Portals and KM

2013 Fortune 500 Expand and Branch Out in Social Media: Google+, Instagram, Foursquare and Pinterest

Nora Ganim Barnes and her colleagues at the Center for Marketing Research at the University of Massachusetts Dartmouth have released another of their very useful studies: 2013 Fortune 500 Are Bullish on Social Media:
Big Companies Get Excited About Google+, Instagram,
 Foursquare and Pinterest. For this work they looked at social media use by all 500 of the 2013 Fortune 500 companies. The types included blogs, Twitter and Facebook. Additionally, Google+, Foursquare and Instagram were added for the first time this year.

I always find their work especially valuable as they have been doing this research for some time and have a longitudinal set of data for comparisons. Here are some recent ones: Social Media Continues to Increase in the 2012 Fortune 500 and Blogging and Twitter by the Fortune 500: A Longitudinal Study (2011). In the 2011 Fortune 500 they found a leveling off of blogging with only 23% hosting a public facing corporate blog.  However, things changed in 2012 as 28% hosted public facing blogs. This surge continues with their latest iteration showing 34% of these large enterprises creating and sharing content through blogs.  Consistent with this is the fact that in 2013, 79% of the Fortune 500 blogs are kept current, take comments, have RSS feeds and take subscriptions.

This was the largest increase since 2008. They concluded that, “signals the return of the online in depth conversation, thought leadership and original content development that was popular a decade ago with early corporate adopters of blogging like IBM and Ford Motors.” I first hand that this is a goal for IBM and supports their strong move into social business (see; My IBM Connect 2013 Session Notes: Complete Listing).

These large firms are twice as active on Twitter as 77% of the Fortune 500 have corporate Twitter accounts with a tweet in the past thirty days. This represents a 4% increase since last year. These 387 corporations with corporate Twitter accounts come from 72 of the 75 industries represented in the Fortune 500. They also found that those companies ranked higher in the 2013 Fortune 500 are more likely to adopt Twitter than their lower ranked counterparts, following the same pattern as blogging.

Facebook presence is also prominent with 70% of the Fortune 500 on Facebook., a 4% increase since last year. Other social media tools are also being used extensively. There are now corporate YouTube accounts were found in 69% of the 2013 F500. This is a 7% increase from last year. Pinterest accounts are found in 9%. Google+ accounts are operating for 35%. Instagram and Foursquare accounts are operated by 9% of the 2013 Fortune 500.

The researches conclude that these results show “an interest in experimenting with new tools.  Only Google+ shows evidence of a significant number of open, but inactive, accounts.  In every other case, there is current activity and vibrant engagement of their audiences.  The use of blogging, after years of low and stagnant adoption has continued its steady move forward with over 1/3 now providing original content and using their blogs to promote causes, establish thought leadership and to better understand their target markets.”

I am very pleased to see an increase in blogging were more in-depth and interactive conversations can occur beyond what the other, more broadcast media allow. Thanks to Nora Barnes and her team for another piece of useful data. 

Social Media Continues to Increase in the 2012 Fortune 500

Nora Ganim Barnes and her colleagues at the Center for Marketing Research at the University of Massachusetts Dartmouth have been dong a number of studies on social media and organizations in various populations. One series covers the Fortune 500. See for example, Blogging and Twitter by the Fortune 500: A Longitudinal Study (2011), Twitter Moves Ahead of Blogs in Fortune 500 (2010), and Fortune 500 Blogging Study (2009). The latest is Social Media Surge by the 2012 Fortune 500: Increase Use of Blogs, Facebook, Twitter and More by Nora Ganim Barnes, Ava M. Lescault, and Justina Andonian.

While last year’s F500 study found a leveling off of blogging in the Fortune 500 with only 23% hosting a public facing corporate blog in both 2010 and 2011, in 2012, 139 companies (28%) had corporate blogs providing the largest increase in use of this tool since the 2008 study of the F500. It was also found that 54% of the corporate blogs come from companies ranked in the top 200 on the list.  Rank influences blogging more than it does the use of any other tool studied. Telecommunications leads the pack with 40% blog usage. The 17 industries with no blogs include Forest and Paper Products, Railroads, Tobacco, Toys/Sporting Goods, Real Estate, Building Materials/Glass, Trucking and Waste Management. Many of these make sense but I am surprised with real estate as it an industry heavy into blogging.

The research also found that Twitter is by far the tool of choice with 73% having corporate twitter accounts and at least one company from every one of the 71 industries on the list tweeting. This is an increase of 11% from 2011. The team found that all of the top 10 companies (Exxon, Wal-Mart, Chevron, ConocoPhillips, General Motors, General Electric, Berkshire Hathaway, Fannie Mae, Ford Motors and Hewlett-Packard) consistently post on their Twitter accounts.  Here the leading industry is Food Consumer Products with 93% participation. Google has the highest number of followers on Twitter (4,795,987), followed by Whole Foods Market (2,666,439), Starbucks (2,546,244), and Southwest Airlines (1,305,938).  Walt Disney had the largest increase in a year with 206,843 Twitter followers in 2011 to 1,289,222 followers in 2012 (84%).

 

In addition, 66% of the 2012 Fortune 500 have a corporate Facebook page. This is an increase of 8% from 2011. Next, in the usage line is YouTube with 62% (309) of the 2012 Fortune 500 while only. 2% (11) are using Pinterest. I do not use it either.  Within the 2012 Fortune 500, 23% (115) have neither a Twitter account nor a Facebook page.  This is down from 2011 when 31% had neither.

There is much more in the free report and I would urge you to take a look. I greatly appreciate the effort by Nora Ganim Barnes and her team in documenting social media use over time. 

Gautam Ghosh: India's Social Media Thought Leader

There was a recent article in Forbes about my long time virtual friend, Gautam Ghosh. Titled, Social Media Thought Leader: India's Gautam Ghosh by Shel Isreal, it goes into many of the great things Gautum has done over the years in this space. Before I get into details about the article, I want to note Gautum is a great practitioner of the golden rule of social media: reciprocity.

Shel notes all the achievements that Gautum was accomplished including being on every short list of top social media influencers globally despite being in a country that has been slow to pick up on social media compared to many others. Shel also notes that, “in 2005, Ghosh achieved the dubious distinction of being the first person on the Asian continent to speak to me via social media. While it was a thrill for me, by then his blog had already connected him with people in about a dozen English-speaking countries.”

I was actually one of those as I interviewed him in 2004 for my book on business blogging along with his country companion, Dina Metha. By then Ghosh’s blog, now called Talent and Social Business was voted as the third most popular in India. He generously notes our conversation for my book in his conversation with Shel. Every since then we have stayed in touch. Gautum was always quick to notice anything I did and responded which naturally motivated me to do the same.

Currently, Gautum has joined the head of Microsoft India to become involved in BraveNewTalent, a London-based community platform service firm that is growing rapidly on a global scale attracting a stellar list of clients including L’Oreal, IBM, McAfee and Starbucks. Shel quotes Gautum, “BraveNewTalent hosts communities where people and organizations share knowledge and experiences, organized by professional topics and serves clients as a social media hub – bringing in content from other sources like Twitter, blogs or YouTube.”

Ghosh predicts that the new professional classification of social recruiting, emerging in the enterprise will follow the same migrations that marketing and communications professionals are following today. This is a move from transactions to relationships and trust. He also notes that forward thinking companies will be “engaging talent communities and giving to the community before they think of getting returns.” I could not agree more. The use of communities is on the rise in every space and I see recruiting as no exception.  There is more in the article so I encourage you to read the whole article. 

 

The Gig Economy – Intrapreneurship – A New Style of Work

My friend Luis Suarez pointed me to an excellent article by Irving Wladawsky-Berger, A New Style of Work. I met Irving at an IBM event around 2005 before he retired and was impressed with his thinking. In this blog post he refers to the post retirement phase of his life that has launched this new way to work for him. In another blog post on the topic, Tom Foremski, a journalist blogger commented, “In some ways, I see your post-retirement life as being somewhat futuristic, in that it will be the way many people will be working in the future.  It's what I call an "atomic" model - collaborating with others on specific tasks/projects and then dissolving those collaborations as you work with others on different projects. In some ways, this is the way Hollywood has been working for decades.  And it's also one that I increasingly see in Silicon Valley.”

This rang very true as I am now seven years into the post-retirement phase of my own life.  I find myself operating in the same way that Irving describes as I have written about on this blog a number of times. I wear multiple work hats and am connected to several organizations. I also find an increasing number of my former colleagues doing the same. Except for most of them they are not yet in a post retirement phase as they are much younger than me. Luis himself falls into this latter category and his post discussing Irving’s article provides some useful thoughts.

