Blog Posts About: Weblogs and Business

Here is more evidence of the power of the weblog community to call out businesses who step over the line:

The website Cowboy's and Poodles learned about a recent snowsports tradeshow where the Ride snowboards booth displayed a sign that read "The worst thing about riding a Burton is telling your friends you're gay". After hearing about this, the site owner organized a boycott and encouraged readers to let Ride Snowboards know what they thought.

Soon after, the President of Ride Snowboards posted this on the company's web site.

Aside from the poor judgement of Ride, I think this is an great example of the growing power of the weblog community. Webloggers have growing power to take letter writing campaigns to new levels- and get results.

Companies should take note that there are influential people watching them and they are ready to report what they see to their community via weblogs and online communities- and word travels faster than ever.

Via: Anil

Fast Company | It's A Blog World After All

Jonathan Carson, president and CEO of BuzzMetrics, a New York-based firm that mines message boards, listservs, and blogs to see what's being said about companies, says his clients ignored blogs nine months ago. Today, more than half specifically ask whether his monitoring includes the blogosphere. "If companies focus in on what's going on in the blog world, it's an amazing leading indicator on what's going to break in the real world," he says.

This quote also reminds me of my last post that included survey results that showed that bloggers like to name and promote companies that "deserve" credit.

Blog Survey: Summary of Findings

The results have just been published for a survey conducted by Fernanda Viegas at MIT. I took it back in January and the focus of the survey was weblogs and "Expectations of Privacy and Accountability."

486 bloggers took the survey and the results provide an interesting look at how we, as webloggers, view our responsibilities and liabilities. As the survey points out, it appears that the blog world is in flux, with some trends emerging. An interesting insight:

Reasons for revealing the names of companies on blog postings:

- providing a service to other people; that is, informing potential consumers about products
- if the products are good, the company deserves the credit

Reasons for not revealing the name of a company:
- if the company is the blogger’s current employer
- if the company is a former employer
- if the blogger is interviewing with the company

If you're interested in understanding the ways in which weblogs and RSS can be used within an organization/enterprise, check out this presentation (with speaking notes, 4.6mb .pdf)by Michael Angeles. Nice screen shots and a broad view of considerations, tools and implementation approaches. Good, good stuff.

Via: Column Two

Michael Angeles has posted an interesting entry on how weblogs and RSS may be used as an information service within a company. Along with the possibilties, he also provides some well-grounded thoughts on how to get people to be webloggers:

The environment has to be right. Potential bloggers can't be forced into this role, but must be willing to fall gently into it. Potential bloggers should be selected among those that have the appropriate skills and subject area exposure for the topics you want to cover. If these (and other important factors that I haven't identified yet) are in place, perhaps this can happen. Perhaps we can employ librarians/indexers as bloggers.

and...

I'm inclined to agree that if you want to tap the potential of the knowledge worker to create/contribute/share knowledge, you have to spend a lot of time making sure the environment makes them feel enabled/empowered/rewarded for doing so.

Via: Column Two

This Harvard case study (26 page .pdf) discusses how webloggers covered the remarks and ultimate resignation of Trent Lott after his remarks regarding Strom Thurmond's pro-segregation stance.

It's a detailed play-by-play of how the blogosphere took a remark that was ignored by much of the mainstream media and made it into an issue that ended with the resignation of a Senator.