Simon Barratt

Corporate Blogging: The ecology of participation

People think blogs are diaries, but they are more like notebooks.  Can we use a notebook in business?  Of course we can, the content is the value.  What do we want to do with it?

Different from company to company, different from person to person within the company.  

Two distinct types of use:  Internal versus External.

External
What are our customers needs?  Customers form relationships with people, not brands or products.  Customers like a glimpse behind closed doors.  Forbidden fruit?

Developers, are a different breed.  Want to keep up with their field and be active in the community.  Share expertise, want to be seen as an expert and also benefit from others.

Marketing may  like to communicate what is new, word of mouth (genuine) where customers pass on stories about you.  Not enough to just broadcast.  Need to communicate what you are up to.  Clear overlap between customers needs and Marketing;s needs.

Semi Official blogs, cause corporate angst, but can be the most useful - most honest.  Official blogs are safer, but who authors it.  Not the CEO, not enough time or interest typically.

Internal
Individual, Team, Department.  Technology is not the issue - culture is.  What is the benefit of the blog?  Individual, company?  Value can be great, in a dynamic environment.  Helps the development of relationships.  Culture becomes smoother, supportive and efficient.

General Discussion
What kind of business value.  Forrester poll, indicated that blogging has the lowest perceived business value - 17%.  Conversely, 17% believing there is business value, for a technology that is so new, could be seen as very good - take your pick!

Risk and liability.  Major issue, that could inhibit corporate adoption of blogging.  Need to make it clear what is and what is not 'blogable'  Wiki's are more acceptable in some case, due to the page change logging inherent in the tool.

Proposed Blogging policy: "Don't do anything stupid!"

Are blogs owned by the person with the most free time?

cc: and Reply Alls are the bug that blogs fix!  email assumes that the content is interruption worthy, not all things are.  Don't cc: 15 people, cc: the project blog

http://techmeme.com, percolates up what is hot, need this inside the enterprise.  Talk about déjà vu, I wrote about this back in September 2005.

Best Practices for moving people from email to blogs: Gold Stars (people like pats on the back), Recommended posts, filtered up to portal page.  Look for behaviours, emails sent to many recipients should be on the blog. Enable email authoring on blog sites, then include the blog email address in the All Employee route lists.  Before you know it you will have a fairly full corporate communications blog site!


This was a very useful and interactive discussion!