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Blogs as news papers
There is something appealing with this idea. Swedish geography based pinging service Lemonad produces a daily pdf (example) with a selection of new blog posts. As they say, "Download, print and read it on the bus".
The nerds among us will immediately argue that it's a waste of fine paper... But web access on the bus - or wherever - isn't for everyone yet. And it'll take some time before it is.
The Lemonad service is pretty basic. You can't choose your own sources, for example. But that could of course be done, and it opens up for interesting possibilities. I could create my own "news paper" with the mix of content I want and get it all on paper - the only true mobile medium.
If you're working in a large organisation with a couple of official RSS-feeds and a growing number of internal blogs... Voila, you have your daily internal paper. That is something we never managed to produce in the print era.
Any international services like this?
Hat tip to JMW.
Internal podcasts: More informal communication, lower phone bills
Well, the phone bills might not be the most important part. But internal podcasting at IBM has already generated good ideas and results.
"...favorite creations is a weekly status update from IBM's supply chain organization. The group previously scheduled a weekly conference call with all the employees it needed to coordinate with -- a conference that involved as many as 7,000 people. Now, supply-chain executives upload a weekly podcast, which staffers can listen to when they want."
"Other IBM staffers have taken to podcasting to illuminate their particular situations at the company. A new IBM worker created a podcast with tips for other new recruits, while a mobile staffer began a series about what it's like being an IBM worker who rarely reports to an actual IBM facility."
The pros and cons of author blogs
The Internet Writing Journal discusses the author's dilemma: To blog or not to blog. I can't really see the dilemma -- could there be a more obvious blogger than an author? -- but it's an interesting overview of blogging from an author's perspective nevertheless.
"...there are several considerations: the type of blog, what makes a great author blog, the pros and cons of blogging, the level of interactivity of the blog, and how blogging can energize your book publicity plan."If you're interested in authors that blog, take a look at the journal's list of "Best Author Blogs" too. Two (1,2) of my favorites are there, and let me also add the Detectivemarketing Blog. I've helped Stefan, the author, get started and he's really wild. If you want ideas you never would get anywhere else, his blog is the place for you. Wouldn't it for example be interesting to see Madonna dance in the streets of Hong Kong for 2 days non-stop...?
CEO blog drives traffic to online employee newsletter
The Intranet Blog quotes a case study about a CEO blog that "was a hit and very successful at driving traffic to the online employee newsletter".
"We noticed increased traffic to the online newsletter on the days that we ran the blog, and the week after our CEO returned we developed a poll for the intranet home page asking employees if they read the blog," says Kail. "The final numbers stated that 80 percent of employees who took the poll read the blog."With the risk of...
1. repeating myself
2. sounding too evangelistic
...I can't find any good reason for a CEO not to consider internal blogging, at least if the company is too big for her/him to meet all employees in person each week.
In the short run a CEO could of course be unable or uninterested in communicating that way (the social and participatory way, not necessarily blogs). In the long run such people won't become CEO's.
Skyblog.com among Top 100 Internet properties in Europe
French blog host Skyblog generates enough unique visitors to make the European Top 100 of internet properties. As #83 on the list they beat for example the publisher IDG and HP.
(Via)
Google Analytics makes site owners illegal
According to Swedish and European Union law, it's illegal to set cookies without telling people on the site that you do, what they're used for and how they can be avoided.
Google Analytics, GA, does set cookies. What information they collect from your visitors is impossible to know (one of the cookies is valid until 2038, though...). When a lot of people, among them probably many bloggers, start using GA they will in fact break the law unless they warn their visitors. And how many will do that?
There's been a lot of discussion about this in Sweden today. It is very relevant. I assume that the same discussion is relevant for all other remote stats services -- but, as always with Google, their services become huge.
Considering that European police forces probably won't be doing raids to catch bloggers that don't warn about cookies, I think that an equally important discussion is what these cookies do. What information are we providing Google with?
Internet use in Europe: The digital divide revealed
The use of internet varies heavily between the European countries. The level of internet penetration, for example, ranges from 12% in Romania to 82% in Sweden.
This is important. Most of all from a democratic perspective, I guess. Who can take part in the information society? But anyone working with a pan-european commercial web perspective, and corporate blogging as potential part of it, need to know this.
