Professor of Practice of Behavioral Economics
Slashdot points me to an InternetNews.com article and the fact that IBM has just introduced blog monitoring software today, called the Public Image Monitoring Solution:
IBM (Quote, Chart) today introduced new software that monitors and
analyzes blogs, wikis (define), news feeds, consumer review sites,
newsgroups and other community-generated content to keep tabs on their
image.
Yes. You read it right. It reads "IBM". Blog stuff has moved into the enterprise software space it seems.
Earlier this year, 21Publish released a whitepaper on corporate blog intranets (PDF file). The paper may have been a little before its time, but then I posted an update here, which indicated that I was starting to see trench-level activity in the corporate intranet space.
Today, 21Publish is releasing a new whitepaper (PDF file) that I authored on corporate group blogging. Stefan has more to say about the topic of corporate group blogging here.
Like my prior presentation on blogging for non-profits (Powerpoint format and PDF format), the new corporate group blogging whitepaper is intended to be an introduction to those wanting to learn more about group blogging. For this paper, I’ve set the discussion context around a customer loyalty framework, which has some different effects in a group blog versus an individual blog context.
Given the recent survey by PR Week and Burson-Marsteller, I hope that people find the 21Publish whitepaper and presentation resources timely. The PR Week article reports two good stats that managers should be aware of:
Technorati Tags: groupblog, blog, blogging, corporateblogging
Update (11/8/05): Niall Cook and Fredrik Wacka provide some commentary here and here on the subject of group blogging (btw – thanks for the coverage of 21Publish). I suppose I should clarify that the summary of benefits I provided early in the paper (of group blogging over individual blogging) seem to be tripping people up a bit. My fault. Since I address some of the detailed items of concern later in the paper, the message at the earlier point in the paper should have been even higher-level: that group blogs benefit from both concentration of information and a larger scope of linkages to a company brand. That is, the underlying arguments for group over individual blogs are opportunities for better scope and scale – a concept similar to that discussed in core business/economics strategy frameworks. Not evey one can have the stature of individual bloggers like Robert Scoble, Seth Godin, or Steve Rubel – group blogs are an alternative.
Posts by Umair Haque, Fred Wilson, and Jeff Nolan are all talking about the looming attention crisis (see here & here) related to information overload and the blogosphere. Wilson captures Umair’s words:
Herbert Simon said it in 1971, which is that "What does an abundance of information create?" A scarcity of attention basically, right?
It’s funny that blogging is starting to replace email conversations (based on ROI), yet we are still in overload. I, for one, peaked out at reading between 50 and 100 feeds, and I needed to start to drop some and add others as my work balance shifted.
For those may not know, blogging was heavily influenced the seminal blogging work, "The Cluetrain Manifesto". The takeaway saying from that work has been "markets are conversations".
But I think with the doubling of the blogosphere hand over fist (with no end in sight on the graphical charts) we are starting to see some limits as to what people can process.
That is why I think we will see a return to works that preceded the Cluetrain by 50-60 some years in the 1940s. These are the seminal works of Claude Shannon on information theory, and much of his work was written in plain English without having to be decorated with tons of mathematics. We may find inspiration in solving some of our new problems from the information theory and related fields.
Some key items from the field of information theory:
The blogosphere faces similar challenges in terms of capacity limitations, means for improving efficiency, and information distortion.
Feedreaders can speed the process of reading blogs. I’m guessing my efficiency in reading news went up 50%+ after shifting to a feedreader.
At some point though, I ran out of channel bandwidth using this method. What to do then?
Well as folks like Andrew have pointed out (as does Jeff Nolan in his post), people do a lot of linking to the same posts. Good case for unsubscribing to A-list blogs because you get the same information everywhere. But I suppose that the unsubscribing method for reducing information may create some distortion. One is not getting info straight from the horse’s mouth so to speak.
Other methods, such as using web services to aggregate tags (as recently contracted by Nivi) are also a way to reduce information. But I suppose that this method could create distortion in that one is seeking information that tends to be the same as what you’ve always sought out in the past.
Another area of interest is around blog communities (as I mentioned before here in the context of BusinessWeek’s b-school community developed by 21Publish), and how the dialogue surrounding these types of structures seems different to me.
I do not know the answer to the general question of how to reduce information overload most effectively (I have resorted to dropping feeds and adding new ones). But I will say that I suspect the blogosphere (and the web in general) does not pay enough attention to holes and gaps in information (e.g., can we create maps of worlds readers are missing). We also tend not to pay enough attention to distortions created by circular linking, information reduction, reinforcing lists, etc. Perhaps not mainstream concerns in the blogosphere, but I know that these types of pitfalls have to be avoided in business in general. Why should use of the blogosphere be any different?
Technorati Tags: blog, blogging, tagging, RSS, feeds
Update (11/1/05): Bill Burnham has a post on Feed Overload Syndrome.
