A group of students at Roskilde University that I have been advisor for this semester have written a paper on corporate blogging in a strategic perspective. Their case-study is the Danish Defence and the students have been interviewing different groups in the organization about the use of corporate blogs. I'll leave it to the students paper and the students' weblog to elaborate more at this point.

A group of students from Roskilde University that I'm mentoring this semester is working with organizational blogging - is it a buzzword, buzz-phenomenon or a tool that creates value? Check out their new blog and join the conversation on corporateweblogs.wordpress.com

Debate on blogging is going around these days – for what do we need blogs, how should or shouldn’t we use them, is blogging a democratization tool, or is the high number of (uncensored and sometimes unverified information published on) blogs just polluting www and our minds?

How does it make sense to use blogs as a tool for political, commercial or purely personal communication? What are the success parametres of organizational vs. privately driven blogs, and how personal or commercial – if at all – may a blog be?

A perspective on this debate is to be found in this Danish-language article by journalist Troels Johannesen: “Nok Blog Amok” (Freely  translated as "Enough Blog Craziness"), that I appreciated to read, followed by interesting comments on the subject. If you take a look around www.stagisblog.com, part of the debate on e.g. distribution of feeds vs. ‘original source of publication’ has also taken place here.

The blog is still a relatively new communication tool and way of relating in the public sphere, so different perceptions and opinions on blogging is a quite natural and interesting part of the process: The medium, genre and definition of its potentials and limitations is still being created, we are in the midst of it all!

Even though you don't work with blogs on a daily basis, a way for you to make your statement on this subject is to vote for the blog you would like to see winning Blogprisen 2007 (The Blog Prize 2007)!

For the fist time, Blogmagasinet is giving out Blogprisen 2007. Until 1st of December you can nominate your favorite blog for Blogprisen 2007 by sending a link with a brief argumentation to Blogmagasinet. Next after, the voting among five nominees will take place. I don’t know how small or big this is going to grow – but I do like the experimental initiative, and will be curious to click by and check out the argumentations and the winner…

For now - enjoy your weekend and the beautiful Autumn!

This week STAGIS helped Kræftens Bekæmpelse publish its new version of www.blogomkraeft.dk that we designed for them.

Meet Charlotte, Jacob and Malthe at www.blogomkraeft.dk, three strong persons blogging openly about their everyday life or what they have at mind, while living with and fighting cancer, to share their experiences, advices and realities.

They - and the bloggers that will follow them in team rotations now and then - have chosen to make a difference that I personally admire in the debate and raising awareness of the fight against cancer; something that matters to all of us, since its a disease that affects and threatens so many and different people all over the world.

Maybe you or someone in your life is also affected by cancer? Feel free to participate in the dialogues on www.blogomkraeft.dk. In short; its a blog for life!

Help sharing: Spread the word on www.blogomkraeft.dk
So in the new version of www.blogomkraeft.dk, the perspective has gone from CEO to patients’ postings. And later on also employees from Kræftens Bekæmpelse will be among the bloggers.

With Kræftens Bekæmpelse prioritizing to develop www.blogomkraeft.dk, it tells us something really good about the organization being aware of their social responsibility related to cancer and people affected by the disease - and their awareness of how they can communicate in new ways and create the necessary dialogue with new tools that we helped them bring in and take to use.

The contributions of www.blogomkraeft.dk from Kræftens Bekæmpelse is to create a concerning debate, that can make a difference for people in Denmark affected by cancer, directly or indirectly. Sharing is one valuable way of handling tough challenges, demanding realities and life-changing experiences. One reason being, that sharing brings in feedback that can turn into dialogue, change your perspective and move you!

So you are welcome to spread the word on www.blogomkraeft.dk, thereby contributing to a meaningful cause; raising awareness of the reality of and fight against cancer.

Websites are still representations and brochures on the web - now with animation. But they lack the social dimension, the idea of dialogue between customers and employees.

Examples of good social dimensions on corporate websites?

