Professor of Practice of Behavioral Economics
I just blogged about corporate positions explicitly requiring blogging skills as part of a job description. WebProNews points me to news that CMT is on the ball with a Dukes of Hazzard blogger position, officially entitled "Vice President of Hazzard Institute".
My first two goldfish as a kid were called Starsky and Hutch. Does that count for anything?
Steve Rubel has a good post that excerpts the HBR article that endorses business blogging as a breakthrough for 2005. Last year was the year of the blog. Perhaps 2005 or 2006 will be the year of the business blog. Mohan Sawhney, a well -renowned Kellogg professor of marketing, writes the HBR article. Here is the paragraph that grabbed me most:
"Marketers will naturally want their messages promoted on influential
blogs and protected from critical ones. But they will find it difficult
to navigate this complex blend of advertising, content, dialogue, and
public relations."
There are those that claim the blogosphere is nothing new and that this whole thing is just an extension of existing technologies. That’s more descriptive of the technology by itself and not prescriptive what should be done by businesses giving the changing social, communication, and business networking structures. PR firms and hired guns will likely emerge or develop additional competencies to navigate the new morass of knowledge and junk.
Steve Shu
Managing Director, S4 Management Group
A book publisher approached me earlier this year to write a book on business and emerging technologies. Never thought of myself as being an author, but the opportunity showed up at the right time – my "spider-sense" told me that it was something that I should pursue further.
Things had been going well through final steps, but recently went South. Trying to do some legwork to see where things are at, but I suspect the deal is probably dead because of a combination of the market space and other factors (how’s that for leaving myself an open door!). More details to come for those following the blogging area. If you want to be included on an email list for updates of this thread, feel free to send me email at sshu@s4management.com (or you can just stay tuned). 😉
Steve Shu
Managing Director, S4 Management Group
The back and forth between John Robb, Dave Winer, Robert Scoble, and Shel Israel continues. John hints that the deal he was not party to included a massive advance of money. Scoble hints that John is looking to do a separate book deal. Who knows what is fact, but this we can be sure of. There will be a book or books on corporate blogging hitting the market by the end of 2005 or begining of 2006. It indicates a trend that while there may be a ton of information on the Internet on the subject, there is still a gap of bridging blogosphere knowledge to those on the outside. The value of bridging that gap (to all parties) is likely tremendous.
Regardless of what each party argues, I cannot begin to imagine how high the emotions must be. I hope that they can work this out. Perhaps a subcontracting, side agreement, or value-added arrangement can be made, but this seems far off from where the parties are currently at.
Update (3/2/05): Robert Scoble posts "The emotions aren’t high on my side of things. Sorry if it came across that way."
In the past, I’ve used Monster.com to do some unorthodox things:
Now to give a little context on how this might work over time, back in 2000 I was chartered to find customers and partners that were ripe for extensible markup language (XML) technologies (I actually secured a six-figure $$, early adopter customer using laser sighting techniques and based on what they posted on the job boards). Anyway, if I recall back in 2000 when I did a search on Monster, there might have been 20 job postings returned max. Now it is 2005, and the number of postings matching XML exceed 1000, and Monster cannot return all of the results it is so many.
With that as backdrop, is blogging an actual skillset? Well, here’s an excerpt from an actual marketing job posting by Working Assets:
"The ideal candidate is the kind of person who:
• has a gmail account
• reads at least two of the following blogs daily (talkingpointsmemo,
dailykos, atrios, juan cole, wonkette, instapundit, brad Delong, MyDD)
• took time off from your job to volunteer during the election campaign
(or tried but couldn’t get anyone to call you back).
• Maybe never bothered to finish the Cluetrain Manifesto but you got the
point."
Cool. That’s pretty darn specific about blogging, so this might lead
one to believe that blogging as a skill set is really coming into its
own.
If one looks further though, searches for "blog", "blogs", "blogging",
etc. all seem to return from 10-30 job postings. Most of the jobs are
technical or product management jobs that match the tech players in the
aggregation space and list of major software vendors that blog (as
cited by Dave Sifry’s study
of the corporate blogosphere) – this are companies like Macromedia,
Microsoft, etc. Plus the job skill is a "desired" skill. That said,
many of the non-technical jobs involving blogging surround community
development (e.g., ESPN, AOL).
Couldn’t find postings for premo, hired guns positions (like evangelist Robert Scoble).
Maybe we’ll have to check the executive recruiter databases next … 😉
Steve Shu
Managing Director, S4 Management Group