Business Blogs for Business Applications - All Kinds of Business Applications for Blogs (from: PubSub: Scoble)
http://contentcentricblog.typepad.com/businessblogs/2005/02/all_kinds_of_bu.html
Weblog: Business Blogs for Business ApplicationsSource: All Kinds of Business Applications for Blogs
Link: http://contentcentricblog.typepad.com/businessblogs/2005/02/all_kinds_of_bu.html
They are just a few of the top executives across the country operating weblogs: personal online journals that discuss subjects ranging from new products to economic trends. And they are not alone. Even small companies such as Seattle-based Clip-n-Seal, maker of an innovative bag-sealing device, have won international media attention for the way they use a weblog to tell their stories. But as more companies experiment with blogging, issues quickly arise about what information is meant for mass consumption and what should stay behind closed doors. Bloggers at Microsoft, Google and Wells Fargo have lost their jobs in recent years for disclosing too much. That potential problem and others led to a new product from Seattle startup WhatCounts, which earlier this week unveiled what it called the “first technology appliance designed to address the growing need for corporate blogging.” The idea sprung from the minds of David Geller and Brian Ratzliff, two Internet publishing veterans who held top posts at Seattle-based Starwave in the mid-1990s. For the past five years, they have been running WhatCounts, a profitable 12-person company that manages permission-based e-mail programs for newspapers such as the Chicago Sun-Times and retailers such as Sierra Trading Post. But the two Internet executives are betting big on their new BlogUnit product, a pizza box- shaped device that plugs into a data center and helps companies control the editing, publishing, broadcasting and content of corporate blogs. For example, a chief executive who was posting to a blog could set up controls to have material automatically directed to a public relations manager or general counsel before it went live. A company could also use the BlogUnit to operate dozens of internal blogs that managers could use to communicate with employees or customers — a possible enhancement to intranets or customer relationship management systems, Ratzliff said. It also could be used to quickly pull information from external sources that might be of interest to different departments within the organization. “BlogUnit is really blogging for grown-ups as it relates to corporations,” Ratzliff said. “Blogging to date has been mostly about individual publishers and it has received notoriety because individuals have been able to break stories ahead of media outlets. This is entirely different. This a publishing platform around blogging, but for corporate communications both internally and externally.”
“Blogging is nothing but really easy-to-use Web publishing,” he said. At $10,000, BlogUnit is not cheap. And with only a handful of test customers, it is unclear whether information technology departments will shell out money for it. But BlogUnit has already won some praise from bloggers — including Microsoft’s technical evangelist, Robert Scoble, who called it an interesting product that could compete against corporate knowledge management systems. WhatCounts also was the only Seattle area startup chosen to present at this week’s Demo@15 conference, an exclusive three-day event in Scottsdale, Ariz., that features some of the most promising ideas in technology. Corporate blogging, both for internal and external communications, is on the rise. San Francisco-based Six Apart, which makes blogging software tools for consumers and businesses, already counts General Motors, Yahoo! and About.com as customers. Anil Dash, vice president of the professional network at Six Apart, estimates that his company’s business blogs have grown by as much as 500 percent in the past 18 months. “It goes all the way from the Fortune 500 companies that are doing their first real approachable conversations this way, all the way to small companies that are legitimizing themselves by being able to talk about what they are doing,” Dash said. A blog is not a substitute for advertising or e-mail communications, but Dash said it does create a more direct conversation with the customer. “You can say: ‘Here are our strengths and weaknesses,’ and that give-and-take is what will enhance your credibility,” Dash said. “And then you have the ability to get feedback and participate in that conversation, which is impossible to do in a press release.” Rebecca Blood, author of the “Weblog Handbook,” said corporations must strike a balance if they want blogs to work. Setting clear standards for employees who operate blogs is important as is protecting proprietary information and confidentiality of clients. Still, Blood said any corporate blog must maintain a “human voice” that avoids the marketing lingo found in press releases. “Companies can install all of the controls they want on the company blogs, but they are not going to get the value out of the blogs unless they let people really talk about real things,” Blood said. As far as internal communications, Blood said, companies are currently trying to figure out the best way to deploy blogs. “It is infinitely useful for all kinds of things, for planning projects, keeping in touch, pointing different audiences to information they need,” she said. “I think, of course, we are going to see corporations adopting web logs as part of their strategy for communicating internally.” In a report last year, Forrester Research analyst Charlene Li agreed. “Forrester envisions a day when new employees on their first day will be handed a sheet of paper with their phone number, email address — and a URL for their blog,” Li wrote. “The company would give all of its employees a personal internal blog where they could provide project updates, trip reports and market intelligence — anything that they think others should know about the work they are doing.” Top executives across the country are operating weblogs. Here are a few:
Geller, the former director of engineering at Starwave, said he sees a day when corporate Web sites become blogs.
ON THE WEB