About bandwith:
http://www.computerworld.dk/art/40222?a=newsletter&i=1147
Check Gartner
Japan

The other day I was presenting the idea of blogging for one of the larger companies in Denmark. The skilfull director of communications asked me what the value of blogging was. ”Is it like our forum”, she asked, ”where people can talk to each other?”. The difficulty of presenting a new way of working, communicating or relating is that it’s being compared to existing technologies and methods instead of being valued on it’s own terms. So I thought I'd share some of my ideas of what blogs can do and why it's difficult to manange here. Sorry if it's a lengthy post...

As blogging is a social technology as well as a way of communicating and relating it doesn’t dictate a specific use or purpose. It’s up to the owner and writer(s) of a blog to apply the meaning and style to the blog that makes sense in the given context. Hence the diverse use and endless ways of understanding weblogs and it’s possible impacts. Some of the qualities I have seen are:

1. Blogging is now Blogs are dynamic, changing and reflecting what’s going on right now. As opposed to lots of websites (I know I’m now doing the comparison to a very old-fashioned thing myself...) it doesn’t state ”Our values” as a static thing but rather introduces new thoughts, ideas and agendas as an ongoing process. A student at CBS interviewed me for a master-thesis on picture blogging and authenticity and one of the ideas is that the perceived authenticity increases dramatically if the pictures (or text) on a (picture) blog is new (meaning only a few hours old).

2. Blogging is honest and builds authentic identity
Or at least it should be. I think it would be hard to keep up an deceitful blog for a longer period of time and it would backfire tremendously so basically it’s bound to be honest. Identity is about sameness over a given period of time and blogs give readers the ability to track what has been said earlier. It gives readers a feeling of what’s the same in spite of time.

3. Blogging is personal
I’ve never seen a good blog that didn’t have some sort of personality behind it. Lots of blogs are related to work or professional practices but they are still driven by a person or group of people who put their personal voice and energy into the blog. The feeling of personality keeps readers coming back and becoming involved in the dialogue.

4. Blogging is dialogue
Unlike the types of communication tools that most companies are using blogs are based on dialogue. For several reasons this scares the living daylight out of some of the managers I talk to. One of them is that they expect to be confronted with customers or users that are not 100% satisfied. As if that is a change in itself. The change is, unsatisfied as well as happy stakeholders wil become visible for the management of the company, giving a unique possibility to build relationships and understand needs of the users/customers. This also means that blogging is not only about writing (which is only one half of the idea, value and time that should be spent on bloging). When was the last time you learned from you customers?

5. Blogging reflects change
Just like the rest of the organization the blog is changing every day, week and year. Depending on the degree of extroversy or honesty of the blog, stakeholders are able of reading some of the ups and downs of the field of work, organization or industry that the blog is reflecting. Jonathan Schwartz from Sun has been blogging a lot about his industry and the competition. That way, lots of employees at Sun are able of following the ideas of their leader.

Blogging is a leadership challenge
As one comment last week argued, blogs that are not nurtured are worthless. The technology and design of a blog is not a big challenge (at least if you know what you’re doing) but writing posts that call others to participate is. It takes involvement, a personal style of writing and ongoing care to create a successful blog. As Marta mentioned in her blog-about-blogs-post last week blogging is a genre of its own and mastering a new genre is not done in a few days or a few blog posts. It takes practice and experimentation to find and develop the personal blogging style of yours. As I mentioned in a comment the other day we have witnessed blogs that have grown to live a happy life and some that have lived a short life only to exhale and die. One of the managerial decisions that will surely kill an organizational blog is too many rules. If a blog is to be written in the ”official language” or live up to ”the communication politics” of the organization it is just not going to happen. That’s why the managerial challenge is to help the blog grow by motivating the participants (if you’re a manager and you are blogging the challenge will be self-motivation and leading your own blog-routines). That doesn’t mean you can’t have a blog-policy or that the blog is going to be out-of-control. It just means that the risk of not having purpose, time, energy and motivation is way higher than the risk of something ”dangerous” appearing on a blog. And once you’ve decided that you want a blog (for any of the reasons mentioned above) there is only one way forward: Fast implementation, experimentation and keeping it simple!

