Blog Posts About: Weblogs and Business

Lilia Efimova Sebastian Fiedler, Carla Verwijs and
Andy Boyd have published a paper called: Legitimised theft: distributed apprenticeship in weblog networks. (download .pdf here)

If you're interested in some of the latest thinking about the internal use of weblogs in corporations, this paper does a good job of describing the possibilities, opportunities and barriers.

For a company employee weblogs can provide a unique opportunity to access usually invisible trails of development and flows of ideas, a window onto practice. It can serve as a learning resource for others, as well as providing a better overview of internal expertise and experts, and may lead to the speeding up of innovation due to earlier cross-fertilisation of ideas. Weblogs can be used as a technology for facilitating and extending existing apprenticeship and coaching programs or capturing stories of retiring experts.

The authors also list some of the barriers to adoption (questions in my own words):

Critical Mass: Will enough people actually read them?
Time Gap: Does the weblogged information have a shelf life?
Embedding into existing practice: Will they fit with other learning initiatives?

Sun Policy on Public Discourse

This is Tim Bray's "Policy on Public Discourse" from Sun. I think it shows that they are seeing the light and using common sense when it comes to using the web to have conversations with their market.

Like Microsoft, they are working to change an image and using real people with weblogs to do it. In fact, it reminds me of (Microsoft blogger) Robert Scoble's Corporate Weblog Manifesto.

Rick E. Bruner's Business Blog Consulting

Back when I first started blogging, and hadn't yet created Common Craft, Rick commented on a post in my personal weblog. With his comments he became one of the first folks I met through my weblog that was doing real work with companies using weblogs.

Now he's got a new weblog called Business Blog Consulting and he's been a prolific poster, introducing ideas and lots of the movers and shakers in the weblog world.

About:

Business Blog Consulting is a site devoted to demonstrating how effective weblogs can be for communicating with customers and marketing to new customer prospects. You will find here lots of examples of business blogs, as well as resources to help you learn more about the topic.

It’s been great being the winner of the perfect weblog pitch competition, but I think it really shows how new all these ideas are to the corporate world. It’s not like I have a long and storied career of implementing weblogs in corporations that led me to crafting the “perfect pitch�?. Mine was just my best look into what corporate weblogs may become in the future, based on my experiences so far.

I think all of us, the judges, the participants and many others are shaping the corporate weblog world as we go. Only collectively can we push the envelop to the next level. In my opinion, the key in getting to the next level (and knowing it when we are there) will be our commitment to sharing what we’re learning as a community. Luckily we have weblogs to do the sharing. Fellow participants like Michael Angeles have inspired me to share as openly as I can (or I'm allowed).

I hope that the competition and my small part at least provides a snapshot in time- an artifact from this point in the corporate weblog world. One day in the future we may look back at the competition and say “Can you believe THAT was the winner back then? What were they thinking? That Lee guy was so far off!�?.

I hope that’s not the case, but if it is, that’s fine, because I will have learned since then too.

Again, many thanks to everyone involved. I'm humbled by the attention- and hope that my future, as played out on this weblog, will contribute to our community in useful ways.

Man this is exciting! I won! I won! I won! I won! This should help my nose heal much faster.

From the moment I heard about the Perfect Corporate Weblog Pitch Competition, I thought, " Oh man, I'm all over this!"

Many thanks to Judith Meskill and the folks at WeblogsInc. and Spoke Software for the prize. Also, many thanks to the judges, many of whom I've grown to admire over the past couple of years. So very cool to have a chance to participate. Woo hoo!!!

I'm excited to see what everyone else posted too- I'm sure this subject brought out a lot of great and varied perspectives.

Funny to see that picture of me on the Social Software Weblog- It's from a rotating banner image on my personal weblog: www.leelefever.com. It was taken last summer in rural Montana.

So, below is the pitch that did it. I must have rewritten it about 50 times, trying to get to it to that "place". I was really trying to think about executives and how they look at the world- and the Wall Street Journal is a big part of that view.

Overall, the message was that weblogs give everyone in a company the ability to see more context in the company around them.

THE PITCH

First, think about the value of the Wall Street Journal to business leaders. The value it provides is context �?? the Journal allows readers to see themselves in the context of the financial world each day, which enables more informed decision making.

With this in mind, think about your company as a microcosm of the financial world. Can your employees see themselves in the context of the whole company? Would more informed decisions be made if employees and leaders had access to internal news sources?

Weblogs serve this need. By making internal websites simple to update, weblogs allow individuals and teams to maintain online journals that chronicle projects inside the company. These professional journals make it easy to produce and access internal news, providing context to the company �?? context that can profoundly affect decision making. In this way, weblogs allow employees and leaders to make more informed decisions through increasing their awareness of internal news and events.

