Corporate America discovered the business blog

June 16, 2003

It was bound to happen: Corporate America has just discovered the business blog. The proof was at hand during last week's ClickZ Weblog Business Strategies 2003 Conference & Expo. The sponsors had set aside a smallish conference room at the Sheraton Boston, and ended up having to knock out the collapsible rear wall and lug in more tables and chairs.

Too bad they couldn't also have called in an electrician to install more power outlets. A goodly percentage of the guests were toting laptops equipped with WiFi ethernet cards. The organizers had the good judgment to set up a wireless broadband router, so these well-equipped guests spent pretty much the entire conference updating their own blogs. At least until the batteries ran out.

In any case, there's plenty of juice left in the blogging boom. That's the practice of using simple software that allows you to easily create a running commentary on your life or anybody else's, published instantly to the Internet. Blogs are an elaboration of the old personal Web page concept. But the blog, thank heaven, quickly transcended the original paradigm, with its photos of the family dog and discussions of Junior's potty training accident. Come to think of it, though, most blogs still aren't much better.

But the best of them feature sophisticated social and political commentary, philosophical debate, art criticism, or summaries of the latest news in every field. Sometimes the bloggers request voluntary contributions of money from their readers -- former New Republic editor Andrew Sullivan is supposed to take in a pretty penny this way at www.andrewsullivan.com -- but most bloggers do it just for fun.

Webloggers tend to focus on topics they know and love. And they post Web links to additional information sources on these topics, as well as links to other blogs. Find a well-run blog focusing on, say, Catholicism (see markshea.blogspot.com), and follow the links to become an instant theologian. An idea this useful can't be left to mere hobbyists. Companies have begun to recognize the potential power of what buffs like to call "the blog-

osphere." Consider: Every business needs to know what its employees know. Companies are crammed with experts on various topics whose knowledge goes to waste -- because nobody knows what they know. Now give these workers an internal corporate blog, and encourage them to use it. Let them natter away on every topic that intrigues them. Harvest and index the results. You've mapped your workers' brains. With a few keystrokes, a manager can find out who's been blogging about skiing or bowling or restoring classic cars -- just the thing when you're trying to sell something to an avid collector of '64 Mustangs. The company's hidden experts will cheerfully reveal themselves, and the firm's institutional memory gets an upgrade.

Rock Regan, chief information officer of the state of Connecticut and a guest at last week's conference, is deploying a weblog in his office to get the techies talking. But he's trying to keep the conversation focused.

"We're not saying, `We're going to give this to you, now go off and talk about whatever you want to talk about,' " Regan said. He tells his bloggers to focus on computer and networking topics, so they can share information about the problems and solutions they've found throughout the state's computer systems. "So far we're pretty happy," Regan said.

Businesses are also looking at blogging to their customers. Companies like the software maker Macromedia Inc. encourage employees to set up public weblogs to provide information to users of the companies' products. The travel website

biznettravel.com uses a blog to post links to the latest travel-related news, complete with snarky commentary. It's a clever way to give Internet companies a human face. But is it really blogging? Sure, the corporate weblogs use the same technologies, but their hearts are not really in it. The best blogs don't just deliver authoritative information; they resonate with the personalities of their creators.

How can any commercial or government agency match that? Contributors to the internal blogs will be careful how much of their lives they reveal on the corporate networks. As for external blogs aimed at customers, those will quickly fall under the sway first of the company's marketing experts, then of its lawyers. An unusually creative blogger might rise above this to create truly good work, but the results will more often be little better than standard press releases.

Still, there's no help for it. Just as e-mail, born as an academic convenience, is now a marketing tool for human growth hormone, the blogs are bound to go commercial. Who knows? Maybe a few will even get it right. There are good TV commercials, after all.

Story by: Hiawatha Bray
Source: Globe Staff

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