Thursday, August 05, 2004

Sun Blog Sparks Novell Purchase Rumor

So Blogs might be bad for business!Following on from my post yesterday about Businesses and Weblogs this story on how Invester relations can be demaged when one of the senior execs writes what he thinks.

So if this is the standard by which others will be judged then Blogs and business will only be possible by the laywers and PR people. However we do see a large number of staff at Microsoft maintain their personal blogs. Last year we even had a contractor fired by Microsoft for photoblogging the delivery of new G5 Macs because it was an embarasement.

I still think that done well the Blog has a place within the communications strategy of a business just the same as online forums have in the delivery of customer support. One company that does seem to have done a good job at online communication with all its stajeholders is SAP, althought posting something once a month does not qualify as blogging in my book!

DE

Wednesday, August 04, 2004

10 Companies That Missed Blog Opportunities

B.L. Ochman's weblog has an interesting take on businesses that miss the opportunity to Blog. This is something that I have been trying to understand for the last year, having read an interesting feature in the Harvard Business Review.

I have spoken to a number of senior PR types about how they plan to use Blogs all of whom say that they run their own site but do not do so for clients, the issue being one of how to get paid for such activity. Now one of the things I like about blogginbg is that micro publishing lets all of us attempt to be a thought leader. But (yes there had to be a but) the introduction of some professional writers can make a difference. Just look at how the Feature (a mobile telecoms site sponsored by Nokia ) does now that it has paid writers contributing. The other benefit is that with the readers ability to interact the copy becomes self policing, you remove the editor from the process but the use of a blog to push a product limits it effectiveness. The introduction of business into the Blogging world has to be a benefit because as a hobby we are faced with hobby sites, just look at what happened to George Micheal's site when he allowed anyone to post!