This post has been reproduced from my 21Publish blog.
Intranet blogging (see earlier 21Publish whitepaper here [PDF file]) seems to be gaining momentum by companies that are looking to imbue and discuss culture in private settings. In a prior post, I mentioned how a major US bank is using blogs by 21Publish to discuss leadership and company culture.
Today, I learned from Shel Holtz’s blog that McDonald’s now has an intranet blog. According to Shel, Steve Wilson, the burger company’s senior director of web communications, addressed a crowd at Blog On:
"If your task is to move the culture of a company, you’re
not going to move it by the flip of a switch,” Wilson said. “You have
to show that an open dialogue can occur, and create an ongoing dialogue
to move from point A to point B."
Culture change is something that I’ve not heard explicitly discussed in mainstream corporate settings since the mid 90s, but it seems to be coming back into vogue. Blogs could be the internal desktop memo of days past.
Other very recent news in the blog intranet space … the NewPR Wiki just started a CEO Intranet Blogs list.
CorporateBlogging.Info also has a very recent post on using intranet blogs for knowledge management in a corporation. Just last week I had a discussion with a major telecom company about using blogs in the context of KM. Perfect use-case just coming of age. I suspect it has to do in part with the fact that blogging has been legitimized if only for the medium’s impact in organizing discussions more effectively than email. Additionally, some companies just aren’t ready organizationally (culturally) to handle the external messaging aspects of blogging, but they are more than ready to try things in a private/secure environment.
To change gears a bit, some things we have found at 21Publish is that customers like the ability to have hosted blogging intranets that support the following:
So I am seeing more momentum on intranet blogging than I have seen in the past. What are you seeing?
Technorati Tags: intranets, blogs, blogcommunity, blog
Blogging about group and blog communities is directly related to my job. If you are interested in facilitating a blog community, here are some of my musings and learnings at my 21Publish blog having looked at a number.
Update (10/19/05): I was prompted to write about this based on a post by Beth Kanter – she covers the non-profit space quite a bit.
Update (10/19/05): Beth has an update here. Feel free to join the discussion.
Update (10/21/05): Beth summarized and consolidated here. Thanks!
Technorati Tags: blog_communities, blogging, nptech
Some facts first. Dave Sifry (CEO of Technorati) recently posted about growth in the blogosphere. 19.6 million blogs. If I checked the Technorati ranking of my blog here, it has been somewhere between 35,000 and 40,000. That’s in about the top 0.002 or 0.2% of all blogs and took about nine months. Additionally, this blog has a very modest following of probably 50ish readers via Feedburner RSS (still some renegade feeds out there) and 20,000 some page views since inception.
Of course, blogging is about microaudiences, the long tail, etc., etc. so expectations from the average person that they will get huge audiences is probably against the odds/base rates unless they are really targeting a niche segment.
The highest number of comments I received on a blog post on my individual blog here (including my own comments) was seven comments. It was a post linked to from Virginia Postrel’s site.
In contrast, at my BusinessWeek blog (which has only been around for about a month and has ten posts) … well I have twenty comments on a post I did there (including my own comments) on ethics – the comments include many more people in the discussion.
A key difference in my blog at BusinessWeek is that my blog is part of a blog community, as opposed to being an individual blog (like the one here) that sits out on an island connecting to context and other users. Of course, another key difference is that the blog there leverages from the BusinessWeek reader base.
But I keep coming back to this … nine months on individual blog with seven comments as a high versus one
month and ten posts on blog as part of blog community with twenty
comments as high. Which method had a better efficiency in creating
dialogue? Just stepping back at a very crude level, the blog as part of a blog community seems to win out.
One could make many other arguments that I have not controlled for factors that level balance the two blogs. Nor I have sought out disconfirming evidence to explain the difference.
But I wonder whether blog use as we know it will shift given the stats and observations I’ve made above. For me, individual blogging has been a substitute for a electronic newsletter. But is it really that way for the majority of people? Is it more about conversations? If a community framework provides a better way to generate that dialogue, should we see more of this?
Disclosure: I am a gun for 21Publish, a provider of turnkey group and branded blog communities. BusinessWeek is a 21Publish customer.
Update (10/19/05): The comparison is nine months and 300 posts (individual blog) versus one month and 10 posts (blog community).
Stephen Baker at BusinessWeek Online’s Blogspotting has a post entitled, "The business blog backlash is nigh". I think there are some important developments and non-developments in business blogging to take stock of and to adjust forecasts on what happens to business blogging going-forward. My perception of what has happened in the past nine months on business blogging (focused on pieces relevant to lower mid- to large-biz sector):
Probably other areas I’m missing. What’s the catalyst for things to tip to the next phase? Are there any drivers for things to tip? Or is business blogging just something that will grow steadily? Any public releases on ROI in the business sector that the layperson (versus bloggers) can chant back?
Personal good news that is work-related. Thus, I put it over at my 21Publish blog here.