Luis defines Intrapreneurship as an era, “where thanks to the Social Web, whether internal or external, or both!, knowledge workers, for the first time ever, are now in charged of their own productivity, of their own workflows and personal business relationships with others, of their own responsibility not only towards the work that needs to be done, but also towards the fellow peers they collaborate and share their knowledge with.”  The reminds me of Charles Handy’s comment in the early 90s that when the workers own the means of production, that is their own minds, things will change.  His forecast has come true.

Luis expands Handy’s idea to add that one of the ways that things have changed is now workers are much more transparent about their work and having more fun at the same time. We are out from under the hierarchical cloud imposed by the industrial revolution.  It is easier to do this as an enterprise of one that is connected to many organizations as I have experienced. Luis is a great role model for this new style of working as he works from within a very large enterprise but has established a strong personal brand to the benefit of both himself and his employer. He is a great example of the social revolution moving inside the enterprise.

Earlier this week I wrote on a study that finds most people not engaged in their work. Here is a good way to change that.

 

 

Corporate Social Media Policies are Advancing

Pam Sahota has provided a useful post, Examples of Corporate Social Media Policies, that actually contained links to 14 examples. While it is always good to look at what others are doing, Pam started with the proper caution that there’s no right policy. Your company needs to find what is right for your culture and needs. Here are a few.

Best Buy has received a lot of press using Twitter for customer service. It has a social media policy in place in order to avoid issues regarding privacy and other topics. Their policy begins with the statement: “If you are an hourly (non-exempt) employee, you may participate in Twelpforce, with your manager’s approval, during your regular work hours. This includes time spent reading the Twelpforce Twitter feed and composing messages sent using the ‘#twelpforce’ hashtag, and all other work related to Twelpforce.” Anything done outside work hours does not count.

Content is broadly defined as “as anything you have placed on your website, blog, microblog, or video sharing account.” By doing this you grant Best Buy “an irrevocable and unrestricted worldwide license to use, modify, reproduce, transmit, display, and distribute the Content (defined below) on Your Site for any purpose whatsoever to the extent permitted by law.” So they can modify as they want which is interesting. You are expected to follow the social media policy that is extensive and has the tagline: “Be smart. Be respectful. Be human.” Those are all good ideas.

You are expected to disclose your affiliation and, at the same time, state this your writing is your opinion. There is a lot more in Best Buy policies and they seem both useful and appropriate.

Pam finds Ford’s policy to be subtle, “human”, and sensible. They feel that that social media follows the same rules (as other communication channels), just in a new playground. You need to use your common sense, beware of privacy issues, play nice and be honest. They seem similar to Best Buy from a quick look. You need to be respectful and aware that what you say is permanent.

General Motors policy states that it likes Charlene Li’s blogger code of ethics and have adapted it for gmblogs.com. They ask bloggers to tell the truth and acknowledge and correct any mistakes promptly. They will not delete comments unless they are spam, off-topic, or defamatory and reply to comments when appropriate as promptly as possible. They will link to online references and original source materials directly. They will disagree with other opinions respectfully. I like the ongoing reference to respect in these policies.

Blog and social media policies have come a long way since I wrote these posts in 2005, Blog-Linked Firings Prompt Calls for Better Policies and What’s On and Off the Record for Bloggers?  This is a good thing. 

 

OutStart’s Participate Enables the Social Side of Enterprise Work Processes

Founded in 1999, OutStart offers an portfolio of inter-related mobile, social, and learning Knowledge Solutions intended to accelerate and broaden access to colleagues and the knowledge they need to respond to business requirements more quickly and make better informed decisions.. I recently spoke with Mike Gregory about Participate, OutStart's Social Business Software. It integrates social networking, collaboration, and knowledge sharing technologies in a secure managed environment. As a disclosure I am now working with OutStart on their social media efforts. Participate is one component of their offerings that also include mobile learning and communications, learning content management, and learning management system as well as a solution that pulls all the components together into a single integrated learning and knowledge suite.   

Participate was acquired in 2006 and they continue to extend its features. Some of the capabilities within Participate include: workspaces, discovery and networking between members, blogs, micro-blogging, wikis, and an web-based interface to publish FAQs and contribute to communities. It integrates with Microsoft Office for the contribution of desktop content. There is also integration with systems such as SharePoint, MS Office Communication Server and CRM. Participate provides granular security and access control.

The micro-blogging feature allows for both manually generated updates such as provided through Twitter and auto-generated updates based on user activity.  You can add comments to the auto-generated updates. This latter feature can be a useful way to keep track of the pulse of the organization. It also reduces email traffic.

There is automated management and capturing of question and answer exchanges for organic growth of the knowledge base over time. If you do not know the right expert for your question, the system determines the most appropriate individuals. It reaches out to the experts through email and the response comes back into Participate.  Hee is a sample expertise exchange screen.

This is much more efficient than the old way of mass email blasts. Answers are then made available through search going forward. The capturing is nice feature and reduces the burden on employees to contribute to the firm’s knowledge capital separate from their normal work efforts. That has always been an obstacle to the effectiveness of traditional knowledge management solutions.

Participate supports both internal and externally facing blogs. Inside the enterprise there can be a community blog, as well as individual blogs. Where needed workflow is available for content review before posting. You can vary the amount of control required. It is used for the Web facing OutStart Knowledge Solutions Blog. Here is a sample internal blog screen.

Team workspaces are available. You can assign tasks, add documents, and perform other projects functions. There are three levels of security: wide open, visible but approval required to join, and completely private requiring an invitation to join. Here is a sample workspaces screen.

You can subscribe to content through email in a regularly scheduled digest where you set the schedule. To fit people’s existing work patterns, email can also be used to send subscription digests, immediate notifications of people, groups, or conversations they are following, and tasks assigned through workspaces. Here is a sample subscriptions screen.

There is RSS capability for all content within Participate. This gives great flexibility to monitoring what is going on within the system. You can track the activity of everyone within the system and provide credit for their involvement. People can also rate contributions. Over half of the features are mobile enabled to provide quick access from anywhere through a mobile interface.

We can see from the feature set that Participate offers a comprehensive set of collaboration capabilities. It goes one step further. Through its integration with OutStart’s learning content management system, Participate can be used to support social learning. This social side of learning has been shown to significantly increase the engagement of in learning activities.  Participate can be the bridge between formal and informal learning.

OutStart has won a number of awards including being named a Visionary in the Gartner Corporate Learning Systems Magic Quadrant since 2004, Top Learning Portal by TrainingIndustry.com, and Best of Elearning! awards for their OutStart LCMS and Hot Lava Mobile. I will cover other components of their offerings in future posts.  The OutStart Knowledge Solutions Blog offers an exchange of ideas on how to better utilize technology to improve knowledge sharing.

 

 

Blogging is Still a Good Complement for Your Small Business Web Site

Here is useful data from a recent study of over 1,500 HubSpot customers (mostly small- and medium-sized businesses). 795 of the businesses in my sample blogged, 736 didn't. It clearly demonstrated that companies with a blog have far better marketing results for their Web site. Specifically, the average company that blogs has: 55% more visitors, 97% more inbound links, and 434% more indexed pages. We have certainly found this to be the case with our Darwin Awareness Engine Blog. Others seems find this benefit as well. In the past three years there was a steady increase in company blogs with a rise from 38% in 2008 to 45% in 2009 to 50% in 2010 as reported by the Center for Marketing Research at the University of Massachusetts Dartmouth.

Kevin O’ Keefe offered some useful commentary on these results through his blog.  He pointed out that blogs help with search results. If your provide valuable content you will generates incoming links which supplies more traffic and even better search results. If your provide valuable content your blog will generate a social network for you. People regularly share posts from blogs on Twitter, Facebook, and LinkedIn. Twitter is my main source for finding out about what is happening on relevant blogs to my interests. I no longer have patience to sort through a RSS feed.  

Has Twitter changed these reasons to blog? I think that Twitter complements blogs and does not replace them. Here is a useful post by Adam Singer that goes into detail on this point, 19 Reasons You Should Blog And Not Just Tweet. Twitter offers the sound bytes and blogs can go into depth. As noted in this blog post, many of the most useful tweets contain links to blogs and other content that goes into more depth.

Adam notes: “Unscientific observation: most bloggers use Twitter, but many Twitter users do not blog.” I think these non-blogging Twitters are missing the chance to have a substantial conversation with their audience.

Case in point, the 19 reasons to keep blogging could not be conveyed in Twitter but the title should draw a lot of RTs and click throughs to the actual post. Which is better to be a RT pointer or the owner of the content where the reader ends up? I encourage you to check on Adam’s 19 reasons. I agree with all of them. Blog on.

