Enterprise RSS

Breaking; Slashdot is old media!

Alex Barnett sets them straight -- OLD study pointed out months ago that 31% of American internet users use RSS.

Slashdot was late, and completely misread the data...

SD = MSM??

More CorpBlogging...

LeBow (via ScobleLink):

Stonyfield's Corporate Blog

http://www.stonyfield.com
http://www.stonyfield.com/weblog
I speak with many corporations about blogging. Why should corporations blog? It's very simple: It's all about goodwill, extending the brand, and ultimately communicating with the customer.

The other day, I had the pleasure of communicating with Stonyfield's Chief Blogger -- a full-time position. I learned why the company's five blogs are important.

First, Stonyfield is a company that is committed to healthy food. That's a refreshing thought in this day and age.

Chris, the Chief Blogger, told me this:

"It's a means of continuing to build relationships with our customers and to 'be real' with them. Blogging is a way to convey a message, engage our consumers in a 'conversation' and to express our corporate personality,"

When it comes to corporate blogging, moooove over because Stonyfield is leading the pack.

The BlogMap

Should you use blogs to pre-announce your confidential product roadmap?!?

Here at NewsGator, we decided to give that a try.

Check out Greg Reinacker's post yesterday (Greg is CTO and founder of the company).

Good PR move?  Bad??

AskBlog?

Ask not who blogs....

Search Engine Ask Jeeves has followed in the footsteps of rivals Yahoo!, Google and MSN in launching a corporate blog.

The blog, which has no clear purpose specified at this stage, commenced with a post from Erik Collier, Data Engineering Manager, who writes about a recent office move.

In a win for SixApart, the blog is hosted on TypePad. Strangely though, no RSS or Atom feed is evident from the site, although the scripting reveals there are feeds available for those who are willing to literally look beneath the surface for them.

(via Searchenginewatch)

PR Agencies get CorpBlog buzzing

via Scoble's linkblog:

Meet the GM FastLane Blog (from: Buzz Marketing with Blogs)

Last night at the Blog Business Summit reception I met Laurie Mayers of Hass MS&L, the PR company who worked with Bob Lutz, Vice Chairman of General Motors, to create the GM FastLane Blog. I learned a little bit from Laura about how the blog works and thought you might be interesed, too.

The blog was result of an ongoing conversation between Hass and GM about blogs. It is run on Movable Type, and Bob Lutz sometimes moblogs using his Blackberry. The company has been pretty happy with all the attention the launch has gotten so far. I love that on the About page GM has indicated their adaption of the Blogger Code of Ethics. I mean, how cool is that?

The blog was a follow to the GM Smallblock Blog, which Hass and GM created as a kind of trial foray into the blogosphere. (more...)

Notes on Enterprise Blogging - in practice

Good, thorough post at Cote's weblog about all the steps involved in blogging from behind the firewall...   He walks through how they went from 0 to 80 blogs ; what people blog about; the technical and social issues involved in spreading the flame....

Well worth the read..

Sun vs. IBM: Blog-off

San Francisco Chronicle this morning;

Sun Microsystems' President Jonathan Schwartz is using an unusual tactic in his company's long-simmering feud with IBM. He posted a letter on his personal blog Friday addressed to Big Blue's Chief Executive Officer Sam Palmisano, in which he challenged the computer giant to work harder at making the two firms' product lines compatible. ...

Why CorpBlogging Matters

... according to David Berlind on ZD Net (via Shore Communications).  Excerpt:

... First, blogging isn't just some trendy, cathartic technology for broadcasting our deepest thoughts to the world, building community, and joining the new age media movement where grassroots journalism could end up threatening media monopolies. Second, every business should consider blogging fundamentals -- particularly the notions of persistence and subscription -- in virtually everything they do.

.....corporate culture will need to change. Provided the capability exists, those who publish information will know when to use a blog versus a tool like e-mail. Ultimately, this could force a sea-change, not just in corporate culture, but also in content management software.

Blog applications in Business

Alex Barnett and Scott Reynolds, via Peter Hoskins, talk about multiple applications for blogging within the enterprise.  On the list; leads management, trigger-based and data-mined intelligence, customised report subscriptions, and internal communications.

Blogs for Business

Electronic Business magazine weighs in:

Blogs for business?

Strip away the hype, and find a newly useful tool for communication

Forget about all the hype you've heard about blogs (a.k.a. Web logs) as the latest outlet for personal journalism. It turns out they also have a remarkable ability to aid communication in business, whether within internal workgroups or among external chains of suppliers and partners. For an industry such as electronics—where relationships are far-flung and time-to-market pressures require fast communications—blogs can bring a new agility to the workforce... ...

... ...

For Sun's Lark, this two-way communication is a key advantage for engineers, working on something as focused as running Java on medical devices, who want to talk to other developers and designers. "You get a lot of insight into how real people think about what we're doing, but it also gives engineers a voice in the market they didn't have before." For instance, with the release of Solaris 10—essentially Sun's open source version of its operating system—Sun's OS developers have been able to respond to concerns from application developers with swift and unfiltered access. Lark adds, "It gives our people a chance to participate in the tribes and communities that are part of our business."

