e 3 a s h i g R E F L E C T I O N S

Promoting Corporate Blog Culture

The personal blogging culture in UAE is quite active with new Emarati blogs springing up everyday as the technology becomes easier and more accessible. However, corporate blogging is nonexistence. I have not come across a single company or public sector organization in UAE that took part in this new exciting phenomenon or benefited from it in anyway. They have in large isolated themselves from the blogosphere. Let’s face it; our corporate culture is already out of touch even with the older online technologies and the continuing persistent to do this is going to be severely damaging in the long run.

If you work in a school, college, hospital, university, private sector Company, or a government instituting, you may want to forward this post to your public relations department to convince them that THIS IS the new-age internet and there is no doubt that its wave is coming to us. We might as well get on top of it.

I am truly thankful to Happ, uaeadorable, kitten, Almazroie, uaeyah, and surrealist for their insightful feedback on the original write up.

• What is a Blog?
• Why is Corporate Blogging a good idea?
• Why are some organizations still resistant to blogging?
• What types of blog should your organization consider?
1. Internal Corporate blog
2. External Corporate blog
3. Employees individual blogs
• Organizations that are already in the blogosphere
• Technologies required to blog
• Further resources

What is a Blog?
Blogs are one of the most significant online trends. There are millions of these “online journals,” most of them maintained by individuals. They could be likened to an online personal diary in that many contain a regular series of postings from an individual about a topic, their life, or day-to-day events that impact them. A Weblog might contain short notes with links to other sites that contain relevant news or information, often with a bit of commentary.

Why is Corporate Blogging a good idea?
Blogging is the most spectacular online phenomenon since sliced bread and Google. People no longer wish to read press releases and articles about a company in newspapers and magazines that everyone knows were spiced up one way or another by the company’s PR department. Blogs have their own private and personal touch, because of their informal nature; they are close to the hearts and minds of every internet user. Businesses and public institutions are yet to start exploring this medium’s unique features to its full potential where newspaper articles and PR departments fail. They are better, more effective and more cutting edge methods of communication.

When it started, most organizations were skeptical about this new trend and its adoption was very slow and cautious. It is now known that the state of the blogosphere is on fire. Its total size as tracked by Technorati was 7.8 million blogs last Feb and doubles every 5 months. In the last 20 months alone, the blogosphere increased in size 16 times.

Fig: Weblogs tracked by Technorati Mar 2003- Feb 2005

30,000-40,000 new blogs are being created every day which is to say: a new blog every 2.2 seconds. More and more blogging tools, software and services are gaining more penetration in the market including (MyMSN spaces, blogger, lifejaurnal, AOL journal) that one can expect the numbers only to increase further.

Fig: New Weblogs created per day Mar 2003 - Oct 2004

Some of the things blogs provide that press releases and newsletters don’t.
1. Company Image
Blogs add up to the company’s image by projecting to the world that they are keeping up with the latest technology trends. It does not get any trendier than blogging in the World Wide Web nowadays. Your company is hip, advanced and out there in the continuously developing cyber world.

2. Instant feedback
This is one of the best features of corporate blogs: You are connected directly to your end users without the burden of the multi-layered structure of secretaries, different level managers and public relation departments. You are there, with the people that matter most to your business and you can read what they think and interact with them in real time. Neither long and draining market studies nor statistics are required to establish and monitor what is happening in the field. You see things as they happen. In addition, a corporate blog connects the management with the smallest employees and establishes an environment of friendliness and a sense of community within the organization. Blogs are a superior communication tool that links the entire organization together.

3. More informative
Blogs by nature are updated much more often than newsletters and press releases. They tend to be more inclusive of events both outside and inside the organization; activities, parties, birthdays, managers views, change in staff and many other things that can not really go through the company’s PR department.

4. Much Simpler
A blog entry can be as short as a single word, line, a paragraph or extend beyond that, a luxury not catered for by press releases and newsletters.

5. Easier linking to internal and external sources
In a corporate’s blog, you can easily include a link to a news article or a event online that relate to your business or your corporate field of interest. People find it easy to navigate from your corporate network to the outside world to see what is happening out there and relate to it.

