Archives
Happy Holidays
Have fun! Back again mid-January.
Kryptonite: Bloggers' role exaggerated?
Kryptonite locks and the pen that opened them... If people have heard of one story related to blogs' influence on businesses, it's Kryptonite. But what really happened? Well, Dave Taylor interviews the company's PR Manager Donna Tocci to find out. He says up front that his "...bias is that the adverse effect of the blogosphere on corporations is much overblown..."
I certainly don't know if this is the true story. But Tocci's answers offer some perspective, especially to people that demand instant corporate response and action to whatever debate that's going on in the blogosphere. Speaking about why they didn't announce their exchange program faster, Tocci says: "Well, the Internet moves at real time but companies sometimes can't - not 'won't', but can't. If we'd announced what we wanted to do before we had the back end in place and couldn't back it up, that would have been the bigger PR nightmare, right?"
Wikipedia comes close to Britannica in terms of accuracy
Wikipedia comes close to Britannica in terms of the accuracy of its science entries, a Nature investigation finds.
Blogging in the largest German companies
An interesting look into the blog plans of the largest German companies: Five of 30 are already using internal or external blogs, and five more are examing the tool.
Among the bloggers we find the boss of Siemens, Klaus Kleinfeld, who uses his intranet blog to talk about visits to different companies in the group, technology, trends and innovation.
It's also very interesting to learn why some companies actively, so far, have chosen not to blog. E.On think that the costs of blogging are too high considering the possible advantages. There also seem to be doubts about content being published without standard editorial control.
The second objection is a common one and if company execs are afraid about what employees might write they have internal issues relating to trust and loyalty that goes way beyond blogging as such.
The first objection is more intriguing and made me think of Niall Cook's post "What's the ROI of blogging?". I think the following quote is central to understanding corporate blogging:
"As I sat through sessions with ROI in their title, I was struck by the difference Delahaye's Mark Weiner highlighted between value and return on investment. To paraphrase (accurately, I hope), value is relative (or subjective) whereas return on investment is absolute (or objective). ... If you accept this logic, then the way you measure relative and absolute metrics must also be different.Thanks to Hugo E. Martin for the tip!