Blogging with your mobile

There is a real buzz around user-created content on the web at the moment. The popularity of sites like YouTube are sound testament to this. But, in order to find genuinely original material you often have to wade through a mass of lifted TV and film footage. Even if you do find the true user-created nuggets you are searching for, the talking heads and candid action rely upon people who have access to camcorders, digital cameras, or the most high-tech mobile phones.

However, as mobiles become more advanced this seems set to change. Cameras are now a fairly standard feature on everyday handsets and even video capturing facilities of a higher quality are beginning to appear, bringing the world of videography to the masses.

At the recent Internet World exhibition we spoke to someone from Moblog.co.uk, a new website which encourages people to film and take snapshots using their phones, and then share them with everyone else by uploading. Effectively it’s a blog for mobiles, hence the name!

Moblog has already been recognised by some as a useful marketing tool. Pop music group ‘Girls Aloud’ have already been documenting their day to day activities on the website, which has created much interest amongst their fans. It remains to be seen if companies will attempt to monopolise Moblog with fake user-created content designed to carry a commercial message.

John Scott

Reasons to blog – it’s not really about community

A frequent reaction to people who suggest internal company weblogs is “Why?” 

Why should we add another communications channel when we have e-mail, phone, Microsoft Project and pieces of paper? 

People have written books about this. But it’s always worth stressing the concrete, practical tasks you can achieve with this sort of technology. For a short version, James at Step Two Designs has summarised why his business uses internal blogs: 

• “summary of all the proposals that we send out, so everyone knows what’s in the pipeline
• updates on projects as they are unfolding
• new ideas and interesting tidbits that we come across
• updates on business development activities, including monthly financial reports
• internal broadcast messages and requests for help”

These types of example probably say more to a manager than a thousand words of theoretical text about “communities”, “collaboration”, and of course “Enterprise 2.0″.

Why everybody’s using enterprise 2.0 except the enterprise

Once upon a time, they invented weblogs. Weblogs caused a big stir, and spread around the world in a very short time. In parallel, Web 2.0 was becoming a catchphrase, as people recognised that the time was ripe for participation, collaboration, and bottom-up rather than top-down. 

After a while, the buzz cooled down, although millions of people continued blogging, and websites continued to get the Web 2.0 treatment. Everybody had a blog, and the focus was moving to what they said rather than how they said it. Web 2.0 had come of age everywhere.   

Everywhere, that is, except some of the world’s biggest corporations. In our experience, a lot of people in these large companies know about collaborative software, Web 2.0, and blogs. They see the value (often having watched how their own kids use the stuff), and are keen to implement them. Convinced by the idea of Web 2.0, they start asking around about how to put it into practice, and at that point come up against any number of people who’ll tell them why it can’t be done.

And they’re often right, considering that enterprises plan their IT for three or five years into the future.  As Andrew McAfee, an Associate Professor at Harvard Business School, points out in his blog, the key hurdle is usually technology. “…security and access control remain key concerns among technologists, and they’ll have to be addressed before most IT departments give their blessings to Enterprise 2.0.”

What’s more, Andrew says, these tools are unlikely to spread like wildfire around the enterprise anytime in the near future. 

“As I wrote at the end of last year, my most likely scenario for the near-term future of Enterprise 2.0 is somewhere between niche deployment and spotty mainstream adoption… I believe that managers and companies that are in fact willing to do this work will gain valuable capabilities and quite possibly get a leg up on the competition.  But can you see why I think there might not be a lot of them, at least in the short term?”

See also “Most Business Tech Pros Wary About Web 2.0 Tools In Business” (Information Week) Thanks to Globally Local, Locally Global for the pointer. 

David Harbottle

Is there a place for employee participation on intranets?

Most people are aware of the buzz surrounding things like weblogs, “citizen journalism”, and even podcasting. They’re often used as examples of how the web is allowing greater participation from its users. But is there a place for any of this participation on a serious business intranet?

We’re currently looking at ways to develop plain old bulletin boards with two of our clients. The aim is to give employees a secure place where they can ask and answer questions, report the latest competitor sightings, or just sell their stereos. Such a board can be particularly useful when potential contributors are all over the world.

