Enterprise RSS

Why CEOs SHOULD blog

Dave Taylor suggests we shouldn't...

...And the Chief Executive Officer? Their primary role is to raise money for the company. They are the lead on strategic planning (along with the Board of Directors) and are somewhat involved in corporate tactics (though that's really the purview of the President of the company), but notice that I didn't say anything about "communicating the company message" or even "inspiring the employees" or "engaging customers". For companies of any size, CEOs have more important tasks than writing articles for the company
weblog.

But... communicating with constituents is central to the CEO's role.  True, they may be prospective or current investors as well as customers and employees ... but it's all about communication, in any case.  Blogs can in fact be the most leveraged (with nice unintended consequences, some times) medium for communicating with all those constituencies.

But I agree with Dave that it's tough to find the time; one has to be aware of unhappy SEC and FTC-consequences; and, most importantly,

I want strategic business blogs that are written by authorities in the company.

But some CEO blogs meet that criterion...

Teaching Marketeers new tricks....

Fair amount of traffic about the short-tail of marketing pros trying to learn the long-tail of new personal media… Rubel:

There's a fascinating article on PR and blogging in today's Globe and Mail (hat tip to IWantMedia). In the piece, Richard Edelman comments extensively on how blogs and other on-line tools that enable companies to speak directly to consumers are pushing the news media out of their central role in public relations. He openly encourages PR practitioners to think more like journalists. Gee, what a radical thought. PR isn't about going to cool parties after all.

…My feeling is that the best way to teach PR pros to think like journalists is to encourage them to become bloggers. I have learned more about journalism through one year of blogging than perhaps anything else over my entire career in this business.

Every PR agency large and small should be giving their employees the "keys to the blog." Let your employees dabble in the blogosphere and learn. Even an internal blog is better than no blogging at all. Will the big PR agencies rise to the occasion in such manner? I highly doubt it. Many of them are risk averse. Is Edelman doing this? One hopes. …

Jupiter Research, comments by  Lockergnome:

            …While the report does serve some relevant obstacles to wide-spread marketing adoption of RSS, it mostly shows a poor understanding of RSS by marketers.

Before going through the various points made, the key missing factors that marketers seem not to understand or acknowledge yet, are:

a] RSS is not only about delivering content to end-users, but also about improving search engine rankings (Google, Yahoo, MSN) and driving new traffic through the use of various RSS specific search engines and directories.

Even if marketers are still doubtful about using RSS to communicate with end-users, the many examples available clearly prove that they should at least start implementing RSS as part of their online visibility strategy.

b] RSS is the basic NewsMastering ingredient, allowing companies to republish online content to provide their visitors with fresh content from multiple sources, even establishing themselves as key sources for highly targeted niche content.

c] Combined with branded RSS aggregators, the marketing advantages of RSS expand to “owning” part of the end-user’s desktop venue; a direct link between the company and the end-user, allowing for complete brand interaction and experience on a daily level.

However, as we’ve shown many times, the key benefit of marketing RSS usage still remains content delivery to end-users.

Paul Chaney of Radiant Marketing:

One of my latest memes is how blogs can be used as search engine optimization and marketing tools. For example, The Green View, a blog sponsored by fertilizer manufacturer Lebanon Seaboard Corporation, is beginning to serve it's purpose of not only providing good lawn care information, but of driving traffic to the new Greenview Online website as well. (I can hear the purists laughing now...a blog about lawn care! Har-de-har-har!)

RSS thinking

Lockergnome:

Chris, myself and a number of others have expressed our belief in and support for RSS as a method of getting content from the Web to your desktop. While it has maintained a high level of growth, the average Joe has not completely jumped on board yet. Still, people like Fergus Burns, CEO of Nooked, believe that it will not only continue to grow in use. But the advantages of RSS will become more mainstream with Microsoft's Longhorn and as Yahoo continues to expand on its use of this syndication...