 

My New Role within OutStart’s Social Media Efforts

I am very pleased to announce a new addition to the roles I currently support. I am now helping OutStart with their blog and Twitter efforts as OutStart’s Director, Social Media. OutStart offers an integrated suite of Knowledge Solutions that address social, mobile and learning efforts. They have won a number of awards including being named a Visionary in the Gartner Corporate Learning Systems Magic Quadrant since 2004, Top Learning Portal by TrainingIndustry.com, and Best of Elearning! awards for their OutStart LCMS and Hot Lava Mobile. Here is how they define knowledge solutions. 

I am excited to be a part of the OutStart team as their offerings reflect the past thirty years of my work experience. I started with enterprise learning in the 1980s developing programs for such companies as American Express, Apple, AT&T, Honeywell, IBM, and NCR. Then in the 90s I become involved with knowledge management, but the initiatives I was connected with were more like the social nature of what is now called enterprise 2.0. Clients included British Telecom, Cigna Insurance, Ryder, and Sainbury’s. It is exciting to bring this past experience to my current focus, the use of social media.    

The purpose of the OutStart Knowledge Solutions blog is to promote an exchange of ideas helping us to better utilize technology to improve knowledge sharing. While OutStart offers an integrated suite of Knowledge Solutions to address these issues, the focus within this blog will be more about the concept and what the market, as a whole, is doing in this space. Here is more about the blog. 

The posts on the blog will be written by a number of the OutStart team, including myself, and each will contain the author’s byline. I will provide overall coordination working with Jeff Whitney, OutStart VP of Marketing. Here is my first post, Aberdeen Report: New Learning Tools are Enabling Organizations to Meet Current Business Challenges.

The Twiiter feed, @outstart, will also be contributed to by a number of the OutStart team including myself. I invite you to follow both of these efforts.  While we will tweet at times about OutStart, like the blog, we will focus more on industry news and innovative articles and posts we discover and want to share. We want both of these communication channels to be more about serving our followers and generating conversations than as a means of promotion. 

On occasion, on the blog I will cover aspects of the OutStart offering and other news on as I do with a range of software offerings. These services certainly fit within the scope of my Portal’s and KM blog’s coverage. I am continuing my other roles, including serving as VP of Marketing at Darwin Ecosystem where I also focus on social media. These two product offerings are actually quite complementary and in no way competitive.

I will also continue to write for the AppGap and FastFoward blogs. They both cover the market space that includes OutStart and Darwin Ecosystem. As always I will provide relationship disclosure when relevant. This is an era where people often take on multiple roles. I am very pleased with this new addition.

 

 

The Inc. 500 Continues to Embrace Social Media in Increasing Numbers

Here is the latest in the very useful series of longitudinal studies on social media use by The Center for Marketing Research at the University of Massachusetts Dartmouth led by Nora Barnes.  This one covered Social Media Usage in the Inc. 500. In contrast here is their most recent one on Blogging and Twitter by the Fortune 500.  In this case, there was a nationwide telephone survey of those companies named by Inc. Magazine to the Inc. 500 list. All interviews took place in October and November of 2010 and obtained 34% participation. 

Of course, this sample represents a moving target as the companies included continue to shift and this may effect the data.  In 2010 there were more government services and financial services firms than the years before. Since companies in these two areas under use social media compared to others, this shift has the effect on reducing growth numbers.

We can see this effect of shifting market niches in the numbers reported in the study. In 2010 83% of the Inc. 500 reporting using at least one of the social media tools studied (see below).  However, government services companies make up 12% of the 2010 Inc. 500, but 27% of those not using social media tools. Energy companies comprise 3% of the 2010 Inc. 500 but 17% of the non-users.  Financial services companies make up 5% of the Inc. 500, but they comprise 10% of the companies who have not yet adopted social media.

The study appears to be focused on market facing uses of social media but then this is the Center for Marketing Research.  It looked at blogs, online video, message boards, podcasting, and the specific social networking tools:  Facebook, MySpace, Twitter, Linkedin, and Foursquare.  Two of the biggest gainers in 2010 are Twitter and Facebook. Twitter is used by 59% of the Inc. 500 use it for business purposes, up from 52%.  Twitter is perceived as a useful tool as 81% of users consider it a success. Facebook growth was higher with 71% using it for business up from 61% in 2009 and it had a 85% success rating.

Next in percent of usage were blogs. Looking back over the past three years there was a steady increase in company blogs with a rise from 38% in 2008 to 45% in 2009 to 50% in 2010.  In addition to the growth in usage the report noted that firms are using them more effectively, “There is a strong propensity to engage consumers through accepting and replying to comments and providing a vehicle for subscriptions.”  Company blogging was also considered successful by 86% of adopters. In addition, 34% percent have developed policies to govern blogging by their employees. In the Fortune 500 only 20% report such policies.  Both numbers are too low.  The Fortune 500 also are less likely to use blogs with only 23% reporting have a company blog in 2010, a one percent increase over 2009.

Within the Inc. 500 the majority (56%) feel social media is important for their success online.  They also look at what others are saying about them through social media. Seventy percent report they actively monitor, up slightly from 68% last year, 60% in 2008 and 50% in 2007.  In addition to using social media to communicate to their markets, there is a rise in use for communication with partners, vendors, and suppliers. Blog use in this category rose form 18% in 2009 to 22% in 2010.  Facebook is used by 31% of respondents and Twitter is used by 27%.

I have only addressed some of the highlights. The complete executive summary is available at the Center for Marketing Research site. 

 

Blogging and Twitter by the Fortune 500: A Longitudinal Study

Here is some new research, The Fortune 500 and Social Media: A Longitudinal Study of Blogging and Twitter Usage by America’s Largest Companies, by Nora Ganim Barnes and Eric Mattson at the Center for Marketing Research at the University of Massachusetts Dartmouth.  I have covered some of their earlier work (see Fortune 500 Blogging Study), This new study builds on their 2008 study and expands to look at the Fortune 500's usage of Twitter.

The main findings indicated that 180 (22%) of the 2009 Fortune 500 have a public-facing corporate blog with a post in the past 12 months. This is up from 81 companies (16%) in 2008. To no surprise IT companies have the most blogs. This includes Hewlett-Packard, Dell, Microsoft, Apple, Oracle and Xerox. The specialty retail industry increased its blogging by from 4 companies on the 2008 list to 7 from the 2009 list. Included are companies such as Home Depot, Best Buy, Toys “R” Us and BJ’s Wholesale. This is perhaps because of the increasing awareness of social media marketing.

The big players seem to like blogs more. The top 100 companies on the list represent 39% of the 108 blogs in the 2009 F500.  In 2008, 38% of the total number of blogs came from the top 100. The top 200 companies in 2009 had 58% of the F500 blogs, while the bottom 200 (those listed 301-500) had 29% of the 2009 F500 blogs. They seem to be open to conversations as 90% percent of the Fortune 500 blogs take comments, have RSS feeds and take subscriptions. This is consistent with the 2008 findings. 

Of the 108 blogs located, 93 (86%) are linked directly to a corporate Twitter account. This is a three-fold increase from 2008. Twitter usage is now running ahead of blogs as 173 (35%) of the 2009 Fortune 500 has a Twitter account with a post within the past thirty days.  Only 4 protected their tweets and these were not included in the total.

The insurance industry has the most Twitter accounts (13) with It and telecom following with 10 each.  Like blogs size matters as 47% of the 173 twitter accounts belong to Fortune 500 companies in the top 200 while 35% come from those listed in the bottom 200 (201-500) on the 2009 list.

While there is growth in blogging in the Fortune 500 they are still blogging at a lower rate than the smaller Inc. 500 firms where 45% now have a blog.   You can find a complete listing of those with blogs and twitter accounts in the research paper.

So it seems that blogs and Twitter are taking hold. I found it interesting, but not surprising, that Twitter usage is higher. However, if you only tweet and do not blog you are not able to get comprehensive messages out and are generally pointing to the messages of others. Perhaps those Twitter only firms are just interested in getting sound bytes out. 

The Darwin Awareness Engine™ provides an easy way to keep track of all these tweets and blog posts.  You can set up Darwin Editions™ on your topic of interests, including what the Fortune 500 or the Inc. 500 are saying. 

 

Take the Prescient Digital Media 2010 Global Intranet Study

Prescient Digital Media is conducting another global intranet survey. The preliminary results (400 respondents) and data of the Intranet 2.0 Global Survey 2010 reveal that 49% of organizations have employee or executive blogs on their corporate intranet. However, the biggest blogging challenge for these organizations and is getting people to participate.

