Blogs & Corporate

DM News posted something I contributed on corporate blogging. Here's more from the piece:

E-mail’s credibility and value as a communication vehicle weaken daily, particularly among workgroups in corporations. As blogs become easier to create and manage, they can be used to provide employees valuable tools to share information within their spheres of influence, such as colleagues, partners, distributors, customers and other constituents.

Advanced features like graphic and file attachments, password protection, CRM application integration and RSS not only make blogs a great fit for corporations but create an environment that builds communities around blogs, extending the marketing reach and brand to new audiences overnight.

Add approval and aggregation, and companies can roll up different views of any number of blogs so that they can present relevant information to their visitors in various venues — an extranet or intranet, for example, could be a view of hundreds of individual employee blogs.

This open approach lets individuals share what is timely and relevant with their own micro-audiences while letting companies reuse appropriate content for macro-audiences. Blogs can create an environment for customer- and consumer-generated content where customers can provide useful content that companies may be unable to create easily on their own.

A few leading business blogging tools, such as iUpload and Moveable Type, provide accountability to allow this approach to succeed in a corporation. These tools let the “open transparency approach” thrive by giving individual bloggers the freedom to write whatever they want on their own blogs while adding an accountability engine so that irrelevant or inappropriate content does not appear on a corporate blog or Web site.

Through the use of an “intelligent aggregation” process, companies can select aggregated views that contain audience-relevant information to improve the quality and appropriateness of the content for each target audience.

A new corporate blog also can augment e-mail newsletters in a more engaging way and bypass spam issues and filters that traditional e-mail delivery mechanisms face.

Blogs not only broaden your corporation’s knowledge base by tapping new content from employees, partners and customers. They can extend this new content to more audiences and communities, including specific topic experts who can add credibility to your product or service.

Too many organizations still fear blogs, mainly because their use is relatively new to business and because they can replace many traditional forms of communication, such as e-mail. Instead of embracing it and using blogs to expand their reach to new audiences, these publishers, marketers and public relations firms fear they will lose control of their corporate message, which until recently has come from a select few.

It’s important to realize, however, that corporate blogging is not about simply having someone — or even several people — inside the company blog. Though Microsoft evangelist and blogger Robert Scoble has been a tremendous asset to the company and is a great example of how effective business blogs can be, if blogging alone is all you focus on, benefits will be limited to things like:

· Putting a friendlier face on your company and creating an evangelist in which to communicate product updates and other news.

· Creating an environment where customers feel like they are more of an integrated part of the company by participating via an embedded blog through features like comments.

· Potentially improved search engine positioning that inevitably will change over time.

These are fabulous marketing value-adds, but they’re not enough. Blogging is a great new tool to communicate to existing audiences and reach new ones, but it is critical that we don’t forget basic marketing and PR principals when it comes to appropriate targeted content and building communities around a solid, cohesive message.

Keeping the tone as genuine and authentic as possible is also important given the transparency and grassroots flavor of blogs that make them so popular and keep people coming back for more.

From a publisher’s perspective, the same value-add applies. As the use of RSS expands into major media outlets, such as CNN and The New York Times, publishers will start to see real revenue opportunities from advertising in RSS feeds as well as greater flexibility in delivering content to readers.

June 24, 2005

By: Renee Blodgett
Blodgett Communications
Renee Blodgett is president of Blodgett Communications, San Francisco, a corporate communications and strategic marketing consultancy.

On Grokster News.....

The WSJ among many other sources covered the Grokster case today. The world is changing -- how can old media can survive in the new world -- and how does the entertainment industry survive and I'd add 'prosper' with the new models and capabilities available.

According to the Journal, "the Supreme Court sided with the entertainment industry against Grokster, ruling that it can be sued if its software is used to illegally swap music and movies. The court also said cable companies can deny rivals access to broadband lines."

This is significant news and an incentive for parties on both sides to come up with some creative and compelling 'legal' options so vendor and consumer both win.

Microsoft on Embracing RSS

BusinessWeek's Jay Greene does a piece today on Microsoft and its new effort to bake RSS into the next version of Windows (Longhorn).

Jay writes: "The fact that Microsoft is putting so much effort behind RSS suggests that the technology's time has come." Jupiter's Michael Gartenberg also provides a stat estimating that about 10% of U.S. Web surfers use RSS readers, software designed to view feeds from Web sites. Says Gartenberg: "This is the type of thing that will bring it into the mainstream," Gartenberg says. "It's going to change behavior, and it's going to do it very quickly."

According to the article, Microsoft will make it available for free via the Creative Commons license. Shocking. What that means is that users will be able to read RSS feeds through Internet Explorer as early as late summer (in a test version).

Lastly he says......But Microsoft's mere presence in the market will do one thing that all the other companies combined haven't been able to achieve yet: It will make RSS mainstream technology. Why does it always seem to take Microsoft to jump on board to make that so?

Ad Blocking: Yes Please

I learned about the AdBlock Project via Doc's blog where he discusses the issues around ads and what consumers would be willing to pay to avoid them.

Adblock is a content filtering plug-in for Mozilla and Firebird browsers, that allows users to specify filters, which remove unwanted content based on the source-address.

Notes Doc that it should be about user choice and that "the holy grail of advertising is to add, rather than subtract, value for the people who consume it: to create a demand market for itself." Here here.