GovRSS

Via moonwatcher;

"Government bureaucracies are usually very slow to adopt new innovations. So when the National Agricultural Statistics Service began offering RSS feeds of some of its news, it was the latest sign that the technology has hit the mainstream."

More from the underlying Wired article:

To date, RSS feeds are offered by agencies such as the U.S. State Department, NASA, the state of Delaware, the National Hurricane Center, a number of state legislatures, local governments and more. However, many foreign governments, including England, France and New Zealand, are way ahead of those in the United States when it comes to RSS.

Companies that Blog

Here's another one - their blog site is intimate, visual, inviting (via RadiantMarketing);

Lincoln Sign Company is a small, custom sign shop specializing in carved, sandblasted & dimensional signs, but we will happily do just about any job (big or small) that is sign related. The company has been in operation since 1972 ...

RationalMarketing also links to this article about the 'blog marketing explosion';

Blogs are a goldmine of formerly hard to get insight from CEO's, marketing guru's and others who never used to have a public forum. These business leaders are utilizing the internet to convey their personal thoughts on happenings in their industry and life. They are blogging for the same reasons they do public speaking, to build credibility for themselves and their company's. Blogging has become a new … less time consuming and less expensive way to reach potential and current customers.

What should a CEO blog?

That's going to depend to a significant degree on the CEO and the industry. A running commentary on the topic has been blogged...

Regardless, more and more CEOs are blogging. Here's one list of about 60 around the world, and here's a list with another 40+ blogging CEOs in the U.S.

In this blog post by Bahar Gidwani, the CEO of a company called Digital Image Marketing, he talks about the impact of trends in his industry on its various constituents.

Blogs are a great place to convey thought leadership.

Triple Point Technologies

Triple Point Technologies is an Inc.-100, 150-person private commodity trading solutions firm on the East Coast, and a NewsGator customer. Triple Point cooperated on a case study with us a few months ago. Their adoption of RSS as a standard for collaboration and communication highlights some interesting facts:

1. Corporate knowledge tied up in Outlook and Exchange is difficult to find, difficult to search, and generally not available to all users who need access to the information in a convenient way.

2. "The idea is to free some of our content, expose it via easily searchable XML and HTML via HTTP, and reduce the amount of information "hunt and peck" that currently goes on, thus increasing productivity and improving the quality of our work," says CIO Allie.

3. They wanted to leverage the fact that employees already spend significant time using Outlook, and also build upon intranet work they had already done with SharePoint.

The solution was multi-fold: weblogs were created for employees to publish to, business systems were modified to leverage RSS, intranet sites now notify via RSS, and NewsGator delivers the content to the desktops.

4. ...automated business systems are being retrofitted to generate data in RSS format. For example, Triple Point uses StarTeam for source control and release management. Using the StarTeam API and some XML savvy, they have built dynamic RSS feeds based on changes to the projects managed by StarTeam. In the past, developers were required to produce email announcements of each source code change; now that process has been automated via RSS.

5.... intranet content is being enhanced with RSS. For example, content in SharePoint is being enhanced to generate RSS change notifications, and other systems have been so modified as well. Whenever existing notification systems were inadequate, clumsy, or manual, Triple Point has built RSS generation systems around them to enhance and automate the process.

6. "We started enhancing our systems to work with RSS in September 2002, and used stand-alone news aggregators on the desktops," says Allie. "By February 2003 less than 5% of potential users were reading these feeds regularly." Triple Point switched to NewsGator in March 2003, and within two months saw adoption increase to about 35%. "The key for us is the tight integration with Outlook and the stand-alone tools never became popular with our users."

Enterprise RSS resources

We'll post these as they come, but this presentation by Disney VP Mike Pusateri and his associates, about his company's use of wiki, blog, and RSS reader technology at a O'Reilly conference offers strong pointers to why enterprises should consider RSS now.

Mike is responsible for about 800 desktops at Disney. Is RSS a department-level pheneomenon right now? How about Microsoft's 1,000 bloggers?

(Thanks for the link and mention, Steve!)