Prescient Digital Media is preparing a comprehensive report on the topic, based in part on the findings collected from the survey. The survey takes approximately 6-8 minutes to complete. The more people who take the survey, the better the results. Ensure you get a free copy of the full Intranet 2.0 Global Study Report and analysis by spending 6-8 minutes taking the Intranet 2.0 Global Survey 2010. It is available to take until April 23.

US Military Enterprise 2.0 Platform is Helping Coordinate Haiti Relief

This post combines two FastForward posts as I wanted to continue to share this story with a broader audience. The US military is using an enterprise 2.0 style collaborative network to help coordinate its relief efforts in Haiti.  As reported by David Pierce in Wired in Pentagon’s Social Network Becomes Hub for Haiti Relief:

“TISC (”the Transnational Information Sharing Cooperation”) is a new iteration of APAN, the All Partners Access Network, which was developed by the Defense Department a few years ago. Initially, the military was using APAN to communicate across borders, particularly in countries without sophisticated communication technology. Even in third-world countries, Internet connection seemed to be frequently accessible, so the APAN system was built to work over the Internet, to facilitate the sharing of classified files, as well as things like coordinating calendars.

The system is designed to be as simple as possible, and is as easy to use as a site like Facebook, says Ty Wooldridge of the U.S. Pacific Command in Hawaii. It uses file-sharing applications, wikis, blogs, and calendaring tools, among other things, to coordinate information and action among people, no matter where they are. Though there are obvious military implications to that kind of network, its first battlefield test is ongoing, on the ground in Haiti.”

I recently spoke with Walton Smith from Booz Allen who was involved in the development of APAN to get the details (see my series on how Booz Allen, itself, uses enterprise 2.0 within the firm). First, I will cover how it works and then cover how it came into being and then its use in Haiti.

We have been reading about the logistics troubles in Haiti but they might be even worse without the TISC. Haiti is the first activity of scale to use the system. When you are determining ROI based on number of hospital beds filled and people who receive much needed food, the benefits take on a different meaning. The TISC concept is to help the US military better coordinate with NGOs and other countries when disaster strikes. The objective is to a create system that not only helps with particular disasters but also builds an archive of best practices, key people/organizations and useful information to better handle future needs, as well as a platform for efficient cooperation.

There are several main components of the system: forums, wikis, chat and blogs. In the forums, people are able to ask questions (how to find experts, etc.) and make requests (can you help with this issue, etc.), as well as offer help or point out resources that others can draw on (e.g., available hospital beds or safe landing areas). The forum tags content and sets up a treaded dialog on the specific issues.  The chat tool allows for real time secure communications.  Then the content is organized and placed in a wiki for ease of retrieval. Finally, the best practices are abstracted and put into blogs to attract comments and be available for use in future disaster relief efforts.  In the future, there will be expert locators and profiles. 

This version of APAN began two years ago when the US Pacific Command (PACOM) wanted to develop an online community for the free flow of information between validated people from the US military, NGOs and other countries.  Ty Wooldrige and Jerry Giles led the effort for PACOM. Booz Allen was asked to create the system with PACOM, and James Kaina and Tim Gramp are the Booz Allen leads.

The system was first tested on some small efforts. The support for mobile devices was strengthened. The US Southern Command asked the PACOM to provide an operational demonstration of the system. The PACOM team was in Miami for this demo when the Haiti earthquake struck. The Southern Command said to forget simply doing a demo and decided to put the system into real use to help with Haiti. Now APAN is providing real-time help, validating the concept and vision, gathering useful content, and the Haiti effort is providing a significant test of the system to make further improvements.

The US military was one of the early leaders in knowledge management and the use of after action reviews and lessons learned. It is nice to see it acting as one of the leaders in the use of Enterprise 2.0 concepts that take the vision of knowledge management significantly forward with new tools, transparency, and capabilities.

The Defense News also reported on how on APAN has evolved into a broader communications and coordination tool that's proving vital to those who want to help and those who need it. Governments, companies and private citizens are using it to post what they are offering, allowing disaster relief officials to pick and choose what they need.  Defense News also pointed out the usefulness of Web social media such as Twitter and Facebook, as well as geospatial systems such as Open Street that was been used to create detailed maps of damaged areas.

I remember how a very basic use of wikis helped with the Katrina efforts (see: Katrina PeopleFinder Project). In this case a call for virtual volunteers to help populate a centralized missing person database was meet over 20,000 people within a day. It is great to see social media and its users helping out again and the evolution of its capabilities. However, the basic human drive to help others in need continues to drive these efforts. Social media just allows a much greater way to productivity channel this human drive. 

Implementing Enterprise 2.0 at Océ

I conducted a series on interviews over the past two months on how Océ Is implementing enterprise 2.0. Océ is a leading international provider of digital document management technology and services. Most interviews were with Samuel Driessen, Information Architect at Océ. I spoke about their SharePoint efforts with Jan van Veen, Manager Internal Communications, in Corporate Communications and Tom Dombret, the technical team lead on the SharePoint effort. I spoke with Samuel and Peter Kruizinga about their social bookmarking experiences. This post provides a summary of some key points and links to each of the five posts.

Samuel’s responsibilities include both the information architecture for structured information in applications such as PLMS and SAP and the unstructured information in places such as email and knowledge management programs.

I really like this dual architectural role for both structured and unstructured information. It makes so much sense to have these two information sources under the same architectural leadership. The approach is to define information architecture principles and then convey these principles to management and employees so they will see the logic behind the approach. This is move away from rigid top-down rules. The implementation details will change faster than the principles and managers and employees will be able to make intelligent decisions aligned with the principles.

This granting mangers and employees the right to make decisions is reflected in all of their enterprise 2.0 work and is consistent with the principles of enterprise 2.0. Samuel also provides guidance on the capabilities of each medium so users can make intelligent decisions. I think their effortts serve as a good model for others.

Creating Information Architecture at Océ in the Age of Enterprise 2.0

Lessons Learned from Implementing Social Bookmarking at Océ

Implementing Enterprise Micro-messaging with Yammer at Océ

Lessons Learned from the Océ SharePoint Implementation

Implementing Wikis in the Age of Enterprise 2.0 at Océ

Altimeter Group Provides Useful Resource on Social Media Service Providers

Charlene Li’s Altimeter Group is hosting a wiki that provides useful information on social media resources. There is a list of social media policies and a listing of social media agencies and consultants. The social media agencies and consultant are divided into five groups: independent consultants and experts, social media boutiques – US, social media boutiques – non-Us, PR agencies, and interactive marketing and search agencies. 

Anyone can apply to be listed. I am listed under independent consultants and experts. Two of my business partners are listed under social media boutiques – US,. Beeline Labs manages the AppGap and FastForward blogs. I am also working with Pistachio Consulting on Twitter client engagements. 

This wiki is a nice service and great resource. There is more than simply resource lists. Check it out. 

Margaret Atwood Takes to Social Media Marketing

The well-respected Canadian author, Margaret Atwood, is now using social media and other channels to promote her latest book. Of course I learned about this through social media via @digiphile on Twitter. Toronto’s Gblobe and Mail reported on this in: Atwood Plunges into Social Media.

This is a good social media marketing success story. In addition to the usual book-signing tour for her new novel, The Year of the Flood, Margaret also created an interactive website, used Twitter it, blogged it, flogged it on T-shirts and turned the book campaign into a contest on YouTube.

In addition to promoting the book, her website, yearoftheflood.com, functions as “a clearinghouse for environmental activism. Fans can also use it to download ring tones for the new-age hymns peppered throughout the book, which are being sung by local artists in each of the theatrical “events” coinciding with the release.”

After the first theatrical Atwood tweeted, “First YOTF event brilliant actors & singers, rocked roof! RSPB made ££, yay!!” Lisa Charters, director of digital operations at Random House of Canada said, “You won't be able to not have a digital presence as an author going forward. Social media is here to stay. It already has become a key ingredient in marketing campaigns.”

I think the same think applies to most businesses. I am seeing that companies are seeing doing Twitter and a blog as a given.

Is Management a Bunch of Social Media Lurkers?

There was an interesting study reported in the Communications Strategist blog on the uses of social media by management. In July 2009, Russell Herder and Ethos Business Law undertook a research study to look at how business leaders view social media and its role in their organizations – see Social Media: Embracing the Opportunities, Averting the Risk. I blogged about it a bit on FastForward but here are more details.

The study found that fifty-one percent of executives surveyed said they fear social media could be detrimental to employee productivity, while 49 percent assert that using social media could damage company reputation.