Talking to the Wall

This post caught my eye because of the battle I have between convenience, great consumer prices and the quaint, small town America that we continually seem to be losing.

It's about a film that captures the story of two neighboring cities, one of which has managed to keep Walmart out of their town and the other which caved in. Did either really have a choice?

Filmmaker Steve Alves documented both town's progress and ideological differences between the one which houses a Walmart and the one which does not. "Talking to the Wall: The Story of an American Bargain" was ten years in the making.

Gnomedex Gone By......

So I missed another Gnomedex, apparently a 'happenin' and 'hot event,' according to many. Co-hosted by Microsoft and Lockergnome, it was held in Tahoe last year and moved to Seattle for year 2. Numerous industry friends attended, many of whom blogged the event. A bit about the schedule here and a summary of the history of the event here.

On that list includes Sam Whitmore, Robert Scoble, Denise Howell, Steve Gillmor, Marc Canter (who posted a piece on open source infrastructure today), John Battelle, Nick Bradbury, Adam Curry, Scott Mace and a host of others. They also had an official blog where you can find highlights and updates of the event.

Next year, Chris, next year. Bottom line, there are far too many conferences to attend in this industry.

New SF Discoveries....

Three new San Francisco discoveries worth mentioning:

1. A fabulous sushi restaurant in Noe Valley on Castro and 24th called Hamano Sushi. My favorite chef there is Teka; quiet, warm, cute, with an amazing smile. He always makes great recommendations, including scallops prepared a new way every time I visit, the freshest Toro I've had on this coast, and to-die for saki.

I also discovered two great finds on Valencia:

2. City Art, where they preview Bay Area artists. Here I ended up buying work by British artist Dan Fischer-Pask, who paints abstract oils in wild colors, a great way to mix up the more earthy tones of my African and Asian pieces. An example of his work here:

3. Closeby sits X21, a retro-modern collection of art, furniture and odd pieces.

From One to Two

Girlfriend chatter. An exchange over a glass -- no two -- of Chardonnay. Sharing of clothes, mother's tales, the boys, the men........the passing of a wand, a ritual learned, a tear that receives empathy...

While I sometimes shed a tear on an airplane, I always cry at weddings. A long-time girlfriend had her first last weekend in Newport Rhode Island.

Women experience a rite of passage when they see a friend embrace a life of two; their friendship, although it may still flourish, is never quite the same. Parents know this too and yet 'two' is a necessary journey.

The feminine energy of a bride on her wedding day is something both sexes can embrace, respect and cherish --

She is often austere, as she approaches the runway for the first time, her head still, her gaze focused, a porcelin doll. She is in control of the walk, of her own heartbeat and that of her fathers' on her arm. As she gets closer, she sees the tenderness in her 'to be husband,' and fights back a tear as she sees him fight back his own.

It's a moment of tenderness, love, respect, and of 'at long last.' When her father delivers her to him and she no longer feels his hand, but her familiar lover's touch, there's a moment of reflection albeit confusing, but also love.

She remembers the little girl, becoming a woman, her first love and the pain thereafter. She remains still and doesn't relax, yet as he squeezes her hand, she finds more strength. He squeezes again and she begins to feel at peace.

She knows the pride her father feels when he stands by her side; she'll glance over her shoulder once to tell him so. She never forgets the tenderness and certainty of love during that seemingly long walk down the runway that bridges her life as one to a journey of two.

As she approaches her lover as 'Miss' for one last time, the inner beauty of the bride exudes radiance and feminity that remind everyone in her presence of a woman's strength, her power, her loyalty and of her love.

Ubercool Unveiled

I attended Michael Tchong's first Ubercool event last night at the Limn Gallery in San Francisco. Ubercool also has a blog which will highlight upcoming events, parties, photos and cool products.

The reason for the event was to officially launch the Ubercool global event series, which are by-invitation only “trend parties” that will now travel to New York and Miami in 2005, with Los Angeles, London, Shanghai and Las Vegas scheduled in 2006.

Ubercool’s mission is to find the most outstanding examples of products that seize a trend and ride the wave to ultimate success. Ubercool media and event properties are analyzed and produced by Michael, whose mission it is to show people how to create superior products and services that leverage changes in business, lifestyle and technology.

The event itself was very chic, with people roaming around in 'trendy garb' enjoying martinis and the fabulous appetizers, and modern dancers who scattered themselves along the edge of the outside courtyard.

The presentation included dance demos which spanned from the Victorian era to 1920's Jitterbug to the Electronic Age, all of which exemplified the change in trends and culture over the years. It also portrayed just how fast-paced our life has become, and how much stimuli we now need to be inspired (as a society). I would also add -- less connected.

If you look at the closeness of the waltz and intensity of the gaze between both parties involved, then the Jitterbug, which is faster and while still a 'couple dance,' less connected. When we watch electronic, hip hop and rap, it's all about the individual for the most part and we're not connected at all. Yet, in the last couple of years, tango has been on the rise, so perhaps we are starving for 'close connection' once again.

We also saw a fabulous tap dance demonstration outside in the courtyard; some people hung onto every move, while others chatted inside the gallery, surrounded by fabulous contemporary art and flower presentations. Photos to follow.

Smoking British Style

I ran into a smoker from the UK recently and he pulled out a pack of Marlboro cigarettes. At first, I thought it was a 'joke,' given the size of the warning, however apparently it's legit. Can you believe this? Way to go England.