Stephen Baker has a piece in yesterday’s BusinessWeek about big companies using blogging technology to improve their internal communications. Good stuff.
Not by a long shot. Instead of public blogs, think about blog technology. That’s the focus for many leading companies around the world. From McDonald’s (MCD) to Cannondale Bicycle, corporations are using the software to revamp internal communications, reach out to suppliers, and remake corporate Intranets.
Technorati Tags: businessweek, internal+communications, stephen+baker
Odeo’s Noah Glass & Tim Roberts handle the blog thang with perfect aplomb. Right after we stuck a ‘send us an odeo’ button on our Like It Matters blog, Noah & Biz Stone zapped us an odeo saying ‘cool, thanks for playing.’ Tim & I have since exchanged notes (via their new feature) about how to improve it, questions about RSS, etc. A few quick moments on their part translate to a great experience with the company on our part. So:
- Listen in (they pinged me within a few hours of my post)
- Respond appropriately (they used their own tool to communicate, which really cements the point)
- Keep the conversation up (quick replies to my question proved, again, that they are paying attention)
Technorati Tags: blog+monitoring, blogs, noah+glass, odeo, tim+roberts
Edgeio is about to launch a free service that will make it simpler for you to use your company blog to widely distribute job listings, a service or product for sale, or anything else for which you’d have traditionally used eBay or Craigslist as a centralized market.
You’ll post a listing on your own blog and add the tag ‘listing’ or ‘listings’. That’s it. You can also go claim your blog (as you’d do for Technorati), use more descriptive tags to improve visibility, and add the Edgeio ping servers to your blog (Weblogs Work will be doing this for our clients) to make Edgeio work even better for you.
We wrote more about Edgeio here. You can also follow the launch at the Edgeio blog. Or track what people are saying about it.
Technorati Tags: corporate+blogging, edgeio, job+search, keith+teare, listings, mikearrington, webreakstuff
From an interview with Anil Dash, SixApart honcho, lover of purple:
I think we’ve seen a number of huge benefits companies get from business blogging. Having blogs means companies can communicate better: between employees, workgroups, project teams, or different locations. Or between a company and its partners or customers.
It’s a cheaper way to share information, a powerful way to collect feedback, and a faster way to respond to the conversations around its products or services. It’s also a much better channel for marketing communications than traditional PR, if your target audience is regular people.
Charlene Li is putting together an evaluation of corporate blogging solutions, and she wants your input.
So this is the process we’ll be following:
Part 1: We’ll ask for feedback on features and functionality required for corporate blogging, and get recommendations on providers to evaluate. Open source solutions will also be considered.
Part 2: A set of specific criteria will be posted on this blog for feedback.
Part 3: The final set of criteria will be available for you to use in grading a current/potential blogging solution provider. You will be able to suggest and grade any blogging solution provider that you have had personally used.
Scott Ryan is using his Architel blog to roll out information about SimpleTicket, the new trouble ticket system developed for his clients. Architel was the first outsourced IT support company in Dallas to provide all-you-can-eat computer support for one flat fee.
In addition to a CEO blog, where Scott posts his POV as an executive running a growing company, Architel uses its news blog to offer IT tips, productivity hacks and information that is useful for the 70 Dallas-area companies for which it provides outsourced computer support. Sometimes it’s desktop issues. Sometimes it’s how to best escalate issues for quick resolution. They’ve been blogging the creation of SimpleTicket since the beginning, and launched a separate SimpleTicket blog to handle the flow of info requests that project has generated.
SimpleTicket is an open source ticketing system developed in Rails by Kevin Marvin. Rock star designer Dan Cederholm, of SimpleBits, did the design work for the application. Oh, and I came up with the name.
I’ve been asked about stealth commenting on blogs before — can you engage without seeming to engage? Just sneak a little spin into the comments of someone’s post? No.
Again, no.
This week Mike Arrington got a fistful of snark when he talked about the launch methods of a new startup. Shel, Jeremy Pepper and others thought Tello’s minions were leaving nasty anonymous commentary. Paul Kedrosky dubbed it Astroblogging. It’s a clueless act. Got something to say? Put your name on it.
Technorati Tags: jeremy+pepper, mikearrington, paul+kedrosky, astroblogging, shel+israel, tello
One of the questions I get all the time is how to measure ROI for social media. (A better question is how do we value return on attention, but, let’s bracket that.) Naturally, you want to know if this stuff is helping you achieve your business objectives. As Hugh correctly points out, blogging’s impact is mostly indirect. And it’s also a long-haul thing. You have to stick with it to build your tribe. Some of the metrics we look at are readership, feed subscribers, comments, links, inquiries, leads, partners and so on.
That said, sometimes the gains are so immediate and direct you sort of get slapped in the face. Exhibit A: the blog for the as-yet-unreleased open source ticketing system called SimpleTicket. SimpleTicket was developed by Architel, who started blogging about it on their own site. Soon, they were getting so many inquiries for the code & questions about the project, that they needed to launch a blog just to more efficiently communicate with this growing community. So, we put together another WordPress-driven site for SimpleTicket, and they started blogging the project progress there.
Results to date:
- A new crackerjack employee for Architel, who found them (and thought they were cool) because of SimpleTicket
- Over $75,000 in annual billings from new clients who hired Architel after discovering them through SimpleTicket
- Immediate improvements to the base code for the project; questions answered
- An international group of beta testers ready for the code release on the 28th
Again, the impact of blogging & social media is often indirect, but these are some pretty good results for a blog that is just a few weeks old.
Technorati Tags: architel, hugh+macleod, simpleticket
We’ll be talking about the new marketing — telling compelling stories in the age of do-it-yourself media — tomorrow at a luncheon put on by the Advertising Club of Fort Worth. Thanks much to Lynne Swihart, of Blanchard Schaefer Advertising & PR, for inviting us. It’s at Joe T. Garcia’s at around 11:45. Google Map. I’ll be posting up the clickstream for the talk as well.
Technorati Tags: ad+club+fort+worth, brian oberkirch, blanchard+schaefer, lynne+swihart, weblogs+work