Apparently with these fears in mind the following reasons that management uses social media were reported. The top reason is to read what customer might be saying about the company (52%). Next was to monitor a competitor’s use of social media (47%). Third was to see what their employees may be sharing, The fourth reason was to check on the background of prospective employees (25%). Thee reasons seems to bring in the vast majority of management into the social media space as only 16% said they use social media for personal use or not at all.

However, as the Communications Strategist noted, these were mostly defensive uses. For example, what about engaging in conversation with employees, customers, and the market in general. They also seem to display a lurker mentality. You really need to more fully engage to understand how social media might help the enterprise. The study also points out the many studies that show a rise in the use of social media should look closely at the reasons the various social media are being used.

This is especially important since despite their apprehensions, social networking is being viewed as a key strategy. According study, eight in 10 senior management, human resource and marketing executives believe social media can enhance relationships with customers/clients (81%) and build brand reputation (81%). Almost 70 percent feel such networking can be valuable in recruitment (69%), as a customer service tool (64%) and used to enhance employee morale (46%). The most popular vehicles being used include Facebook (80%), Twitter (66%), YouTube (55%), LinkedIn (49%) and blogs (43%). However, they seem to leave active participation to employees and simply want to monitor what is happening for various reasons noted above.

It was also interesting to read that, in fact, the majority of those surveyed who are not using social media on a corporate basis say this is primarily because they simply do not know enough about it. Again, the best way to learn is to engage.

So does your management use social media? If, so, how do they use social media? If you are management how do you use social media?

Blogging Remains a Great Tool for Small Businesses

Here are some useful statistics as reported in, Blogging: The Best SEO Tool for Small Businesses. Hub sport recently published a study on that showed companies that blog have far better marketing results. Those who blog see 55% more visitors to their website.

In addition, they get 97% more links to their website which is a primary factor in determining search results. If you want a higher ranking, get quality links to your site. They also get 434% more indexed pages – this is the number of pages that show up in search engines. Simply because you have a web site doesn’t guarantee it is being indexed and is thus findable by search engines. If some of your pages are in search engines it does not mean all of your pages are there.

This is useful evidence to support what I have seen over the spat five years. Blogs get you on the front page of Google and other search engines if you do them right. I first discovered also by accident when I saw that many of the various niche topics that I wrote about appeared on the front page of Google. I noticed this first by looking at the referring source and seeing that it was often a Google search. Usually the search had my post in the top returns so that people saw it and came to t the blog.

The results above show how a blog can boost a regular web site if they are connected in some way. I feel that it is better to have then as separate but closely linked, rather than have the blog embedded in the site. It tends to make the blog easier to find and have its own identity. What has been your experience?

Come to Webcom 2009 in Montreal October 22

Webcom 2009 will take place in Montreal on Thursday October 22 from 8Am to 6PM. I look forward to seeing you there. There is a great agenda of speakers. Shel Holtz leads it off with a session on Tactical Transparency: The Value of Access to Information. Then there are four tracks on: Enterprise 2.0 & Intranets, Marketing 2.0, Solutions 2.0, and Media 2.0.

I am pleased to be speaking twice. First, there is a Enterprise 2.0 and Web 2.0 Blogging in the Age of Twitter. Here is the description. "Blogs were one of the initial social media, emerging on the political scene in 04 and business in 05. They were the first social media to make it into Gartner’s “slope of enlightenment.” Now Twitter has emerged as the hot new social media tool on the Web. Does Twitter replace blogs? Have blogs seen their day? This session will cover the state of business blogs in 2009 and attempt to convince you that blogs and Twitter are natural partners that make each other stronger. It will focus on blogging outside and inside the enterprise."

The second session is a brief discussion on Twitter for Business is Not an Oxymoron. In this discussion I cover "how Twitter is another of the long line of Web 2.0 consumer tools to cross over to the business world. It has emerged in the past year as a new communication channel that augments, but does not replacing existing ones, including blogs. Hear a wide range of business applications for Twitter from a skeptic turned convert. Case examples will be provided and discussion encouraged."

My colleague at Darwin Development Corporation, Thierry Hubert will cover how Collective wisdom is emerging from Web chaos. In this session he will demonstration the Darwin Awareness Engine ™ and discuss its capabilities. Our friend, Claude Malaison will discuss Twitter & the Mumbai Terrorist Attacks: How to scoop CNN.

There are many other interesting speakers and topics and you have the wonderful city of Montreal.

Prescient Digital Media Study Finds Social Media Becoming More Mainstream on Corporate Intranet

Toby Ward recently sent me a copy of the Intranet Global Survey that I participated in. Toby is the CEO of Prescient Digital Media. The headlight quote was encouraging, “Employees want to work for progressive and innovative organizations, and expect 2.0 environments from employers of choice.” The study included input from 561 organizations of all sizes from across the globe and the results reveal rapid adoption of social media on the corporate intranet in the past year.

The breakdown of specific types of social media on intranets include: 47% have wikis (10% have no plans or interest), 45% have blogs (11% have no plans or interest, 46% have discussion forums (9% have no plans or interest), 37% have RSS (12% have no plans or interest), 23% have podcasts (30% have no plans or interest), and 19% have social networking (20% with no plans or interest. I am not sure which is better the high numbers who have already adopted or the low numbers with no plans or interests. The study concluded that an organization without Intranet 2.0 tools, or plans to use them, risks being out-flanked by their competition.

Many of these initiatives have been accomplished on low budgets, 46% have spent $10,000 or less, 35% have spent between $10,000 and $100,00; and 19% have spent $100,000 or more. However, remember these numbers come from organizations of all sizes. The sample found that 61% have more than 1,000 employees; 32% have 6,000 or more employees; 39% have less than 1000 employees. So many of the large organizations have still managed to implement with a small financial investment to date.

Of those organizations that have not implemented Intranet 2.0 tools, lack of a business case (30%), executive support (33%), and IT support (31%) and internal policy concerns (27%) are the top barriers. The study adds that business cases do not need to always have hard ROI and other dollar-driven targets, but a clear need must be established.

The use of intranet 2.0 is relatively new as only 15% of the firm shave had them over 2 years and 355 have had them less than a year. The study concluded that few organizations have had these tools long enough to perfect their use or achieve critical-mass acceptance. At the same time, firms have spent relatively little time evaluating tools as almost half have spent than less that three months at this tasks.

The major uses cases for intranet 2.0 tool include: employee collaboration (77%), knowledge management (71%) employee engagement (53%), and executive communications (35%). This is useful information for those who see enterprise 2.0, in part, as a realization of the promise of knowledge management and as adding better collaboration to a firm’s capabilities. On the other end, cost control (14%) and cost savings (19%) are a low priority for most organizations in adopting intranet 2.0 capabilities.

Despite the common wisdom that executive involvement greatly aids adoption, the study found relatively little executive involvement as 57% of executives have never contributed content or have done so infrequently (less than once per month) and only 11% of organizations have executives that contribute content on a daily basis.

There is much more and you should look at the report. You can get a free summary or purchase all the details. I think the findings are very supportive of the concept of enterprise 2.0 as a reality and, at the same time. Show some of the things that need to be done to increased adoption.

Allstate’s Social Media Experience with the Good Hands Community

I recently posted a two-part interview with Ben Foster about Allstate’s Good Hands Community. See:

Allstate’s Social Media Experimentation and Adoption Experiences Through the Good Hands Community: Part One – Background and Blogs

Allstate’s Social Media Experimentation and Adoption Experiences Through the Good Hands (SM) Community: Part Two Twitter and Summary

I want to share some highlights here. First, I like the way they set up the blogers on the Good Hands site. The content is not marketing focused, that content is available on other Allstate sites. It involves around four themes that they determined would be of interest to their community. The bloggers were recruited from Allstate who were already writing blogs or had interests in these themes. They provide content from their experiences.

Ben said that the biggest challenge was getting the right type of content that fit the themes and objectives of the site. They wanted it to be the right level of quality and be interesting to their readers. They did not say, “Write about anything you want.” They helped them focus on certain issues by posing questions raised in consumer research that they could address. This enabled them to write useful posts. They said to their bloggers, “Here are the issues people are concerned about. Here is the reason why. Here are some of the details.” They asked them to write content that helps people think differently about the problems. They asked them to write open-ended posts to encourage conversation.

I think this a really smart approach. They recruited people who knew the answers. They just did not necessarily know the right questions. They were able to motivate and focus them by giving them the questions and more background from research.

On the Twitter effort, Ben said that one thing that works well for them is to have multiple people involved. They each bring their own perspective: we each subscribe to different blogs, we talk to different people, so there is a broader perspective.