6. RSS Syndication
RSS is one of the corner stones of the new-age internet. The concept of the “Semantic Web” evolves around production of data in a consistent standard format that can be read and understood both by human and machines, and the total separation of date from the design surrounding it, or the medium that is used to deliver it. This is, and has always been a huge engineering problem. Few solutions were envisioned and one of the popular ones now is XML for RSS syndication. RSS is a critical part of today’s blogosphere. It is great for organization wishing not to sit and wait for their visitors to come and learn about them, but want to deliver their news to the readers using whatever design or medium to view it. It is gradually becoming the gateway to major news engines including MyYahoo, MyMSN, Newsgator and, perhaps soon, Google news together with customer’s standalone news programs installed on their computers, mobile phones and PDA. RSS is really the answer to reaching your reader’s, especially the top 1% of them who are most influential and can further propagate your message to thousands in their circles.

7. Tracking and Track-back
With a blog, you can keep real time monitor on the demographics of users who are interested in learning about your organization or product and it becomes much easier to track where they came from, how long they spent reading your news, where they exited to afterwards, what country they reside in, what search engine query they used to find about you and a whole battery of other information. These monitoring services are provided by virtually all current web hosts, and there are free service providers who will actually do it for free if you do not wish to go through your web host. Further more, a nice feature provided by modern blog management software is “Track Back” where, if you chose, a snippet of the text other people used to link to your posts is publicly displaced after your entry, thus, putting the short piece of news you published in a broader context and accessing everybody’s view, not just on your website feedback, but also anywhere else on the internet. In essence, track back allows you point to the people who point to you.

8. Control
Contrary to what some people think, blog entries’ feedback and comments rarely mushroom into flame-war battlegrounds, an occurrence much too frequent in discussion boards. It is not in the nature of blogs to cater for extended discussions. Experience shows that only focused distilled feedback is posted in response to blog entries, and, if you don’t like feedback, you can disable it all together, and still enjoy all the other benefits of a corporate blog.

9. Instantly searchable
Blogs are instantly searchable by external search engines as you post them unlike every other part of the corporate website. Most search engine spiders (the programs that actually index your website on the search engine database) take up to three weeks to catch up with your updated news. Even the fastest search spider out there takes at least one to two days to keep up with your website. With blogs however, your content is visible and searchable to the whole of the online world the minute you press “Publish” thanks to the free automated ping-o-metric and other similar services.

10. Saves money & time
It actually costs nothing to put your company’s name on the blogosphere and reap the benefit of this new online trend. Your organization can host its blog on its current computer system, or buy a remote host less than $80 dollars or even host for free on one of the abundantly available services. The programs that actually run these web logs and make them work are provided for free by generous open source online communities and trust me, they do get the job brilliantly done. Blogging in fact can save you both time and money as it becomes easier to publish company news with the click of a button. When editing is required, entries automatically go to your editor, HR, PR, or legal people to approve of it before it is actually published – saving their time, yours, the porters, and saving the loads of paper that your organization consumed.

If you are now thinking: “GOSH where was I in the last few years. How did I miss this sweeping online phenomenon” then don’t worry. Your organization is not the only one out there who has been left out. To date, only IT, News and Media industries have fully explored the online blogging to their benefit, other industries have been largely unaware of the potential of the blogosphere.

Why are some organizations still resistant to blogging

• Possible publication of corporate secrets
• Too much effort to get the blog in sync between the public relations and the legal departments
• Conversational style of the blog might clash with corporate branding (e.g. with a top bank.)
• The blog might turn into a blatant PR channel, turning readership away, being a one-sided, or even untrustworthy source
• No clear distinction between news and blogs.
• Too much time spent on replying to customer feedback on blogs
• Blog silence will cause suspicion of something being wrong amongst readership
• Politics again: corporate seldom have one management voice inside. Likewise it will be difficult to find one blogging voice to the outside
• As long as the competition doesn’t blog, why should we?
• Fear of talking to people, and fear of letting your people talk.

