Effective use of blogs in business: How companies can talk to themselves 2 nd December 2004 Olympia The Big Blog Company

Doughnuts, is there anything they can't do? -Homer Simpson BLOGS

Links to other sources Links to that article/post Posting content Company and contact info Ability to track events Company name Posts stored for future reference Images Ability to track links to that post Distribute via RSS

Blogs are optimised nodes  Content is only half the job  Distribution is the other half Network effect of blogosphere  Ease, immediacy, speed and interaction  Creativity and dynamism  Replicate inside the company network

Portals  different forms of information on one page, easy to update & customisable Intranets  secure slice of the web, place for tools to support collaboration KM applications  top-down IT projects Weblogs  designed for individual interaction and networking  Blogs have the right balance between unstructured creativity and structured format

Forum is a collective drawing - mess of lines Blog is a painting untouched but commented upon

1 st principle Information organisations, knowledge economy 2 nd principle Nothing was ever invented in a meeting 3 rd principle Basic unit is the individual - not a process, department or even a team  Collaboration & creativity is a human problem, not a technological one

If we all do this, marvellous things happen e.g. if we all contribute to this new KM/CMS/collaborative software, we unleash a fount of creativity, knowledge, interaction, experience etc.  These are company’s goals

 What’s in it for them?

 Collaboration and information sharing must not be a chore  Bottom-up motivation not top-down imposition  Idea ownership  Immediate benefit to individual employee  Job easier or another value  Key to effective use of internal blogs

How do you get employees to accept the new methodologies and paradigms?  Don't tell users there are new methodologies and paradigms, they don't care or need to know  Show them that the new systems allow them to get their work done  Show them that you can fix problems that prevent them from getting their work done going forward  Possible with blogs and emergent technologies as they are a ‘multiple orders of magnitude cheaper’

Disney Google InfoWorld London Internet Exchange

Disney internal communication  Track cable operations across the world  Messages by technical operators  Programming, marketing, traffic, operations Shiftlog  From proprietary DB to blog software  Improving efficiency and coordination Source: Disney Presentation at O’Reilly Emerging Technology Conference, February 9-12, 2004

Internal expertise and information sharing  Knowledge best shared through a system that notifies users of new content  notification replaced by RSS Blogs and RSS aggregators the answer  Easy for each group member to store and share content  Keeps group members coming back, easy to find out when new content is available  Encourages others to share  “Need people willing to share information to get people to use blogs, wikis and other collaborative systems”

Use of blogs within Google  Keeping track of meeting notes  Sharing diagnostics information  Sharing snippets of code  More personal uses – sharing what people are thinking about and what they're up to  “It really helps grow the intranet and the internal base of documents”

InfoWorld six-months IT initiative  Coherent roadmap on weblog  No need for agendas, handouts in meetings  Changes distributed via RSS to anyone who wants updates  Accountability within IT team and to non-IT colleagues  “Amazing how a system so simple and easy can produce such profound results”

LINX internal blog for member updates  More permanent record of announcements than the pre-existing mailing lists  Archiving and clustering of topics easier  More accurate classification and labelling  Tracking and analysis of audience more accurate  Balance of time spent on topics  Timeliness leading to more feedback  Change in dynamics satisfying short and long term reporting

 Blogs  persistent conversation, dynamic info flows  Movable Type, Expression Engine  Wikis  ideal for collaborative documents created by many  Web Collaborator, Wiki 2.0, MediaWiki, Social Text  RSS readers  Replace notification, internal news feeds  Newsgator (Outlook integration)

 Format  Match with purpose and activity  Evolving and dynamic  IT aspect  Flexible  Low cost  Easy to implement  Human dimension  Most important and complex  Individual matters  Collective result emergent rather than imposed