Blog: Design
Revolutionize that
16 Mar 04 by DL Byron
Wanderlost posted a summary of the Blogging for Business at SXSW. It went very well and I was surprised by the large turnout and amount of questions. Based on that, I think the topic could fill a conference day. Now that blogs are beyond the tipping point, people want to know how to make them work for their business. I discussed how we blog at Clip-n-Seal and my experience as a consultant at a large corporation that's embraced blogging. The questions centered on "connecting with customers" and "blogging behind the firewall." Most wanted to know
- How to do it?
- How to change your business with a blog?
- How to get one started?
- How to tell your boss it's not a personal journal?
- What software to use?
- What are the liabilities?
- What about PR?
These same questions are probably being discussed at companies worldwide. The panel repeatedly noted how Movable Type was an effective team tool and Sharepoint Team Sites were not. I've built countless intranets that have never worked as knowledge management. Movable Type and RSS feeds simply (or a wiki) work. Tom Coates has written about the The Mass Amateurisation of (Nearly) Everything. What I'm thinking about now is the Mass Amateurization of an intranet, a sales/marketing plan, and how to revolutionize that. That thinking should turn into a case study or white paper.
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Comments
Posted by doug | 16 Mar 04
I'd think that these are probably the sticking points for most businesses:
How to tell your boss it's not a personal journal?
What are the liabilities?
What about PR?
Once you get past those questions, the other stuff is cake (relatively).
I also totally agree on the "amateurization of everything" in the sense that a lot of small, light-weight tools that can be mixed and matched and customized are much more effective than a single giant sledgehammer of software. For example, if Moveable Type isn't filling your blog needs on your intranet, you can try something else. Write your own if you're able. If Sharepoint (just an example, not trying to pick on Microsoft) isn't serving your blog needs, you're out of luck because you just spent the equivalent of a person's salary on licenses, new hardware, IT man-hours to babysit the thing, and training from the people who sold it to you.
And the small, flexible tools don't necessarily need to be open source or free, though that is a nice bonus when you're proposing your budget. Dollar cost, I think, is less important than flexiblity and customization. No organization really knows what they need when they're building out their intranet. The users, by adopting some features and ignoring others, communicate their needs as they go along. The builders need to be able to change course quickly.
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