These reasons are very likely to be flagged up in corporate meetings while the decision to blog or not to blog is being discussed. This is the logic not of a organization that is afraid of blogs, but one that is afraid of conversation and innovation in communication methods. An argument encouraging Corporate Blogging might be centered around the following points:

• Markets consist of human beings, not demographic sectors.
• Companies need to come down from their Ivory Towers and talk to the people with whom they hope to create relationships.
• Companies can now communicate with their markets directly. If they blow it, it could be their last chance.
• These networked blogging conversations enable powerful new forms of social organization and knowledge exchange to emerge around your company/product.
• Once a community evolves around a corporate blog, people in the network will figure out how to get information and support from one another than from vendors which will save time and money.
• There are no secrets. The market will eventually know about your product as much as you do. Talking about it openly will make create a base of loyal customers who have good faith in what you tell them.
• Blogs do not speak in the same voice as press releases and newsletters where, to their intended audiences, the later sound hollow, flat, literally inhuman.
• Markets do not want to talk to press releases. They want to participate in the conversations going on behind the corporate firewall.
• Companies must ask themselves where their corporate culture ends. And if it ends before the community begins, they will have no market.
• Smart companies will get out of the way and help the inevitable to happen sooner.
• Companies that assume online markets are the same markets that used to watch their ads on television are kidding themselves.
• People are becoming immune to conventional methods of advertising
• Companies spent billions on Y2K bug. Why can’t they hear this market time bomb ticking? The stakes for missing this trend are very higher indeed.

More thought provoking arguments in favour of better communication with the market are available on this URL

If you really think there is no time for writing or even reading a blog, then you may find this article insightful. Patrick writes

“So where do we get time to read or write blogs? For writing, I would have to admit that it is a passion for some (like me) and they will do it because they want to. As for reading blogs it is a more complex question. Where did we get the time to use Instant Messaging? There are millions of IM’s every day. Where did that time come from? Telephone calls and email. The average person spends hours per month surfing. Where did it come from? TV, trade magazines, catalogs. This is nothing new. TV took time out of Radio. There are only so many hours in a day but the number of “channels” of communication is constantly expanding. It is mostly additive. This phenomenon is not a bug; it is a feature. Having so many channels allows us more choice, more breadth and depth, and more on demand information and expertise. Technical people have told me that blogs have become their primary source of technical information. Some people are using Newsgator as their primary way to read news. Blogging will begin to take a chunk of time away from email, surfing, IM, trade magazines, newspapers, and journals.”

What sort of blogs will your corporate consider

1. Internal blog on corporate intranet network.
2. External blog on corporate website.
3. Employees’ individual and personal blogs.

Essentially, the same concept, tools, software and methods are used in all of the three types of blogs above. I separated them because the approach of your corporate to each of these might be different.

1. INTERNAL BLOG ON COPRPORATE INTRANET NETWORK
A blog on the corporate internal network can serve as complementary/substitute at two main fronts:

• Organization and HR type functions which are run by the HR department. They face the challenges of the corporate growing larger in size with high turnover of policies, different and evolving rules, employees dissatisfaction and complaints of feeling left-out and unheard. Blogs provide a two way communication between your HR department and all levels of employees in an open and transparent environment which will promote a new culture of collaboration. Current tools will help setup the company’s HR blog replacing internal newsletters, and mass emailing, and will result in more interaction. They also give the opportunity to speak up and provide feedback, which can later be taken forward into internal workshops and seminars on or offline.
• Internal communication between and across employees is currently informal and unstructured exchange of ideas and thoughts. Only some official correspondence might exist and very low sharing of high value ideas and information due to highly competitive corporate environment. Often, where a communication system exists, it is underused and often not optimized. This results in a tremendous loss of potential opportunities and capital within the organization. New communication methods, the most user friendly of which are internal blogs, make greater sharing of information easier and more comfortable and harness a culture of collective intelligence. Employees can report the problems they faced at work and methods they used to overcome them. The contributions are documented and archived so that if someone leaves the organization his experiences are not lost forever.

Different size organizations may choose different approaches to internal corporate blogging. Current Blog management systems allow all employees to submit their entries to the corporate blogs. However, only entries validated and approved by designated editors are published. Editing can either be centralized throughout the organization or distributed to different departments’ offices that can approve and edit contents of their own department as they see fit.