Are you open for critique like Anders Fogh?
As I’ve been mentioning before one of the ideas of getting a blog is to hear ideas as well as critique directly from your users/customers/employees/citizens.
Last week the danish Prime Minister Anders Fogh Rasmussen started blogging and as one of the danish newspapers commented, he seems to be open to critizism – at least in the sense that critical comments haven’t been removed from the blog which is obvious for a blogger (like myself) but still a question that I meet a lot when I talk to managers about corporate blogging. And with a reputation that lots of critics would describe as anything but open and dialogical a blog is either a move in a good direction or an attempt to create an image without changing what's behind it. Thomas Madsen-Mygdal is referring to Jeff Jarvis article on Irans president blogging already back in 2003 so it's not a new thing. Anders’ predecessor Poul Nyrup Rasmussen also blogged very early on but changed his blog into ”moments” (”øjeblikke”) and cut the amount of posts down to just telling about moments he felt like commenting on. Now he seems to be blogging full throttle again. As did a number of danish and international politicians back in the early blog-days in the nineties to express their opinions and ideas and get feedback from their stakeholders. As any good leader would do today.

Is your leader afraid of blogging?

Recently I'ev helped colleagues do research on new numbers about the blogosphere. Figures that are not so easily found, since the blogosphere is constantly evolving. In March 2007 Technorati tracked 70 mio. blogs (not nescesarily active blogs). Estimates tell, that every second 1.4 blogs open worldwide. The blogosphere is more than a 100 times bigger than in 2003. And today the estimated post frequency is 17 per second. (Click on illustration to see 'Why Blogging Matters'!)

Numbers on corporate blogging are challenging to estimate; A reason is that many corporate blogs start-off as company intern blogs that, if they have the potential, might go public later on. Those are not easily tracked. But online lists and wikis on corporate blogs are being developed at different sites. Like the one by TheNewPR/Wiki. Or like this wiki by Social Square on professional blogs in Denmark. And blogspotting is a competitive field, where different experts demonstrates different tracking skills.

In October 2004 Technorati tracked around 5000 American corporate blogs. Today around 10% of the Fortune 500 are blogging (some find the Fortune 500 list to undercount, and find TheNewPR/Wiki to be more accurate, see this article from BusinessWeek). TheNewPR/Wiki counts that by March this year 274 CEOs are blogging. But numbers tell that eg. 2.000 employees at IBM are blogging, and even 2.500 at Microsoft. So, if including the company intern blogs, the numbers must be rather sky-high.   

Balancing corporate governance of organizational blogs
My friend, who works with New Media at another agency (none mentioned, none forgotten!) and I shared a too short but really interesting conversation this week on corporate blogging: My friend telling me, that their corporate blog was launched full of good intentions. But is now slowly dying because of its, in my friend's opinion, too corporate concept; there are many restrictions on the bloggers, and personal angles on posts are not too welcome. My friend sees radical corporate demands on blogs as contrasting the very essence of what a good, living blog is. And this has been a turn-off and has taken the live and blog-engagement out of their corporate blog.  At least that’s my friend’s qualified experience.

(Click to read joke)           When introducing something new like a corporate blog, its understandable that leaders might wish to stay in control of how it evolves – but, like Nikolaj S. points out when talking about organizational blogging, since those leaders have chosen to hire their employees and provide them with a phone line and email account, trust in the employees' communication skills on behalf of the cooperation has already taken place… So personality (not to be confused with 'very personal' og private) in a blog post can be a tool of engagement; for the blogger as well as the reader and the commentator. Turn-on and tune in! – in stead of turn-off and turn out...

But the balance between personal and corporate (like that of private and public) can still be a challenging one when launching and introducing a corporate blog, at least 'till the new bloggers and management find confidence in this medium and way of communicating. And in DK, we (and Danish cooperations) are still far behind of what is a rather mainstream thing in eg. United States: Blogging.

Success parametres in corporate blogging
I find a blog-theme to be one qualified parameter of success, also since the blog is strong in narrowcasting, as well as personality, a strong sense of 'NOW' (presence and topical) and the ability to turn on engagement from the world around you through your blog, that being a social media.

