Debbie Weil is a corporate blogging and social media expert, online marketing consultant, speaker and author of The Corporate Blogging Book (Portfolio). She consults with large companies, CEOs and senior executives on how to create blogs that connect with customers and attract media attention.

Discussion

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Comments

1. Don Baker on Friday, June 13th, 2003 at 1 pm

   Check out Rebecca Lieb’s column about the conference on ClickZ today (June 13): She make some good points that complement Debbie’s:
   http://www.clickz.com/feedback/buzz/article.php/2221421
2. Bill French on Thursday, July 10th, 2003 at 12 am

   Debbie:

   There’s no denying that blogging is a disruptive force in many areas such as journalism, enterprise knowledge management, web marketing, content management, and many more. But, like any new paradigm, blogging is in for a period of growing pains.

   Blogging technology evolved to meet the needs of the grass roots bloggers — predominantly, individuals wishing to publish to the World with minimal friction. The unintended consequence of current blogging technology was demonstrating the power of blog-like technology for enterprises—organizations that don’t necessarily wish to publish (everything) to the World.

   I just read John Foley’s excellent article on the state of blogging in InformationWeek. I found it interesting that while explaining the benefits of blogging for enterprises, this article also—inadvertently, I suspect — offers a great example, of why many enterprises will resist the use of today’s popular blogging tools. Specifically, John writes, “People may switch employers, but they’ll take with them electronic journals of their best ideas.” More than a few enterprises would frown on this, to put it kindly, yet this is what today’s popular tools enable. (In fact, some actually mandate this by making each user’s own machine the content server).

   The needs of enterprises are very different from the needs of individuals. Enterprise blogging technology must (just for a start):

   -Provide granular access permissions—not all posts are for all eyes
   -Easily aggregate postings of multiple authors
   -Provide cross-author searching
   -Discover semantic relationships between postings automatically
   -Support behind-the-firewall deployment
   -Support SSL connections for secure transmission of company confidential material
   -Provide content agility—the ability to easily repurpose content for different use cases

   As you indicated in your MarketingProfs article…

   “I predict that a new set of best practices for business blogs will evolve. A successful corporate blog may ape the “raw” and “unedited” style of a personal blog. But it will most likely be reviewed by a savvy in-house editor who knows what crosses the line into trade secrets and what doesn’t. Just keep it out of the hands of your in-house corporate counsel if you want to preserve any semblance of “voice.”

   As is the case in John Foley’s comments, I think this type of commentary about blogging creates an uneasy feeling about the idea of business blogging. Like John Foley’s article, if your intent is to advise businesses and enterprises on the merits of blogging, please do a little more research and consider the perspective of the CTO, CIO, corporate responsibility to their shareholders and of course, IT managers.

   MySmartChannels (and its underlying Web service platform) was built specifically to meet the emerging needs of enterprises while maintaining the individual benefits associated with personal blogging. A public version of MySmartChannels is available online for anyone to use for free at http://myst-technology.com.

   Bill French
   970-262-9181

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