Ben said that social media provides another channel to connect with customers and other consumers and this connection is aligned with their strategic vision. They are able to hear from them their concerns, either directly or from others who are also listening to consumers. They also feel that social media are here to stay so we want to learn about it as much as possible so we will be better prepared to make effective use of it as the usage becomes more pervasive. See the links above for the complete interviews.

Social Media Policy Outside and Inside the Enterprise

I am cross posting this from FastFoward to get more feedback and perhaps additional examples. I would be very interested in any other social media guidelines that you think are useful, especially those for activity within the enterprise. I think companies are focusing their guidelines too much on public use.

As the use of social media grows within the enterprise and on the Web, the need for policies and guidelines to govern employee behavior becomes more essential. Effective use of social media requires that employees can act on their own to produce content without review by Corporate Communications or other groups. I remember in my past life with a large consulting firm and prior to the rise of social media every time I talked with the media, a PR person had to be on the call. Now customer and market communication is more and more handed over to individual employees.

However, to avoid violations of company security and such things as government regulations for publically traded companies, some guidance is necessary. I remember in the early days of blogging IBM relied on its standard rules of business conduct. Then in the spring of 2005, IBM used a wiki to create a set of blogging guidelines. Here is the latest version: IBM Social Computing Guidelines. It begins with the following.

“These guidelines aimed to provide helpful, practical advice—and also to protect both IBM bloggers and IBM itself, as the company sought to embrace the blogosphere. Since then, many new forms of social media have emerged. So we turned to IBMers again to re-examine our guidelines and determine what needed to be modified. The effort has broadened the scope of the existing guidelines to include all forms of social computing.”

You find the details at their site. Other companies have embraced this concept. Sun was another of the early adopters. Sun's policy begins with this statement, Many of us at Sun are doing work that could change the world. Contributing to online communities by blogging, wiki posting, participating in forums, etc., is a good way to do this. You are encouraged to tell the world about your work, without asking permission first, but we expect you to read and follow the advice in this note.” I think this captures the right spirit for these efforts.

Intel has released new social media guidelines. It has also created a Social Media department and offers training for employees who are interested in blogging and participating in online forums and other social media venues where they represent Intel (see Intel publishes social media guidelines for its employees). I like the addition of training.

These guidelines are not limited to the large players. RightNow provides a suite of CRM tools that I have covered on this blog (see Barack Obama’s Answer Center - Campaign CRM from RightNow and most recently RightNow is Enabling Further Government Adoption of the Cloud). RightNow's guidelines state that, “RightNow has an open participation policy for all employees. The choice to participate in social media is yours. If you decide to participate, you are making a commitment to following these guidelines.” I was told that RightNow’s guidelines were influenced by the work of Intel, IBM and Sun.

Here are the just released social media guidelines for SAP.

Social media guidelines should not be limited to market facing channels. Use inside the enterprise raises many adoption issues and they are no less important here. Some employee concerns can be clarified by a good set of guidelines. If done right these policies can actually encourage participation as employees are likely to feel more comfortable that their actions are sanctioned. They will also feel like they know the rules.

Here are some more useful tips I came across from Forbes, A Corporate Guide For Social Media.

Five Things to Avoid with Your Company Blog

The strong interest in company blogs continues (e.g., Forrester Says Firms to Increase Marketing Investment in Blogs, Fortune 500 Blogging Study). The investment is largely one of time more than money but how do you best leverage this investment? Here is a useful list from Mack Collier”s post, Five reasons why your company blog sucks.

1 - You use your blog as a billboard.

2 - Your don't answer or encourage comments.

3 - You rarely have new posts up.

4 - Your blog has little or no pictures, and is visually boring.

5 - Your blog creates little to no value for your readers.

Mark provides commentary for each point and you should go to his post for the details. I certainly agree with this list. The last one is the most important and often results from too much of the first one. The company web site can serve as the promotional tool so there is no need to have the blog do the same thing.

One and five also apply to company Twitter feeds. You can use the blog and Twitter to occasionally promote something but if that is all you do, little interest will be generated. Like TV, you have to first provide good content before you can offer commercials.

Sometimes companies are hesitant to open a blog up for comments but to me a blog without comments is not a blog. You can always monitor them and delete spam but that task is part of the effort. You also need to have a consistent posting schedule. It does not have to be daily but it should be consistent. I also agree with the visuals. I have been taking pictures with this in mind but sometimes resort to Creative Commons images on Flickr. Thanks to Mark for this list.

Why You Should keep Blogging in the Age of Twitter

I think that twitter complements blogs and does not replace them. Here is a useful post by Adam Singer that goes into detail on this point, 19 Reasons You Should Blog And Not Just Tweet. Twiiter offers the sound bytes and blogs can go into depth. As noted in this blog post, many of the most useful tweets contains links to blogs and other content that goes into more depth.

I find Twitter a great way to exchange and discovery good content on a variety of topics. However, most of the content resides outside the 140 character limits of twitter. On the other hand, Adam notes: “Unscientific observation: most bloggers use Twitter, but many Twitter users do not blog.” I think these non-blogging Twitters are missing the chance to have a substantial conversation with their audience.

Case in point, the 19 reasons to keep blogging could not be conveyed in Twitter but the title should draw a lot of RTs and click throughs to the actual post. Which is better to be a RT pointer or the owner of the content where the reader ends up? I encourage you to check on Adam’s 19 reasons. I agree with all of them. Blog on.

Blogs are Most Influential Social Media for Women (and Men)

Here is an interested study, 2009 Women and Social Media Study by BlogHer, iVillage and Compass Partners, that was reported in the Small Business Trends post, 42 Million U.S. Women Use Social Media: Blogs Most Influential. The study found 42 million women in the United States (53% of US adult women who are Web users) are participating in social media at least weekly. As they spend more time with social media, “women are spending less time with traditional media: 39% less on newspapers, 36% less time reading magazines, and 30% less time watching TV.” Here are the main findings:

“More women use social networks like Facebook and MySpace than anything else, with blogs their second choice. Forums and discussion boards come next, with Twitter bringing up the rear.” The study was done in March 2009 so it is recent but Twitter continues to rise in number of users. I think it will get out of last place soon.

However blogs are more influential for purchasing decisions than other social media. In addition, “those who blog are more likely to be tech savvy, on the leading edge of trends, and invest time searching for new products online. Those who participate in social networking sites like Facebook are motivated to spend time there more as a matter of staying in touch with family and friends.” This makes sense and is not a surprise. I also think the same would hold for men.

“Women Look to Blogs for Business, Politics, Cars and Technology… Women are more likely to go to social networks for beauty, entertainment and dating advice. But for the majority of other categories they look to blogs.” Again, I think the same would hold for men.

Thanks to BlogHer for this comprehensive study. These findings are consistent with the research across gender such as the Jupiter Research study I covered in Business Blogs Trump Social Networking Sites as New Business Drivers. Businesses are also recognizing this as Forrester Says Firms to Increase Marketing Investment in Blogs. Here is another supporting report: Blogs Still Matter for Social Media Marketing in 2009.

Fortune 500 Blogging Study

Nora Ganim Barnes at the University of Massachusetts and Eric Mattson at Financial Insite recently released a study on the Fortune 500 and Blogging. The study found that eighty-one (16%) of the 2008 Fortune 500 have a public-facing corporate blog. What is more interesting is that the higher you are in the standings, the more likely you are to have a blog. The study reported that of the top 100 Fotune 500 companies, 38% (31 companies) have a corporate blog. Those listed 101-200, 25% (20 companies) have a corporate blog. The top 200 companies account for 63% of the Fortune 500 corporate blogs. In contrast, the bottom 200 (those listed 301-500) account for 26% of the Fortune 500 corporate blogs.

They are open to interactions as over 90% of the Fortune 500 blogs take comments, have RSS feeds and take subscriptions. The study says that, “these blogs are kept current with frequent posts on a range of topics. It appears that those companies that have made the decision to “blog” have utilized the tool well. There is frequent posting, on-going discussion and the ability to follow the conversation easily through RSS or subscriptions.” In addition, 23 (28%) linked to a corporate Twitter account.

However, the Fortune 500 lags behind over sectors as the 57% of charities, 41% of higher education institutions, and 39% of the smaller Inc. 500 have institutional blogs. But many seem to be trying. I would like to see a comparison on revenue and profits with blogging. Not that you can claim a cause and effect but you can see if the most successful companies are ones that have the vision to operate blog. Has anyone looked at this?

Legal Issues for Bloggers from Blog Herald

Here is a useful post by Jonathan Bailey, 20 Law-Related Questions Every Blogger Should Know, in the Blog Herald. I learned a number of things from the post, including you are legally responsible for what you write in terms of libel, etc. but you are not responsible for what others type. In the case of blogs, I assume this means comments.