Blogs have a build in element that tricks voyerism, which, if managed with considered thought and paired with authenticity, can do all good for a corporate blog – as well as for the organizational culture and public face of the cooperation, strengthening its display with a touch of personality, that many stakeholders demand of companies today - eg. future employeees, but also clients and product fans.

A blogger that really enjoys blogging is another simple but important key to launch a successful blog! So, management should also be vary not to turn-off the blog-engagement by too heavy corporate governance on the organizational blog.

The interesting thing is, that blogging, now being more constituted, is developing as its own genre – where styles, lengths on posts and purposes and perspectives on blogging are being discussed worldwide, also in blogs on blogs, meta-blogs. And the development, exploring and challenging of this new genre in communication and writing is really interesting to participate in! I mean; there are many ways to write a great poem – like there is writing a blog. And just ‘cus you are excellent in writing novels or journalism, you will not necessarily do good in writing poetry – or blog posts…Or maybe the cool thing about 2.0 blogging is, that it is really for everyone to do?! – though some talk critically about the 2.0 'pollution' of and by www, like author Andrew Keen in his recent book "The Cult of the Amateur", just reviewed by K-forum in this article: 'Al magt til amatøren?' (Power to the amateur?).

What do you think? Do you have a favorite style within blogging? What do you find to be a key to success in corporate blogs? And how corporate do you think corporate blogging can be?

A friend of STAGIS, Jonas Kjær, gave in his master thesis at Roskilde University about a month ago. He has been studying how blogs can help to develop or keep relations between companies and customers or other stakeholers. During the fall Jonas interviewed me and Birgitte as well as two of our clients about stagisblog.com. There are lots of interesting thoughts and discussions in Jonas thesis that may inspire if you're considering how an open blog could effect your organizations' relations.

You can download it here: speciale.pdf.

Last week we helped Kræftens Bekæmpelse (The Danish Cancer Society) launch their blog "Blog om kræft". It's going well so far. During the first week 13 readers with some connection to this hideous disease chose to comment on Frede Olesens first blog post. And today Frede has been blogging about the coordination of the danish healthcare services which seems to be an issue that many cancer-stricken patients and their relatives are challenging.

I wonder what the members of the organization that haven't been involved in the process of discussing blogging and the organizational effects of the blog are thinking about the blog? One of the objectives of blogging as a manager or team-leader is to set the good example or put focus on critical issues. But how is this seen from the perspective of colleagues in the organization?

You can see the blog here.

This week we've been discussing the conventions of blogging. Over and over again. Especially the conventions for organisational blogging. Because there seem to exist many different opinions about what function a blog has - about the bennefits and possible dangers.
From my point of view, the most important functions of an organisations blog is
1. to show the surrounding world a true or authentic picture of the organisations values and the people outliving those values. 2, to keep an open dialouge with everybody who's got an interest in the organisation. And 3, that the blog provides a frame to share knowledge.

I am a quite new blogger, and what I've found most surprising about the bloggosphere is how loyal bloggers seem to be. By loyal I meen that bloggers seem to respect eachothers opinions, no matter how different they might be. They keep their texts and comments within the relevant theme and mostly in a relevant language.
Furthermore, bloggers seem loyal to what I call "the unwritten rules" of blogging. These rules, I think, are bread in a paradigm of opennes and are not yet fully understood or accepted by many organisations. These rules contains the expectations of what a blog has do tecnically (it has to contain rss-feeds, links, commentboxes, some kind of categories to navigate in and some information about who and when the text is from), and also - more importantly - the expectations about the people behind the blog. We expect that the opinions of the bloggers are infact the real opinions of the real author. We expect some kind of feedback from our comments. And we expect that the issues discussed on the blog represents the work of (or issues discussed within) the organisation.

This kind of loyalty is seen through the judgement (or punishment) of blogs that are 'cheating'. Fx Walmarts blog shows a good example of how wrong it goes, when a blog looses its reliability.
Cases like this might help to convince ceo's about not only the bennefits of blogging the "right way", but also the concequenses of blogging the "wrong way".

This is my understanding of the bloggosphere so forth. And if it's not far from the truth, organisations do not have worry about opening a dialouge with the sorrounding world, as long as they follow the rules...