2. EXTERNAL BLOG ON COPRPORATE WEBSITE
Yes, having a nice little website with your organizations’ information is no longer the accepted standard on the web. A blog brings your site to life more than a million slow-loading flash introductions, heavy graphical interfaces and numerous feedback forms, contrary to what outdated PR people might tell you. The best example of this is Google corporate blog. Clean, concise, straight to the point and kind of cool. You will still need public information about your organization to be published somewhere, perhaps on the same page as your corporate blog.

Fig: Corporate Blogging business model (Banoota 2004)

A well recognized and painful truth about the vast majority of corporate websites is that they are usually out of date, often grow out of control, and generally are a complete mess. Jeffrey Veen from Adaptive Path analyzed this problem and presented a sound solution to it in this single page essay.

“Set up a process something like this: An editor manages all content on the site. Give that editor a staff of writers to send out into your business units. These writers act like reporters in the field, working on stories that they submit to a copy desk. The stories are then compared against editorial and corporate style guides, producing consistent, professional content. That content goes to your legal and marketing departments for approval if necessary. Only then does it go online”

The beauty with current available blogging software is that much of this process can be done automatically without the headache of having to overlook it.

3. EMPLOYEES’ INDIVIDUAL AND PERSONAL BLOGS
Blogging is part of the natural evolution of the online culture that is coming to your organization whether you like it or not- It is just a matter of time. When it does come however, it will overwhelm you unless you are prepared. Your employees will eventually learn how to maintain their own blogs and will no doubt at some point start to talk about their job one way or the other. It is good to be ready for that when it happens. Publish blogging guidelines for your employees who wish to maintain their own personal blog. It can be the coolest thing to brag about to say that your organization has now its own corporate blog. Who minds the free marketing?

As these blogs are the property of the people who maintain them both physically and intellectually, your involvement with them has nothing to do with setting up, maintaining and typing the personal content that goes into them. However, when it comes to employees’ work-related entries, it is a whole different matter. Organizations all over the world now acknowledge and accept that they need to publish, internally or publicly, a set of guidelines that clearly explain to their people what they are or are not allowed to talk about when it comes to work issues. It is only fair that someone on your payroll should not communicate to the world damaging facts about your business, be it financial status, upcoming contracts and deals, or anything else that you may define as “damaging”.

A hypothetical set of Google blogging guidelines might look like this while Yahoo’s real set of blogging guidelines for its employees are available here

Other than publishing guidelines, your involvement in your employees’ personal blogs ends here. It is generally and historically accepted that when someone who works for you violates the rules about blogging, specifically laid out or not, published or non-published (believe it or not) firing them is justified. Microsoft fired at least one of their people because of blogging, and so did Google.

Companies and Organizations that joined the blogosphere
The number of organizations that have already joined the blogosphere is very modest in relation to its increasing size. A sample collections of corporate blogs can be found on this link

Technologies you may want to suggest to your organizations’ IT/HR/PR people
Building a company’s blog is really not the hardest of jobs. New super-spiced up blogging software are now available as open source platforms for free download. For most of them, the installation process from beginning to the end takes few minutes and very rarely involves more than 4 simple and straight forward steps that anyone with the simplest internet background can master. Two very popular, scalable, versatile and FREE blogging software are WordPress and Movable Type.

This website provides a huge and extensive break down comparison charts of most blog management software available to date.

Further Resources
If you are still trying to convince your boss that Corporate Blogging is the way to go and need more information, you may find these resources helpful:

• Marketing Magazine:Have blogs made it on to your strategic radar?
• Corporate Blogging:Why start a Corporate Blog
• The NewYork Times:The Corporate Blog Is Catching on
• Loosely Coupled: Pros and Cons of Corporate Blogging
• Scobleizer: The Corporate Weblog Manifesto.
• Fast Company:It is a Blog world afterall
• Robert Paterson:How do we tell non-bloggers about blogging
• Immigration DailyMarketing Directly To Clients With Weblogs
• Richard MacManus:Internal corporate blogging
• John Porcaro:The Corporate Blog Tipping Point
• Corante:Feed, Greed and Social Software
• Corporate Blogging Info