Also, a blogger can use a logo and name of a company when you write about them so long as there is no confusion created or any implication of a relationship that does not exist. This is good as I often use logos as an illustration when I write about a company or a site.

A plaintiff in a defamation case must prove three elements: publication to someone other than person defamed, false statement of fact that is understood as about the plaintiff and tending to harm the reputation of plaintiff. I have not heard of a defamation case against a blogger but it is legally possible.

There is much more. As the post concludes this information, “can keep you out of court and keep you on the right side of the verdict if you are sued. It’s worth spending some time to learn and understand.”

Is a Business Blog Right for Your Company?

Ray Guluck recently put up a useful post on Social media Today, What Kinds of Businesses Can Benefit from Blogging? He asks three questions and I agree with all of them. Below I repeat them in his words followed by some of my comments.

Are your customers searching online for your products/services? This goes way beyond low-ticket consumer items. A recent survey by Tech Target asked the question. “In the past three months, which of the following information sources have you looked to for information on a new product or technology that your company is potentially going to acquire or implement?” It yielded these top four results: Search Engines—66%, IT Publishers – Websites—58%, IT Vendor Websites—50%, IT Newsletters—41%. Blogs play to the number one source, so by increasing the effectiveness of the blogs and taking more of your content into a blog format you can be a better player in the top two sources. So recommenders, influencers, and even buyers look to the web for information on high ticket IT items.

Is there expertise or a knowledge base that you could share, and is it knowledge or expertise that your customers would find useful? Many firms already have much of the content for a blog. They just need to fit it into this channel. But they need to make sure they are more conversational and not simply giving out PR materials.

Do you like your customers? If you do not like your customers you should not be in business. But the point here is whether you also like to communicate with them. Which should also be a prerequisite.

Ray asks if there are any other questions. I would add:

Do you like to write?

Can you make the commitment for a consistent publishing rate?

Can you be open, spontaneous, and informal in your communication?

Do you want to add others?

Podcast on Social Media Inside and Outside the Enterprise

I recently did a podcast for the InMagic blog. Inmagic provides web-based solutions for social knowledge management, library automation and information management needs.

In this interview I first talked a bit about how I came into blogging. Then I covered what types of companies are well suited for blogging, how to know if you should be blogging, and how to identify what you should be using it for. I also mentioned tools for monitoring your online image.

Then I offered my opinion on why social tools work better inside the enterprise, rather than externally, and how social media is ideally suited for helping companies increase their productivity. It was nice to have a chance to discuss these issues.

Your Favorite Portals and KM Posts for Last Quarter and Last Year

A few days ago this blog passed the 500,000 page view mark. It took almost five years to get there and I know some bloggers do this in a month but it does feel like a milestone. I never thought I would still be blogging five years later when I started in May 2004. Now I do not see stopping.

Last year at about this time I started using Google Analytics. Here are the most popular posts that drove the most visits in the last quarter and last year according to this tool. I tell my blog clients that they are putting up content that will be accessible for as long as they keep the blog available. With this in mind it is useful to supply a mix of posts that include many that will have a long shelf life of relevance.

These stats support this concept, as there is a mix of years in the most popular ones for this blog. I added the year to the title so you can see when I put them up. They are listed in rank order. I added an asterik to the ones on the last quarter list that are also on the list for the past year.

Tops in Last Quarter

Ten Ways to Track Your Online Reputation - 2009

Central Desktop Using Twitter for Sales, Service, and Brand Monitoring Conversations - 2009

Knowledge Management 2.0 and Microsoft Office SharePoint Server (MOSS) – 2006*

Google AdSense Success Stories - 2007*

Bob Dylan on You Tube - 2007*

Sample Action Plan for Business Blogging - 2008

History of Knowledge Management in Six Parts: Introduction - 2004*

Tops in Last Year (not also in Last Quarter) These rank 5, 6, and 7 in the order below.

How Barack Obama is Using Web and Enterprise 2.0 in the US Primary Campaign Through Central Desktop - 2008

Serena has Adopted Facebook as their Intranet - 2007

Some Knowledge Management Blogs - 2005

Post Scrip t- See Tony Karrer's post for another way of looking at this

Forrester Says Firms to Increase Marketing Investment in Blogs

Here is more good news for business blogs. ReadWriteWeb recently covered a Forrester report, Despite The Recession, More Than 50% Of Marketers Will Pursue Social Applications, by Jeremiah Owyang of Forrester. Jeremiah surveyed 145 global interactive marketers in both B2B and B2C companies with more than 250 employees on their social media marketing plans. Blogs are included in the social media mix and they had the highest combined total for increasing or staying the same in marketing investments.

One question was, “Assuming that the economy us in recession in the net six months, how would you change your investment in the following marketing channels.” The results included: Blogs – increase 65% stay the same 31%% decrease 4%; Social networking – increase 72% stay the same 22% decrease 6%; Display ads – increase 16% stay the same 44% decrease 40%.

I continue to see active interest in business blogs in the many software venders I speak with, supporting these results. The key to success is to align the blog with your business objectives. At the same time, you do not want to simply use your blog as a PR and marketing channel but provide value to your readers. If you have a business blog, what are your plans?

Business Blogs Trump Social Networking Sites as New Business Drivers

Sally Falkow reports in Blogs are Better Business Drivers Than Social Networking Sites that a recent study “Harnessing the Power of Blogs,” (sponsored research by BuzzLogic and conducted by JupiterResearch, a Forrester Research company) found that blogs can have more impact on purchase decisions than social networks. The study went on to conclude that while social networks help people connect, but blogs create a conversation and become a trusted resource that influences purchase decisions. They also said that blog readership has jumped 300 percent in the last four years.

This is consistent with the recent Gartner study that concluded, “Blogs have grown from a novelty to a mainstream platform for content distribution. Therefore, it is time to align IT and business forces to develop a blogging strategy for corporate and public-facing opportunities. Enterprises must define clear strategic objectives for blogging, and support them with policies to encourage executives and employees to maintain regular entries and to identify and discourage harmful blogging practices… Increasingly, any public-facing media company or enterprise must have a blogging strategy.”

All of this is welcome news to business bloggers and confirms what I have been seeing informally in conversations with my clients and others. A blog allows you to go beyond the sound bytes in Twitter and Facebook status fields. They allow for the development of a complete thought and then the ongoing elaboration of that thought through subsequent posts. Comments are also not limited in their length and allow for the exchange of ideas, moving beyond simply being pointers to more comprehensive content. They become destinations in their own right. At the same time Twitter, Facebook, and LinkedIn status can be useful pointers to your blog content and others. I often find useful links to blogs through both Twitter and Facebook. These tools complement each other when used in manner that is consistent with their features.

Unexpected Benefits of Phonetic Alphabet Keep Appearing

I have written a number of times on this blog and elsewhere that the phonetic alphabet was the greatest ever breakthrough in information technology. Here is a great blog post, Why Text Remains King of the Web, by Steve Rubel that documents some more reasons.

Steve writes: “I am starting to believe that despite all the hype around online video, text remains King of the Web. Why text? There are at least five reasons...

It's scannable - according to Jakob Nielsen users have time to read at most 28% of the words during an average site visit and 20% is more likely

Three letters: SEO - For all that Google Universal Search has done to elevate video, search results are still largely made up of text and everyone wants better SEO

The workplace - It's much easier for cube-based workers to read text on the screen and get away with it vs. watching long videos. Watching videos (even work related vids) screams "slacker"

Mobile Devices - Yes, of course you can put a video on an iPhone. But it's work and requires planning. Text is easier to pull up in a nanosecond

Distribution - Nothing flies like text. It's so easy to cut and paste it and send it somewhere or to clip and re-syndicate it via email, RSS or social networks

I don't know about you but I love text.” Thanks Steve. I do too. I agree with all his points. I often get links to videos but I do not play them because the audio would bother others around me so I save them for later, and sometimes forget about them. However, I can silently read text as soon as I get it. This possibility was not always considered, as we shall see below.

Now the ancient Greeks who came up with the phonetic alphabet probably did not think about these implications. It is the invention that keeps on giving. As I wrote in Deloitte Declares We Are in a “Media Democracy,” the concept of an original version that could be preserved did not evolve until after written text. This was critical to the development of modern science among other things. In many ways, the epic poets, chief knowledge distributors of their day, made up the details as they went along. Text made available a visual record of thought, abolishing the need for an acoustic record and hence the need for rhythms. The first thing put into text was an epic poem but soon text inspired documents appeared. But there is more.

