Tom Glocer, CEO for the newly formed Thomson Reuters (Thomson acquired Reuters last week) has launched his own blog.

We are all subject to a lot of official communications these days from companies, governments, celebrities and others. All too often these are ghost written passages concocted by overeager PR machines and do little to tell you anything new about the author or his or her true interests.

All the best writing at Reuters gets done by our journalists, so I certainly don’t pretend that I can improve upon the impressive work they produce everyday, often at great personal risk. Instead I’m going to write about what interests me, which is often my work at Reuters, as well as wider issues like technology and media - two areas that I am fascinated by.

I imagine much of my audience will be internal at Reuters, although this blog is open to anyone. I am currently experimenting with various bits of it so it may change from time to time. But I’ll try to update it regularly, although sometimes the doing makes the talking about it difficult. My real aim is to engage in an electronic dialog with whomever wants to comment on a post or otherwise share their views.

Via LexBlog Blog.

What it means to be genuine in today’s marketing world…

“Genuine is an e-mail from a person rather than a company. If the lead singer of some band that I like sends out an e-mail to those of us who have registered our interest, that’s authentic in a way that a record label sending out an e-mail wouldn’t be. If the lead singer responds to his e-mail, that’s even better. A MySpace page is more authentic than a billboard. A blog is more authentic than a press release. It’s all about having a human voice and re-personalizing the connections.”

“The key is in catalyzing word of mouth. If consumers don’t trust institutions and do trust individuals, if they don’t want to be marketed at and do want to be influenced by their peers, how can marketers influence those influencers, those alpha peers? Some companies have done lots of experiments in this. There are fake blogs and fake viral videos and fake buzz marketing. It sometimes works, but if you’re busted, it turns into a PR nightmare.” — quotes from Chris Anderson

Via Brand Autopsy.

McKinsey & Company is launching a virtual business plan competition in Second Life: the Virtual Venture Competition.

Be part of the first truly global business-building contest ever held in the virtual world! The Virtual Venture Competition is your chance to turn your innovative ideas into successful business operations in Second Life.

For the first time your business plan will not be assessed by a jury, but proven by real customers, make real turnover, and present your results to a real audience!

Team up with other young talents from around the world. Use your creativity to attract seed capital for your virtual ventures and realize your potential as a virtual entrepreneur. Bring your ideas to life!

Three days after the first B-spirit Workshop, I think it is worthwhile posting some comments about the event.

It was out first attempt to capture attention within the local business community about what we think is becoming crucial in today’s business: online collaboration.

Even though we had about 10 attendees only, they showed a lot of interest and participated actively in the discussion. We collected a lot of feedback which will help us to prepare the next b-spirit workshops, both in terms of content and methodology.

To put in practice what we preach, we decided to post below, for everyone who’s interested, a brief summary of the major points as well as some additional information we would like to share as a result of the feedback.

The key point to remember is: effective collaboration depends on getting 3 things right.

• The business case. You must be clear on why you want to implement a collaboration platform and be able to show how your organisation/department will benefit from the exercise. Inevitably you’ll have to show that you can save money somehow or generate more revenue for the organisation. This means being cristal clear about the needs, the objectives and how you’re going to be able to measure the results. Here is an example of a case study by Suw Charman at Corante describing the roll-out of a collaboration platform in a multi-national pharmaceutical company.
• The technical roll-out must be flawless or nearly so. The reason is that you will be asking people to change their behaviour. This is never easy so it helps not to create additional resistance as a result of technical glitches. For those of you who would like to see what a popular platform looks like, there are some links at the bottom.
• The social/cultural aspects of successfully deploying a collaboration platform are probably the most challenging to deal with as it involves building solid teams and drawing on synergies from diverse elements in a group or organisation. It pre-supposes a unity of purpose that is not necessarily present and without which having the platform is not likely to improve collaboration and/or performance significantly.

For those interested in the Return on Investment (ROI), here is a paper released earlier this year by Forrester on the ROI of blogging for business.

Those interested in ideas on how to make money from blogging, check out these tips and tricks by Darren Rowse.

Finally, we will soon post the video clip of the workshop.

If you have additional questions or would like more information, please don’t hesitate to comment below or to contact us.

Popular Web 2.0 Online Services (these are just a few examples)

Getting Things Done (GTD): basecamp (see also the video feedback from their customers),
stikkit, remember the milk

Social Bookmarking: ma.gnolia, clipmarks, del.icio.us

Blogging: Blogger, WordPress.com, TypePad

Wiki: Socialtext, list of wiki solutions available at WikiMatrix

Aggregators: NewsGator, Google Reader, Netvibes

Social Networks: Xing, LinkedIn

Web Office Suites: Zoho, Google Docs & Spreadsheets

For Cisco CEO and President John Chambers, social networking isn’t just for kids. It’s for business and it’s the collaborative model that will propel productivity.

“The second phase of the Internet is how collaboration and Web 2.0 tools will forever change business.”

Chambers isn’t just jumping on the mass media social networking bandwagon, either. He argued that Time Magazine got it wrong when they declared “You” to be the person of the year.

“They got it wrong and are looking to the past. It’s not about you. It’s about ‘us,’ and collaboration is the way it’s going to be expressed.”

[...]

