11 posts tagged “blogging”

I saw this Geek and Poke cartoon today and then received the results of a Pollstream poll into social media that indicated:

• Over 77% of communicators declared that they will introduce or enhance Online Social Media tools on their intranet and within their email campaigns in 2008.
• Over 46% of communicators will be leveraging blogs, videos and polls to enhance customer and prospect online engagement in 2008.

Managers who think blogging - or other forms of social media - has had the requisite 15 minutes of fame are rare. Most yet do not know the potential to change the conversation in their company. More likely: fear will kill social media in the company.

A week may be a long time in politics, but trying to keep up with the pace of change in social media is just as mad. Even as mid-size companies get to grips with Web2.0, and corporate blogging reaches a tipping point, up pops an interesting look at what the blog of the future could be like!

The pace of change can be seductive and/or discouraging, yet really understanding what can help you, how and how to do it is critical. A few luminaries have shone their torches recently on information about systems that should help when considering these key questions:

• Chris Brogan on Facebook
• Jeremiah Oywang on Twitter
• Bill Ives on Wikis

You might be waiting for all of separate systems to be fully integrated, easy to update and simple to find. Maybe you are waiting for Microsoft's unified communications product Live Communication? In the meantime, social media is here and now, and no longer something that only your secretary should know about.

What do Wal Mart and A&P Supermarkets have in common? Both are seeing the impact of social media up close and personal.

Wal Mart authored their own fate by starting a Facebook page. Not everyone likes Wal Mart - and now they had an outlet for their views. What did Wal Mart do? Well, as Jerimiah Owyang reports here and here - not too much. They could have taken down the page, but haven't - so at least they know that you can't stop the interweb.

Which is more than A&P Supermarkets. They are asking for a parody video filmed by two teenagers in one of their stores to be taken down, and have filed a seven-figure lawsuit. B.L. Ochman and Shel Holtz cover the debacle well.

Shel also suggests that corporate blogging - one of the higher-profile forms of social media - may have reached its tipping point, as a company joining the conversation doesn't make massive headlines anymore. The flip of this normalizing is that attention shifts to companies - such as A&P Supermarkets - that get the even the basics horribly wrong.

Jeremiah Owyang highlights a case of handbags at six yards in the blogosphere between data storage rivals EMC and StorageZilla.

Nice nod to the value of corporations nurturing organic bloggers, leading to a great reminder of how blogging can actually help a business - not least by overcoming an irrelevant internet site.

Overcoming a useless internet - or for that matter intranet - is where Andrew McAfee's SLATES comes in: companies looking at an Enterpise2.0 approach should, he posits (and summarised below by Dion Hinchcliffe) provide the combined use of

• effective enterprise search and discovery
• using links to connect information together into a meaningful information ecosystem using the model of the Web
• providing low-barrier social tools for public authorship of enterprise content
• tags to let users create emergent organizational structure
• extensions to spontaneously provide intelligent content suggestions similar to Amazon's recommendation system
• signals to let users know when enterprise information they care about has been published or updated, such as when a corporate RSS feed of interest changes

Was Scoble fired? Apparently not. But the man himself seems to have decided that enough is enough:

"I thought blogging would be a tool for humans to get smarter, not stupider."

This is a shame. Scoble is opinionated and the world needs people who do not sit on the fence, and his recent experience may be partly a function of happenstance, but the warning is there. Naked conversations can make the world smarter, but there is another possible path that could lead to a different outcome.

Personally, Scobleizer stays in my RSS feed reader and I hope that he returns refreshed some day.

So notes Hugh MacLeod. He goes on to say that blogging isn't for everyone, Web2.0 is. This made me smile, as just today I began to prepare my thoughts for a trip across the pond to talk to a client about both. One caveat to Hugh's thoughts, imho, is that blogging is for all internal communicators.

Okay, Shel Israel has returned to a question he asked recently around whether blogging is passe? Shel thinks that blogging has normalised - become more embedded in everyday life while newer systems pop up. At about the same time today, I got a newsletter from BNET that includes a video interview with Matt Mullenweg, co-creator of Wordpress. The subject? The future of blogging.

Now it might be, as Shel highlights in his post, that already the world is looking back at how quaint the initial round of social media systems (read 'blogging') were. But that's in the real world. In the corporate world, social media remains at the early adopter/fast-follower stage. It won't last long, but that is still where it is. So the pressure is for internal communicators and companies to catch up!

A great celebrity death match is on following Web guru Jakob Nielsen asserting that people should write articles and not blogs. Robert Scoble has taken umbrage, however, expressing surprise that anyone is listening to a guy with an uglier webiste that his own!

Handbags aside (check out the later comments to Scoble's retort) the issue of short posts versus longer articles is a valid point of discussion, and it's worth reviewing both sides as Debbie Weil does.

There's a Yellow Pages ad running at the moment that talks about acting as soon as you think of something - so i am linking now to an article by Dare Obasanjo on Why Facebook is bigger than Blogging found through Robert Scoble's Scobleizer becasue I read a great piece recently about the difference between Facebook and MySpace that I wanted to link to but couldn't find again!

Two very interesting conversations in the past two days with two parts of central government have made me realise that there are (at least) two camps of thought in the UK public sector.

CAMP 1: The first is the hesitant camp - not unexpected becasue the private sector is only now slowly gettting its corporate head around social media. What was surprising, however, was that that was not principally why there's hesitation. It seems that certain parts of central governemtn are - understandably - not comfortable with sharing any form of personal information online inside or outside of work. They are encouraged not to have any form of online presence, not only because the information might be used against them by sinister forces - it could also be taken into consideration when career progression is on the agenda.

CAMP 2: The second camp is much more gung-ho. That initself is the surprise. No sitting on the fence here - more a case of rational exuberence taking hold. Pass blogging (for they have Message Boards!) and go straight to our own version of Channel 9 anyone? Why not!

I completely get that Camp 1 is a function of the nature of the job, yet I can't help but think that there will be a significant group of intelligent, opinionated indiviuals not necessarily as comfortable with the developing ways of commuicating as they could/should be. Rally cries for Camp 2: Just do it. You have to be in it to win it. Gotta shoot if you want to score. You get the general idea. This is not without its own caveats but (and not to trivialise the important reasons behind there being a Camp 1) it really seems much more fun (oh, and relevant!).