australia) though.

The Intranet Leadership Forum is a professional community for intranet managers and teams in Australia and New Zealand.

By joining the Forum you will have access to real-life solutions for your organisation’s intranet issues from peers who have already found the answers, saving your organisation time and money.

You will receive many benefits to improve the effectiveness of your organisation’s intranet and the skills of your team. These include workshops, best-practice toolkits and guides, a members-only website and networking opportunities.

Via Column Two.

Mike Heck’s January 5, 2007 review ranked Traction TeamPage #1 in an InfoWorld Test Center roundup including TeamPage, Confluence, SocialText and Near-Time. The ranking earned TeamPage the “Best Enterprise Wiki” and the “InfoWorld 2007 Technology of the Year” award.

The review concludes: “Traction TeamPage clearly placed above the others with its superior ease of use and query ability that presented each user with just the knowledge they need.” Traction TeamPage received an overall rating of Excellent with a 9.0 score.

Read the full InfoWorld Review and the InfoWorld Traction TeamPage Product Page.

Via Traction Software, Inc.

Short assessment onDirect2Dell, Dell’s public blog, by Lionel Menchaca, Digital Media Manager, about Dell’s online presence and efforts to get closer to its market.

“… we’ve created a team to find customers needing assistance in the blogosphere, entered Second Life, recently re-vamped the Dell Community Forum and have plans to offer more options for customers to provide feedback at CES and beyond.

We are making efforts to be more forthcoming. We entered the blogosphere in part to take on negative issues. Will we make more mistakes along the way? Sure, but we are listening and learning as we go. In fact, the blog is all about those conversations, and it’s why I’m recognizing this debate that goes on about and around us.

While there isn’t a silver bullet, all these vehicles have the potential to strengthen our direct relationship with customers. We think this dialog is important and we’ll continue down that path.”

Via NevilleHobson.com.

Volvo takes a completely different approach with its market and launches a new ad campaign in the U.S. (later this year in Europe) asking consumers what they think of the new C30 design. At http://www.volvocars.com/freewill, everyone can give his opinion via 16 short films that will also air on TV.

According to Volvo, the effort’s aim isn’t really to get opinions but to get non-Volvo owners ages 25 to 35 to think about and consider the C30.

“Volvo researched this idea carefully. Consumers felt the marketer was conveying honesty and confidence in the ads. In research, we learned that people feel as if we are really talking directly to them, so they consume it and engage with it differently than other typical advertisements. The effort is about taking a bold and honest approach, respecting people and then having some fun.”

Via Advertising Age.

Traction TeamPage has just been named InfoWorld 2007 Technology of the Year Award Winner for “Best enterprise wiki”.

“Yet the real action this year happened in socializing business interactions. By homogenizing wikis and blogs, applications such as Atlassian Confluence, Near-Time, Socialtext, and Traction TeamPage let workers organize and share knowledge and form interactive discussions.” InfoWorld

Traction Software – named one of the 100 Companies that Matter, by KMWorld – also is a winner of the RedHerring 100 and eContent 100 awards. Its core solution, Traction TeamPage, is used by Global 1000 and government customers for business-critical applications including product development, management-issue tracking, marketing, competitive intelligence and sales-force communication. It can plug into a company’s existing infrastructure or can operate as a stand-alone on an intranet or extranet.

“Everyone at Traction Software is honored to learn that TeamPage has been named an InfoWorld 2007 Technology of the Year Award Winner. In addition to InfoWorld, we’d like to thank customers and friends of Traction for helping us build a product that goes beyond blogs and wikis to enable true and effective collaboration in any enterprise.” Greg Lloyd, President and Co-Founder

On January 2nd, InfoWorld.com, the leading integrated media brand for IT solutions management, announced the recipients of its 2007 Technology of the Year honors, recognizing 41 products across 40 categories. Results appear on InfoWorld.com, as well as the Jan. 1 print edition.

“The annual Technology of the Year Awards highlight the best products reviewed by the InfoWorld Test Center in the past year that are defining, and often redefining, the role of IT, regardless of category, innovation thrives across enterprise IT.” Steve Fox, InfoWorld editor in chief.

Read InfoWorld’s Traction TeamPage Award citation.

Read the press release here or there.

Since December 18, 2006, Traction Software proposes Traction TeamPage™ FAST Search Module, a new integrated search module based on FAST’s search technology to enable secure search, entity extraction and drill down navigation.

FAST’s advanced linguistic analysis adds relevance ranking and automatic entity extraction to support interactive permission-filtered drill-down by person, company, location and other attributes.

Over 370 document formats are supported for file attached to posts or files stored in Traction TeamPage’s web folders.

“In the era of Enterprise 2.0, smart companies are leveraging tools like Traction TeamPage to empower individuals to create their own content. Now, by leveraging Traction TeamPage together with FAST InStream businesses can offer their employees a new and more powerful package of tools to help them produce, share and then intelligently search this collective intelligence, creating a smarter, faster-moving and more profitable workforce.” John M. Lervik, CEO, FAST

By embedding FAST InStream, TeamPage now delivers state of the art search and content drill-down comparable to the most capable content and document management systems on the market today and…

• Extends the TeamPage standard search capability by adding permission-filtered search across over 370 formats of documents attached to Traction TeamPage blog posts or stored in TeamPage web folders.
• Adds linguistic analysis to automatically extract and rank relevant key words and entities. Entities include company names, person names, locations, and e-mail addresses.
• Provides interactive drill-down navigation, including AND and OR selection, enabling users to quickly understand their search set and narrow tens or hundreds of thousands of results down to just a few that are highly relevant using keywords, entities, and metadata attributes.
• Adds a “Find Similar” choice to posts, comments and search results to make it simple to find other relevant content.
• Adds automatically calculated Rank order to Newest First and Oldest First sort options. Rank order is determined by automatic linguistic and link analysis.
• Adds search by content types including posts, pages, comments, emails and files.

“The FAST InStream option adds tremendous value to TeamPage’s hypertext model, particularly for companies using TeamPage blog and wiki capabilities for commercial, pharma, or government intelligence and project communication. Drill-down navigation by automatically extracted company name, product name, person or location is incredibly easy and useful. We chose FAST because it’s highly scalable, supports Traction’s permissioned search model, and is simple to support and use, which fits our model for all TeamPage product development.” Greg Lloyd, President and Co-Founder, Traction Software

Read the press release here or there.

Read also the recent report of Intranet Journal: Traction Juices Up Collaboration.