The first wave of the Internet and the network was all about transaction and not interactions. The new Internet 2.0 is all about collaboration of many to many that is enabled by the network.

It’s not just talk for Cisco, either.

“A lot of ideas you see with social networks we are doing now. We’re changing our business structure.”

Cisco is also using Web 2.0 approaches to get its products to market faster. The I-Zone Cisco wiki has thousands of ideas posted which then get whittled down to 250 feasible ideas, down 12 that get a business plan and ultimately three ideas that translate to new product and business units.

Read more on internetnews.com and on ZDNet…

[Update] See the video

Interesting. Delta Air Lines choose the community-style with a new site: Delta Air Lines: Travel Tips, Ideas and Change - Experience Change - Change the Experience. Obviously, the site is not ready yet but the fact that the airline asks users to submit ideas for making the airline better is very promising.

Delta.com/change represents a whole new way for Delta to connect with the global community and, ultimately, redefine the travel experience. Out of the gate, this site will serve as an informative tool, tracking all the exciting changes going on with us and showcasing travel tips and ideas from people like you.

Very soon, though, it will evolve into something truly collaborative - truly revolutionary.

We envision a forum for open, honest dialogue between airline and air traveler. A place where your ideas may very well influence how we operate in the future. And a stockpile of user-generated tips that will make travel more enjoyable and sane for us all.

You can get started by submitting an idea or tip. Or, join our mailing list, and we’ll e-mail you when we launch the full forum. Let’s set this revolution in motion. Here, now.

Also interesting to note that Delta is on Twitter too: http://twitter.com/deltaairlines.

Via Community Guy.

As reported by Computerworld, “IBM has opened a virtual business centre at Second Life that will be staffed by IBM sales representatives from around the world.”

Clients who want to buy hardware, software or services, or get help solving a business problem, can meet with a sales rep in the new IBM Business Centre.

Read more on Second Life Research…

Wirecard Bank AG now is the first German financial service provider to open a branch of its own in the 3D online world Second Life. In the virtual world, specially trained Wirecard Bank service personnel are available to assist customers. Customer advisers are represented by avatars in the branches, answering questions on the products and services of the Wirecard Bank. In addition, access to Wirecard’s payment services is available via Second Life. Interactive entertainment campaigns serve to round off the offer of Wirecard Bank AG on an island of its own in Second Life.

Read more on Second Life Research…

Jeremiah Owyang did an interesting interview with Intel Internet Strategist Bryan Rhoads.

Many corporations want to have a level of control, and even employees who blog are scared to voice their opinion, do you have an Blog Policy? What’s the publishing process like for the Intel Blogs, and who’s involved? Who is allowed to blog and how are they selected?

We do have a policy for employees that is essentially an extension of our long standing communications policy. Its very much inline with former electronic communications policies, but updated to accommodate the medium and new technologies.

Read more…

Via Blog Business Summit.

Cisco has a few hundred employees in Second Life. They have several sims that they use for user-group meetings and meetings among their own international staff. They do customer education and training in Second Life, get feedback from customers on products, and do presentations using PowerPoint, video, and streaming audio. They hold events that combine people in the real world with avatars in Second Life — a type of event that Second Lifers call “mixed reality.”

“The real value of Second Life for Cisco is the opportunity for spontaneous customer interaction. It’s like a birds-of-a-feather session that goes on ’round the clock. I bump into customers and partners multiple times a day in Second Life. In 11 years at Cisco, walking through the parking lot in San Jose, I never get people come up to me and say, ‘I’m a Cisco customer, have a second?’” Christian Renaud, chief architect of networked virtual environments for Cisco

Via InformationWeek Blog.

Computerworld just published the list of their top 8 corporate sites in Second Life:

1. IBM
2. Pontiac
3. Sun Microsystems
4. Dell
5. Reuters
6. Cisco Systems
7. H&R Block
8. Best Buy Geek Squad

Via Second Life Research.

As reported by Tom Sanders of IT Week, “Sun Microsystems has developed a prototype 3-D environment that essentially mimics Second Life, but turns it into an enterprise collaboration tool. Sun’s MPK20 virtual world allows for collaboration between employees in different locations. Each employee is represented by an avatar that walks around in a virtual environment, communicating using internet telephony.

Plans for future updates include the ability to share applications in the virtual environment, and to link whiteboards in physical meeting rooms with the virtual space to show up in both online and offline worlds.

Read more…

The blogosphere appears to be reaching its point of maximum size. Why?

On Valleywag: “personal publishing is still growing, but the fastest growth is occurring on social media properties such as Myspace and Digg; on “directed blogging” sites such as Yelp, the collaborative restaurant review site; and on new publishing platforms such as Twitter, which deliver posts not just to a web page, but to a reader’s instant messaging client. Amateur publishers may not be drawing back from the traditional blog but, rather, moving beyond it.

How do you feel about business and collaboration platforms? It seems to be one of the topics of discussion in today’s business circles. The Internet and direct ways of doing business on the Net are changing the world.

Fears abound when confronted with the question of blogging for business purposes, especially in very traditional hierarchical organisations. What will happen if people are encouraged to share knowledge and information freely across departmental barriers, or have open conversations with customers about products and improvements?

B-spirit.com will host a workshop on collaboration in the business environment on Tuesday, 22 May 2007. Click here to read the workshop’s details and to register.