Weblogs vs. newsgroups...

Differences detailed... (thanks, John!)

Business blogging webinar

Business Blogging webinar just wrapped up.  Audio transcript worth revieiwing in archives at www.livemeeting.com  Also, content blogged at Coudal's site...excerpts:

Why RSS?  Coudal says:  use it from your blog to expand your audience.  It's a coming thing... growing pretty quickly.  Anil Dash:  It's growing massively.  ... Great complement to notifications via messaging, e-mail, etc. 

Why blog software? Coudal; we're not building sites anymore which don't have blog updating as the foundation ... non-technical people then can make revisions on the entire site ...there we won't be many companies that aren't using blog tools for some part of their communication ...

Online Paperboy meme catching on

Rubel feathers the flames: 

Heather Green came up with a really great description for RSS in her excellent introductory article. She writes in BusinessWeek that really simple syndication is like your online paperboy...

If you're a news junkie, an online auction lover, or someone who wants to know when the latest songs, DVDs, and books are released, here's a technology that's perfect for you. Called Really Simple Syndication (RSS), it lets you pull together a list of Web sites you want to follow. So instead of surfing through The New York Times site for news, going to eBay (EBAY ) to track a particular auction, or checking with Apple's (AAPL ) iTunes to see when a new recording is available, you can get access to all the information through one Web page or download to your computer. The information you get, called a feed, comes to you through a piece of software called a newsreader.

Related...

[Micro Persuasion]

NY Times on Coporate Blogging

This via David Card:

...From a marketing perspective, blogs make perfect sense. They are cheap to produce, immersive and interactive. It's easy to measure their readership and response rates. For small companies, blogs are a quick and dirty promotional tool that cuts out the middleman; for big companies, blogs are a tool of humanization -- an informal, chatty, down-to-earth voice amid the din of bland corporate-speak.

Chief Blogging Officer

Shifted Librarian has a take on this;

Are you Chief Blogging Officer Material?

"Government is already rife with chiefs, why not one more? HighBeam Research, Inc. has set the pace by announcing today the appointment of Christopher Locke as Chief Blogging Officer (CBO). Looks like the role of CBO is a pace setter who creates a buzz about the company products and enlists others to blog the cause. Ironically, the announcement came in the form of a (oh, so 20th century) press release." [RSS in Government]

Yes! More ammo for my theme that libraries need to treat blogs like newsletters and devote the same types of resources (time, training, graphic design, staff, etc.) to them. Blogs humanize, and library web sites desperately need some humanizing.

In the short term/if you're young, have your CEO be your CBO too...

And the word is...

(click on the picture to expand) via the bigblogcompany

More on why CEOs should blog...

Thoughts from Michael Gartenberg via Scoble;

A good argument from Tim Bray at Sun that the best way to get for an organization to get into Blogging is with a directive and support from management. "It’s going to have to happen much the same way it did here at Sun: your CEO or COO or whatever is going to have to say Make it happen! and then you work out the details while you’re doing it." This also sets the ground rules (and as I've written in the past removes this is important) so everyone knows what's acceptable and what's not.

There's no doubt that it was easier for us to launch analyst weblogs here at Jupiter because our CEO, Alan Meckler believed in medium and in fact embraced it himself. Which once again begs me to ask the question, Does your CEO blog? and if not, what are you doing about it?

And, Sabre blogs.  Internally, and somewhat externally.

Targetting Target

The blogosphere was buzzing this weekend, pointing out that Target's web site has been promoting err, unexpected products. 

Though not all bloggers agreed this was worth chasing, it was chased. How should Target have responded?

1.  Some one associated with the company should have been tracking web and weblog comments with a keyword feed on 'Target'

2. When the first bad buzz started, a Target rep needed to reach out to a couple of the key commentators and let them know what the company was doing to correct the problem.  Comment on the post or posts; use a trackback; send emails.

The difficulty was that this all happened over a holiday weekend, when Target's execs were unlikely to be working.

But it's a 24/7 world now, folks -- you can't let negative buzz spread too far too fast, at any time... As Wired said recently (via Radiant Marketing),

"The same thing will happen in business, because people know they don't need to head to branded sites for good information. Bloggers can be trusted to be independent and people will turn to self-published experts for information."

The good news is that the mechanisms to manage the message immediately and remotely are all right here, right now...

LawBlogs

Law.com Launches Blog Network with Leading Independent Legal Experts

More evidence that mainmedia are paying bloggers to blog... and that relevant content is being blogged.

PubSub now tracking 6.5 million blogs (via Ross)

CorpBlogging: Google says "yes"

InfoWorld (link via moonwatcher) (caveat: quotee runs Blogger) ;

Google, which implemented an internal Web log system behind its firewall about 18 months ago, has seen tremendous benefits from it and may in the future consider providing tools and expertise for this purpose to interested clients, a Google executive said.

"...we have seen a lot of different uses of blogs within the firewall: people keeping track of meeting notes, people sharing diagnostics information, people sharing snippets of code, as well as more personal uses, like letting co-workers know what they're thinking about and what they're up to," Goldman said. "It really helps grow the intranet and the internal base of documents."