Updated:
Without the worthy panel judges, this would not have been possible. They were:

Dave Pollard, Dina Mehta, Don Park, Flemming Funch, Jim McGee, Lilia Efimova, Martin Dugage, Phil Wolff, Ross Mayfield, Scott Allen, and Ton Zijlstra

And the other winners were:

Second Place: Randal Moss

Third Place (tied): Michael Angeles and Jack Vinson

Esse Quam Videre is my new motto – it means “to be rather than to seem�?. Not only is it the motto of my home state (North Carolina), but it captures the essence of what I believe is happening in business today and more importantly what I think will happen tomorrow. Let me explain in an admittedly idealistic fashion…

I believe that a fundamental change is occurring in the way that businesses market to and interact with their customers -- a notion I first saw related in the pages of the Cluetrain Manifesto. The essence of the change I see is related to “seeming�? vs. “being�?. I’ll start with a description of these two terms related to this post.

To “seem�? is to project a specific impression or to appear as desired

To “be�?is to be real or to have an existence

Seeming vs. Being

The growth and power of online discussions and weblogs are moving organizations from a state of “seeming�? to a state of “being�?. The current public face of a majority of companies is more about how the company *wants* to appear in the market than how it actually appears to customers, as described in press releases and marketing collateral. The message is one of “seeming�? a certain way to customers and this message is losing power and influence.

At the same time, tools like online discussions and weblogs are allowing companies to “be�?. These new tools are providing the foundation for a new kind of marketing, a new way for companies to appear in the market by enabling real people to be the embodiment of the company’s message.

Using weblogs and online discussions, companies can project an authentic message that engages and builds relationships with customers through personal connections and communication. These tools help the organization to be more human- as in human “beings�?.

So what?

I believe that “being�? is a competitive advantage and that “seeming�? is becoming a liability. In the future, companies will find that it is impossible to project an image that does not match the reality. They will find that there are hyper-connected, vocal and influential people in their customer base (and inside their company) who may rival their own influence in the market -- and these people will expose the problems they see and celebrate the successes.

In this new reality, companies will need new resources to influence a new kind of market; not a mass one, but one of customers with influential voices. Only by influencing this new market of influencers will companies realize the value of “being�? real and dealing with customers and the market in honest and engaging ways.

What’s a company to do?

Companies need to understand the value of Esse Quam Videre- "to be rather than to seem". As the environment changes, we’ll see more companies adopt the strategy of engagement in these new networks of influencers. Instead of defending themselves against the perspectives of influential webloggers and communities, successful businesses will learn to become part of the discussion – to engage the influencers.

As companies learn to "be", they will become more transparent, more open and personal. They will create weblogs and online communities that allow their customers to interact with people inside the company who really know what is going on. They will become more human, warts and all.

All Companies?

No. I don’t expect to see a weblog from my bank teller -- and “seeming�? may be perfectly appropriate for many companies. However, I think a growing number of companies will find that their market is made up of people with growing online influence.

Currently, this change is affecting mostly high tech companies, where users are more likely to have weblogs or participate in online discussions. Over time, as weblogs and online discussions become more mainstream, the risks of not being involved in these networks will grow.

Below are examples of companies that are “being�?:

Microsoft has made some real progress toward being. MSDN's Channel 9 is one of the more impressive examples of transparency and personal communication. Further, they have over 400 employee bloggers who are working to personally communicate with the market every day. Microsoft is becoming more human.

Apple, HP, Cisco and Adobe all have online support communities that are networks of users who support one another using the company web site. Inside these communities, a human voice is the only type of communication that exists. These companies are using online communities to support users, but also engage them in conversations that build long-term relationships and trust.

MacroMedia is using corporate sponsored weblogs to allow employees to have a voice in the market. Their weblogs are run by their community development team, personally managed and open to the public. This is one of the most advanced and managed systems of corporate weblogs I’ve seen.

Six Apart makes the ultra-popular weblog platforms Movable Type and TypePad. As you might expect, they use weblogs to market products, inform customers, and promote ideas. In using their various weblogs, they engender trust because they know that they are under the microscope of thousands of webloggers- who will not let them seem to be something they are not. They can only be.

Northfield Construction is a small company that uses a weblog to support their construction business.

The list goes on and on.

The traditional marketing machine is losing ground to networks of real and influential people with opinions based on reality and experience. The only thing that will matter is the real quality of a product or service, not what it seems to be.

In the end, I believe that companies who learn to be rather than to seem will reap the rewards from a market that values reality and substance over bravado.