vnunet.com analysis: Blogging and the art of business communication

Blogging can be a key element in a company's repertoire of communication channels

The use of tools to facilitate online social networking, including blogs, has proliferated at an astonishing rate in recent years.

A new blog is created every second, adding to the 37 million that already exist, according to David Sifry, founder of the Technorati weblog data-set and link tracker/search engine.

This staggering rate of increase equates to a sixty-fold growth of the 'blogosphere' within the past three years.

There are no geographic or demographic boundaries to blogging. Ray Valdes, a web services analyst at Gartner, observed that the total number of bloggers worldwide makes it difficult to conclude that one geographical region could have a higher concentration of blogging activity than any other.

But, despite the general accessibility, popularity and viral nature of social networking tools, organisations are only now putting them firmly on the corporate agenda.

"Blogging can be a key element in a company's repertoire of communication channels," said Valdes.

The analyst pointed to a well-known case at the end of 2004 in which bicycle lock manufacturer Kryptonite fought claims spread through blogging that its locks could be picked with nothing more than a plastic pen top.

"In the days after the initial blog posting, the information resonated within the blogosphere and was amplified to a level that reached the mass media," explained Valdes.

Kryptonite recouped goodwill by instituting a $10m product exchange programme, but also had to settle a $200m class-action lawsuit out of court.

Costly horror stories like this are not only forcing organisations to acknowledge the extent of the blogosphere's influence on consumer and market forces, but to engage with it.

"The biggest risk with regard to corporate blogs is not having one, which can result in being blindsided by competitors, customers and broader market forces, " said Valdes.

• Set up your own blog in just two minutes

Many organisations now monitor the blogosphere to 'police' what is being said about them, and many are realising the value of targeting bloggers as part of a marketing or PR strategy.

Suw Charman, a social software consultant and digital rights activist, suggested that most companies now have an understanding of the external influence that social networking tools can wield.

"They allow you to have direct contact with customers and potential customers, get feedback, and show the human face of a company," she explained.

Charman also maintained that smaller companies should use these tools to show off niche expertise and thought leadership.

But it is notoriously difficult to market products and services at bloggers, as they are delighted to expose anything that might have a whiff of marketing or PR spin about it.

"The risk is that, if you do have an external blog, and you do it badly, you will get criticised," warned Charman.

"Take cosmetics firm L'Oreal. It launched an ill-conceived and badly written blog that was spotted as a fake. But the company then engaged with the bloggers, learned from its mistakes, relaunched, and is very popular now."

Charman suggested that the most successful blogs interact with their readers by adopting an intimate, open and honest policy.

"Every company should be reading blogs concerning them, understanding who has a serious point to make and engaging them in one-off discussions in an effective way that stops the point being disseminated and becoming widespread criticism," she said.

If a company proactively adds blogging to its arsenal of marketing tools, then it should consider articulating how existing employee policy should be extended to blogging, given that there is a good chance many of its employees blog already.

• Set up your own blog in just two minutes

Some organisations, however, have gone even further and put social networking tools like blogs and collaborative websites, or wikis, to use internally, to achieve benefits like increased productivity and collaboration.

"From an internal aspect, these tools are like lightweight content management systems with social networking capabilities," said Charman. "The technology is not new; it's the cultural change it brings that's challenging."

Many companies already use blogs or wikis instead of intranets to share competitive information or to keep in constant communication.

And those that make use of the tagging or bookmarking capabilities of Web 2.0 technology can provide a repository of information for more effective knowledge management than email.

"Social bookmarking and tagging allows companies to make the unstructured data already gathered retrievable and usable," said Charman.

UK web-based automated despatch firm eCourier recently bought enterprise weblog software TeamPage from specialist vendor Traction to accelerate the bespoke development of the company's business systems.

Jay Bregman, chief technology officer at eCourier, told vnunet.com: "It was quite an exercise to keep multiple teams in Italy, Germany and the UK up to date in developing our business systems, and we couldn't afford to have everybody meet at a hotel every three months."

Bregman explained that the software was more economical and flexible to customise than traditional project management software tools, and easier to implement than free blogging software packages.

"And the advantage over email is that you can set certain areas where people can and cannot write to," he said.

"We have a persistent view of projects, so we can review things we did right or wrong, and give new people a chance to go back and update their knowledge."

It is Bregman and others who are showing the way for next-generation social networking technology which can add value to the way we work and play online.

• Set up your own blog in just two minutes