Bill Ives, co-author, Business Blogs: A Practical Guide
This session covered a lot of the basics, and the nearly full room reflected the growth in the number of business blogs as companies get experience with managing blogs, and determining the value as a communications tool.
- Use of blogs for business activities: Effective examples are Microsoft and IBM communities, SAP Developer, John Hopkins Applied Physics Lab Laboratory, and MIT Sloan
- Show of hands – about a third of this audience is blogging, so room for growth in this market.
- Tom Davenport (KM guru) now has own blog. Searchable archive is high value, particularly for knowledge workers.
- Showed own blog as a personal knowledge management system, using it to annotate materials, and providing link to the article itself which can then be shared either internally or externally. Uses trackback as a means of communicating.
- Key value is 1) No barrier to entry, 2) Transparency and 3) Searchable archive. CIO at MIT Sloan put all project status reports on a blog – used comments to communicate widely.
- Example of advisory committee of doctors for hospital project. Meeting minutes put in blog, and openly accessible on any computer in the complex. Doctors could comment and add links to relevant articles. Value established with final report using archived entries and comments.
- Blogs offer “Discourse at the boundary between conversation and publication” ( Alexander Halavais). Individuals are now biggest contributor to Web content, i.e. reviews.
- Knowledge management seen as conversations. Lower barrier to entering the Web, further reducing the cost of communication. Components include 1) creation, 2) collection, 3) context, 4) connection, 5) conversation, 6) community and 7) collaboration.
- Examples: Compassion used as means of collecting success stories from the field for fund raisers. IBM’s Ed Brill and Microsoft’s Scobleizer gives human face to large organizations. Small companies can communicate a world wide presence.
- Question from audience about difference between discussion forums and blogs. Discussion Forums are threaded communications, and cinitiateditated by any authorized member. Blogs are managed by a single individual, with a voice to reach the intended audience. Each entry has its own webpage, which generally allows comments.