Forrester excerpts on CorpBlogging

Charlene Li has posted some bits from her recent Forrester report (ca. $400) on corporate blogging, specifically on best practices and blog codes of ethics. She links to five corporate blog policy examples, and has started a wiki which includes a list of companies with 'open' blogs. (Confused about wiki vs. blog?  Read Chad's post and article)

One of the more unique corpblogs Charlene cites is Maytag's Skybox blog, which she describes as;

...a product support blog for its personal beverage vending machine ... ... In addition to providing sports-related content to "man cave" enthusiasts, a product manager dispenses advice and answers questions about the product.

GM's smallblock engine blog is personable, personal, and inviting.

Wall Street Blogs

Financial insight wants to be blogged...

The Wall Street Journal launches its Econoblog (as mentioned by Jarvis and Rubel).

And Fred Wilson points to five posts on Wall Street blogging, one of which highlights this quote from an institutional investor to a Wall Street analyst;

"I find I increasingly get a lot more out of reading blogs than sell-side
research. I am doing more and more primary research myself, and blogs form a very important part of that process."

Echoing Seth Godin's point about features of strong blogs, EuroTelcoblog also highlights what he likes about some analysts' blogwork;

...the highly individual qualities of blogs which collectively deliver what brokers' research typically lacks. All three have very sensitive BS meters, and are not afraid to court controversy. All three possess wide expertise and that rare quality of 360-degree, joined-up thinking, which allows them to consider the broader implications of what Company A is saying/doing, rather than the all-too-typical broker treatment...

and has this credible prediction;

...the message is pretty clear to me: eventually, and probably sooner than later, someone is going to pull together all these diverse angles on telecom/internet/media/hardware/applications/chips, incorporate some hard financial and technical analysis, and build a cross-sector investment research platform incorporating realtime tools (I mean blogging, IM, video conferencing and collaboration) rather than .pdfs and spam.

Update:  Ross Mayfield points to another variation on the blog-based research model:

Last week I presented at KM & Intranet World alongside Mike from Techdirt -- which not only delivers public analysis, but custom corporate intelligence via private blogs. They have hit upon the beginnings of a cost effective method of delivering post-by-post analysis that engages the research client in conversation.

Forrester's Blogging too, now

...as a Jupiter analyst points out :-)

Welcome to Charlene Li's weblog... and she has the NewsGator button, huzzah! Charlene pulls out some recos from Pheedo's Marketing VP about good corpblog practices;

To recap: 1. Focus on your core interest area to establish yourself as an expert. 2. Create at least 15-20 meaningful posts BEFORE you open your blog to the public. When people visit for the first time, you’ll have more then one post to share with them. If your blog is rich with information, most likely people will continue to read it. 3. Figure out who the a-list bloggers are in your niche and participate on their blog using comments and trackbacks. Links to your blog, outside your blog and within in your blog are all important to search engines. 4. Continue to write on target content

Other Forrester feeds here...

Myst on corpblogs

Myst founder (and NewsGator partner) Bill French, talked about corpblogs last summer, channeling Chad Dickerson of InfoWorld;

Chad correctly points out that corporate weblogs have a different set of requirements that revolve around security, permissions, and discovery. The blogging framework must be designed to meet these requirements.

"I think one of the biggest mistakes people in corporate IT make is wrongly assuming that documentation is something that ends at some point. In reality, IT is an organic beast, and documentation is never really complete. Fortunately, the Weblog paradigm gives corporate IT the means to create documentation that works the way people think -- in dates (When did this happen to the system?), incidents (What happened, and how was it fixed?), and people (Who fixed it?). We've used the Groove discussion to manage the IT logistics of office moves, server migrations, and the RFP (request for proposal) process for Web hosting. This method of group documentation works better in practice than anything I've ever seen."

6 Months Earlier...

Moonwatcher chides us for being six months later than his site, devoted to "Tracking the emerging Enterprise Weblog Management market."

He's right -- we weren't blogging about all this six months ago!

We're also interested in RSS beyond weblogs -- it's increasingly the lingua franca for all sorts of content communication and collaboration...

Much coolness chez Moonwatcher, including this one from last month highlighting the fact that stock analysts are shunning the enterprise content management sector -- even as VC's worry about those companies entering the space of their shiny new start-ups...

Check out the tabs at the top to track posts about vendors, the industry, customers, requirements, et al... or just subscribe to the feed in NewsGator (we'll see about getting that NewsGator one-click subscription button up on the site!)

GM Blogging

Scoble and Jarvis note that GM has a blogger ... and a place for bloggers.

And, that there's an upcoming Blog Business Summit.

Directed, subscription-based interactions with external constituents is a vital competitive tool. Not everyone's comfortable blogging, but it's easy to learn, and the value in a controlled dialogue with your market and others can be immense...

Guide to Corporate Blogging

Steve Rubel points to this primer on corporate blogging;

Blogs are no different from channels like video, print, audio, presentations and so on. They all deliver results - but of varying kind. The kind you can expect from blogs is mainly about stronger relations with important target groups.

Basic, but worth checking out.