Eurostat, the Statistical Office of the European Communities, has taken a closer look at the magnitude of the digital divide (news release in pdf).
Some statistics from the report:
85% of the European students used the internet during the first quarter of 2004.
In nearly all Member States a lower proportion of the unemployed than employees used the internet in the first quarter of 2004. Internet use amongst the unemployed ranged from 8% in Lithuania and 10% in Latvia to 86% in Sweden and 76% in the Netherlands.
In all Member States the lowest proportion of internet use was observed for the retired. In thirteen Member States less than 10% of the retired had used the internet, while only in the Netherlands (54%), Sweden (45%), Denmark (34%), and Luxembourg (32%) was the proportion more than a quarter.
You only have one corporate blog!?
Anil Dash thinks that a business need more than one blog. See what happened to email. Our email (ab)use started out as one address per company. Then each department wanted one and today, of course, everyone has an email address or more. We are also on a number of email distribution lists.
Already, writes Dash, there are "...universities that deploy Movable Type across their entire institution admitting students who just expect to have a blog in the same way they expect an email address. Today, many businesses may be content with just having a single blog to talk to the public or for tracking projects and work inside the company. But we think that a lot of people who've seen how easy and effective it is to use blogs to share information with the audiences they care about will start to demand blogs for every audience they want to reach."
I'm sure that the email analogy can be questioned. But Dash is probably right anyway. In fact, back in April I wrote about the Dutch company Macaw where all employees had a blog. And many of them used it to. Since then we've learned about IBM's offer to all employees to start an intranet blog.
There's guaranteed more examples like this -- and even more will come.
Ad revenue from blogs analysed
Professor Starling Hunter has studied what the strongest predictors of the revenue earned by ads appearing on blogs are. The conclusions:
- the number of weekly page views (WPV) is a much stronger predictor of weekly ad revenue and price than are either the number of inbound links or the number of blogs providing those links
- the number of ads has a negative impact on ad price and a largely positive effect on ad revenue, and
- the political orientation of the blog matters: on average left-of-center blogs significantly out-earn their right-of-center counterparts.
PubSub rankings makes me dizzy
I notice that this blog ranks quite high on PubSub's PR List. November 12th, 2005, it (I) made it to third place. Almost a religious experience to be so close to the almighty Rubel... ;-)
But then I looked up the PubSub LinkRank from October 18th, 2005. This blog's LinkRank was then 31,997 (compared to the 2,314 that earned me the third place on the PR list for one day). And that illustrates very clearly my main objection to PubSub's link ranking in general. It changes too quickly to be valuable. The problem is not my own ranking, but everyone else's. Now and then I want to get a sense of how "important", whatever that really means, a blog is. PubSub is certainly a place I check -- but I tend to distrust what I find. How can we trust a ranking that fluctuates like the track of a drunken elk?
Many sound people out there probably thinks "Who cares?". You're right I guess, which makes me want to point to Neil Kramer's insights after a weekend of exploring the world of male blogging:
"Too many men write about too many boring subjects - like computer technology, politics, gadgets, business news, and management styles. Ironically, these are the most popular sites on the web and make up most of the Technorati 100."
Blog transparency -- synthetic or authentic?
Are corporate blogs in general transparent? Or is it what we say or hope they are when they really just try to give that impression? The discussion is not new. But it is probably the most important discussion we can have about corporate blogs now that they rapidly are becoming more or less mainstream.
Advanced Organizational Communication wants to introduce a new phrase in this context: Synthetic Transparency. It's based on "synthetic personalization" which is "...a compensatory tendency to give the impression of treating each of the people 'handled' en masse as an individual." Think fast food restaurants, hotels etc. and you know what they mean.
I don't know about you, but this sure got me thinking (well chosen words/phrases have that effect on me). A blog that's just the old press releases is no blog and it will never have the positive effect a blog can have. I think we all agree to that. But I also think that many would agree that we can't talk about everything in a blog. There are information that would hurt us if it became publicly known (deals being negotiated, for example).
Does that mean that blogging by definition is synthetic transparency? In that case, could it be any other way? Or how can we achieve authentic transpareny and still have a job?