Bulletin boards are basic, but practical and useful. They’re a good way for companies to dip their toe in the water and start encouraging employee participation via an intranet.

At the other end of the scale, the BBC is usually cited as the organisation that’s been most adventurous in this direction (follow this link to find out how). Employees run hundreds of internal blogs, participate in dozens of wikis and thousands connect via a network called talk.gateway. Participation on this scale has its drawbacks, but it has great potential for eliciting new ideas and pushing collaborative projects forward. So there’s a huge range of possibilities from the very basic to the elaborate. And there’s a place for all of them on an intranet, as long as the aims are clear.

There’s no shortage of opinions on how best to use these evolving resources to improve communication within a business. Here’s an article asking whether or not you should allow employees to blog on your intranet. Business Week describes how business can use Wikis to replace e-mail. And here’s a list of bulletin board providers frequently used in business.

David Harbottle

L’Oréal’s blogging disaster

A new survey by thePewResearchCenter has revealed that around 12 million US adults publish a weblog, and 57 million people are weblog readers.

Isn’t blogging just for egocentrics and unhappy teens? Not at all – businesses are discovering the value of weblogs in promoting their brands and products. But as l’Oréal discovered, publishing a weblog is not as easy as it looks…

Blogging – keeping an online journal or “weblog” about a certain topic – sounds simple, doesn’t it? Something happens, you have a few thoughts about it, you type them out then click the “publish” button for the world to admire.

But when l’Oréal stepped casually into this new world, the company found blogging was not as easy as it might appear. In a promotional drive for Vichy l’Oréal invented a character called Claire who was concerned about her appearance and her wrinkles, and used her blog to talk favourably about the company’s new anti-ageing cream.

It was a disaster. The online world criticised the artificial blog and fake character called Claire. Word spread around the Internet like wildfire. Readers found they were unable to comment on the site and felt excluded. The press said L’Oréal had misunderstood how this form of promotion could work, and the Vichy brand was in danger of serious damage.

It was not a good start, but you can’t blame them for trying. There are now millions and millions of weblog readers in the world, and thousands of businesses are using them to support their traditional promotional efforts.

The upside for L’Oréal was that they had the courage to persist. They hired a well-known French expert on weblogs called Loïc le Meur to advise them how to manage the crisis. They apologised to the public and the blog became much more open. The fake Claire was dropped and the real Vichy team became a part of the site. The result was admiration and interest from the public.

Read the full story of how l’Oréal started a weblog and what happened next on Shel Israel and Robert Scoble’s site.

Are they talking about us? Are we listening to them?

Weblogs can offer big companies a lot, even if they decide not to publish one themselves. They are firstly a chance to listen in to the public and find out what it really thinks.

Bloggers are consumers, and they like to criticise or praise what they’ve bought. Of course, their praise is an excellent form of advertising, and since bloggers are often influential they will likely help to spread the word about a good product. Meanwhile their criticism is an opportunity for companies to hear an authentic opinion about their products and capture insights about how to improve them.

For an example of the way weblogs can give you a glimpse of what consumers are really saying, take a look at this search for Compeed (most people are raving about it!).

Sites like Bloglines and Technorati are designed to search millions of weblogs and give results updated every few minutes. Although a lot of reseller advertising is mixed up in there, why not try searching for a brand you’re involved with?

Business weblogs – more a dialogue than a sermon

Businesses publish weblogs for many reasons. But behind every business weblog is the desire to improve sales and increase income.

The English Cut is a small tailoring business whose owner decided to start a weblog. He uses this to explain the skills that go into making a bespoke suit, and keeps his customers informed about fitting sessions. As a result his business has exploded and he now makes regular trips to London, New York and California to measure up new customers.

Successful business weblogs are used to listen to customers, to communicate, to foster a community of users, and to keep people informed. Businesses use weblogs internally too, in order to gather opinions and suggestions from staff. In other words weblogs are a dialogue, not just an opportunity for a business to broadcast their usual message.

Check out some other well known brands that are using blogging to communicate with their consumers:

• Microsoft
• Glenfiddich
• Thomson Holidays
• Hewlett Packard

David Harbottle