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Europe's largest dairy company is blogging
Europe's largest dairy company, Arla Foods, this week became the first major Scandinavian company to start blogging externally. It's their Danish company (Arla is owned by 11,600 milk producers in Denmark and Sweden) that takes the lead.
Arla now has three different blogs, all in Danish. They want to tell us about nutrition and health, the life on a farm and what's happening "behind the scenes" in the organization. They do it to build long-term relationships, to show a more human face and how qualified they are (via).
Arla has met a lot of criticism in Denmark lately, accused of for example crushing small diary companies. It's brave -- but completely logical -- to start blogging in that situation. I hope they succeed. It could become an important step for blogging in the Scandinavian countries. Even a breakthrough.
We're social animals
Much of what's happening on the web today is hard, even impossible, to explain in terms of rational economic behaviour. The voluntary and collaborative work we do will never make us rich -- when we help people, answer their questions, offer web services without even ads.
So why do we do it? Well, Tom Evslin suggests an easy answer. We do it because we can. "We're programmed to want to help and, given the opportunity, that's just what we do. A lot of Web 2.0 is about giving us that opportunity."
Managing knowledge with blogs
Long time no see... Won't waste your time talking about all the things I do when I don't write here - but it includes workshops on blogging, and more and more I find internal blogging to be the thing people, especially bosses, really pay attention to. I'm convinced that for every external corporate blog we will find (if we could) 10 or 20 internal ones. Perhaps more. One reason is this - executives currently feel unable to exploit large amounts of corporate information according to a study Sally Falkow writes about.
It's obvious to me that blogging should play a role in that exploitation. I see them as the "middle way". They're not the structured systems with elaborate meta data that we find in large KM solutions. They're not email either, but they're almost as easy as email -- which can't be said of the system approach... -- and that's the key to success.
The efficiency of blog advertising
Any media executives that just felt a cold shiver run down their back? From MediaPost (via):
"Just one-half of one percent of the media buy budget, Clark said, was spent on BlogAds--a firm run by panel moderator Henry Copeland, which sells ad space on some of the highest-trafficked blogs. Those ads, Clark said, ended up accounting for 29 percent of the traffic sent to the campaign's landing page."
A backlash soon to come?
Steven Baker thinks that a business blog backlash is nigh. I hope he's right. Less hype will mean that "bloggers" that doesn't really understand what it's all about jumps over to other things. Probably, in their cases, more effective things to spend time on.
With any luck a backlash could also open for what I believe is the next step of blogging, that is personal and participatory communications without the label "blog". Why should comments be limited to blogs on a corporate site? Why should personal reflections be limited to one part of the site? Why should we as bloggers limit ourselves to a rather fixed format when we instead could use our knowledge -- and it is a valuable skill -- to support market and internal communications in general?
Using blog community intranets to imbue culture
I want to hear more about this, Steve.