Maybe this is just semantics. But I don't think so. I think there's tens of thousands of people out there that want to blog but don't know how to handle exactly this issue. The corporate blogging policies we've seen doesn't give much guidance -- it's more complicated than "Don't tell secrets". Much more complicated. And because of that, much more interesting.
Whitepaper: Corporate group blogging
21publish tries to raise the profile of group blogging for business purposes in their new whitepaper Corporate Group Blogging (pdf). They remind us about the fact that many of the most popular blogs are group blogs: Daily Kos, Boing Boing etc.
"...the value of group business blogs over individual blogs can be summarized as follows:My main objection is that much of it is valid for blogging in general. I would add for example that group blogs create a less risky situation. The blog will (or might, at least) survive even if one blogger find a new job.
- group blogs capture information from real employees and experts and built tighter trust and ties with your constituents
- information on the various blogs making up the group blog is personalized not sanitized like traditional websites
- blogs provide a way to touch base regularly with customers, partners, and prospects
- group blogs can create top of mind awareness and demonstrate thought leadership on certain subjects while reducing the authoring requirements of each individual"
On the downside you can have doubts about the personalities. What if I really like one blogger but can't stand another one? Would the company be better off if I could choose just my favourite? And if I can, aren't we just talking about a corporate blog aggregator?
That said, let me also say that I like many group blogs. Especially when they are true group blogs. Extended social arenas (beyond the sole voice) where a blogger relate to the co-bloggers, discuss with them, even disagree with them.
Blogs in customer loyalty programs
Hapag-Lloyd Express, a provider of low-cost flights that in 2004 carried 2.7 million passengers, are using blogs as part of their customer loyalty program. Perhaps they weren't the first in their business to realize this obvious blog use, I don't know, but it's a good idea nevertheless. At HLX Urlaubsblogs everyone that has booked a flight can publish photos and post to blogs. Travelling is experiencing, experiences are best shared and blogging is sharing. Travels and blogs are a perfect match.
On our way from Attack to Acceptance
When I spoke about blogs 18 months ago I asked the audience "Have you heard the word blog?". Today I sometimes ask people "Are you so sick of the word that you never want to hear it again...?".
Actually very few has answered yes, but it seems as if there are a number of journalists out there that would have. Neville discusses two MSM blog stories, among them the infamous Forbes story, and in them he interprets a sign of the times.
"...we're now in the Stage 2 'attack' phase. That must indicate we've passed from Stage 1, the 'ignore/denial' phase, and on the way to Stage 3, the 'acceptance' phase.I think you're right Neville. The blog hype was perhaps necessary -- but it's just as necessary to get rid of it now, to let this tool find its place in professional communication. In that, the media attacks are a crucial step. Even if the "attackers" don't intend to they're giving the blog idea a very valuable help.
Royalty and diary gimmicks (a.k.a. fake blogs)
In Denmark there's a major discussion about two royalty blogs. You can read all about it in the The E-mediator blog, but in short Princess Alexandra and Crown Princess Mary have their own blogs, hosted by The Danish Cancer Society. Considering that they're written in third person I guess it's obvious that it's not blogs (the way most of us understand the word). An interesting sign, nevertheless, that this cool thing called blogging has made its way even to the dusty chambers of royal castles...
Don't miss E-mediator's short summary. Very illustrative.
Bad to hear in surgery: Could you stop that thing from beating; it's throwing off my concentration.!
Bad to hear from communication experts: You should get yourself a weblog!!! You know one of those diary gimmicks!
European Corporate Blogs: List updated (finally...)
Today I finally got around to update my list of European Corporate Blogs. It's not a full list, of course, but I understand that many people appreciate these examples from other countries than the US. So keep sending the tips.
Among those added I've found some personal favourites. I especially like the blog of The Danish Patent and Trademark Office. They're writing about innovations, patents, intellectual property and so on. Only in Danish, though.
I like the blog because it's an official part of the Office's site. Considering that they're a government agency under the Ministry of Economic and Business Affairs, that's a big step. I've discussed blogs with many people in the public sector and they usually think that it's interesting but not for them. Well, take a look at our Danish friends!
I'm also glad to be able to add a Swiss example to the list.
European blog survey for PR professionals
EuroBlog2006: We need the knowledge this survey by Euprera could generate. Finally a closer European look at professional blog use and corporate blogging. Answer it!