Like many great inventions, the uses of text slowly evolved. In fact, it appears that reading was often done aloud until after the 6th century. Ivan Illich relates that St. Augustine refrained from reading after his brothers went to sleep for fear of waking them. After the 6th century, silent reading became more commonplace, and such techniques such as tables of contents and indexes first appeared. These new devices allowed for random access to text information, a concept we take for granted now. Now people were free to read their emails and blog posts without disturbing their neighbors. What will be next for text?

Blogs are Climbing the Gartner Slope of Enlightenment

It is nice to see that blogs have made it out of the infamous Gartner trough of disillusionment and are now leading the pack of social software as the sole member that has crossed into the slope of enlightenment. Blogs have always been a ground-breaker for social media so I pleased to see this trend continue. This relative placement for blogs was reported in the Gartner Hype Cycle for Social Software, 2008. Ironically, I found this report through a comment on a post about Twitter, Will 2009 be the year of Twitter? by Matt Rhodes. According to the same report, Twitter is about to crest at the top of the peak of inflated expectations.

The report says, “Blogs are pervasive. Google, Yahoo, Six Apart and MSN, among others, have blogging platforms, and publishers have begun to monetize blogs. While some press reports have characterized the blogging trend as having peaked, this perspective ignores the number of new users coming on the Web every day, more than a few of which will be utilizing blogs. It is now commonplace for CEOs and company executives to post regularly to their blogs; companies such as Yahoo or Google frequently announce new product betas on their blogs.” Good for them.

More importantly, it goes on to say, “Blogs have grown from a novelty to a mainstream platform for content distribution. Therefore, it is time to align IT and business forces to develop a blogging strategy for corporate and public-facing opportunities. Enterprises must define clear strategic objectives for blogging, and support them with policies to encourage executives and employees to maintain regular entries and to identify and discourage harmful blogging practices… Increasingly, any public-facing media company or enterprise must have a blogging strategy.”

I remember that when I first started this blog in May 2004 that was not the case. Blogs for business were a novelty and mainstream media was at war with blogs. Then 2005 marked the beginning of recognition for the business blog. Fortune Magazine named blogging in the top ten business technology trends for 2005, and the Harvard Business Review included business blogs in their list of breakthrough ideas for 2005. Blogs also made the over of Business Week in 2005.

However, I think they did not become pervasive until 2007. At least, this was when I started to get real interest in my business blog consulting. The interest only increased through 2008. While 2009 may be the year of Twitter, I think it will be more like 2005 was for business blogs. It will take a year or two longer to see if micro-blogging or micro-messaging becomes as firmly established as blogs. The Gartner report expressed similar feelings. Meanwhile, I hope that 2009 will also be another year for business blogs. There is still a place for messages longer than 140 characters.

Most Popular Portals and KM Blog Posts 2008

I took a look at Google Analytics to see what posts people were looking at on this blog in 2008. It seems to get the best data. The top two destinations were the home page to no surprise but I was pleased that the average time on site for people who came first to the home page was 6 minutes, 45 seconds. Thanks to everyone who visited this past year.

Here are the next ten destinations with their year of posting. These are not necessarily what I consider the best work I did but since 64% of new traffic to this blog comes through search engines, these are the ones that appealed most to the dual audiences of people and search. All of them but one were in the top three results for Google searches on the relevant phrase and the other was fourth.

A bit over 21% of visits to this blog are from referrals so perhaps the older ones have been around long to pick up more links. People did seem to stick around and read them as the time on page varied between 4 minutes 54 seconds and 2 minutes 17 seconds on these posts with the average over 3 minutes.

They are all individual posts except for the restaurant pick index. I like the variety here as some are about knowledge management, some cover web 2.0 and enterprise 2.0, and some are on weekend topics. The one on Newport jazz festival has attracted a lot of comments. I learned much more about this event I attended and I wrote a post about some of these stories, Early Newport Jazz Festivals Relived in 2007.

The number of page views ranged from 1.423 to 712 and the number of unique visits ranged from 965 to 590. This list also shows the asynchronous nature of blog traffic as the posts were put up from 2004 to 2008 but this is just the 2008 traffic.

These results do not accurately represent the actual readers as around 2500 people subscribe to this blog. These subscribers likely simply read the RSS feed, if they read a post at all, since I put the whole post in it. If they did click through to the blog then they do show up in these results. However, I think these results are biased to new readers and not regular subscribers.

Google AdSense Success Stories (2007)

How Barack Obama is Using Web and Enterprise 2.0 in the US Primary Campaign Through Central Desktop (2008)

Knowledge Management 2.0 and Microsoft Office SharePoint Server (MOSS) (2006)

Serena has Adopted Facebook as their Intranet (2007)

History of Knowledge Management in Six Parts: Introduction (2004)

Bob Dylan on You Tube (2007)

Health Care Social Networking (2007)

Some Knowledge Management Blogs (2005)

Restaurant Pick category – see also Updated Index to Cities and Towns with Restaurant Picks - January 09

The Original Newport Jazz Festival: 1969 – 1971 (2004)

What is your favorite post on this blog? What is your favorite post on another blog? What is your favorite post on your own blog?

Blogs Still Matter for Social Media Marketing in 2009

Here is a post by Chris Aarons, Social Media For The Masses, that I appreciate. Chris starts with this, “As the number of social networkers and Twitter-ers continues to grow, advertisers and marketers often find themselves employing tactics such as setting up a “Fan-page” on Facebook, posting tweets on Twitter or developing applications to attract consumers to their brand. But all of these tactics ignore a critical player in the online marketing game—blogs.”

I agree. He goes on to say that blogs play a bigger and more important role for marketers than ever before. A blog can be the foundation for a social media marketing campaign. Then you can use other channels like twitter and email newsletters, as well as forum to focus attention to the blog. Twitter can only offer sound bytes while a blog can provide the complete message. It is hard to establish a thought leadership position with Twitter or even a forum but blogs are built for this.

Chris gives some stats to support blog use including the finding that blogs had almost twice as many unique visits as Facebook. I found this data and some more in the 2008 Technorati report on the blogosphere. About 50 to 75% of US web users read blogs. The same report mentioned that 71%of survey respondents feel that blogs are getting taken more seriously as sources of information. Half feel that more people will get their news from blogs than traditional media in the next five years and blogs are just as valid sources as traditional media. The report also said that bloggers are more likely to be enticed to learn more about a product by other blogs than any other source.

Chris mentions four components to blog’s power: consumer generated content, third party validation, social media and search results. Chris said that reaching influencial bloggers can often be a better way to get noticed in social networking sites such as Facebook than going there directly yourself. On the last component, Chris noted that blogs stand for “better listings on Google” which is very true. There is both an art and science to achieving these results.

I would add that blogs give you more control over your message will allowing for input by others. So here comes the commercial – if you need help with your marketing blogs, let me know.

Predicted Increase in Social Media Marketing in 2009

As the economy stays down it is nice to see that social media marketing, including blogs, is predicted to increase in 2009 according to Online Media Daily – see Social Media Wins In Marketers' '09 Plans. Marketers are directing their 2009 budgets toward content, custom media and social media initiatives, according to a new study from online marketing resource and vendor-matching tool Junta42. This is consistent with what I have heard from social vendors who say their revenues are holding strong also.

The study said that more than half (56%) of marketing and publishing decision-makers plan to increase their content marketing spending next year. In addition, 31% expressed their intention to increase spending on content significantly, while 25% said they planned to increase it slightly, only 4% of respondents said they planned to decrease spending on content dramatically next year, while 9% said they planned to decrease it slightly.

In terms of most important products/tactics, social media--other than blogs--resonated with 68% of subscribers, followed by e-newsletters/email (60%), blogs (56%), case studies (55%), online video (51%), white papers (46%) and microsites (43%). For the study, 42% of respondents were corporate marketers, 22% were traditional publishers/media, 19% were marketing/advertising agencies, 15% were custom publishers and 3% were association marketers. Within the surveyed audience, 85% make marketing purchase decisions for their organizations.

Now for the commercial: If you need help with your social media marketing in 2009, especially with market facing blogs, I would be glad to help out. Contact me at [email protected].

More on the Role of Blogs in Business Communication

Here is another follow-on inspired by Andrew McAfee. This time I am adding more to my post, Can You Trust Your Blogger? What is the Role of Blogs in Business Communication? I briefly mentioned Andrew's post, Evidence of the Value of a Blog, at the end of the first post. It deserves more attention.

He provides major credit to his blog for his reputation in the IT field that led to his selection as number 38 on the top 100 Most Influential People in IT by Ziff Davis. He stated that an article is a one time event. Then added, “I’ve found my blog to be a fantastic tool for continuing the conversation. This blog has allowed me to air ideas on E2.0 and other topics as frequently as I want, and at the length I feel is appropriate. In other words, the person determining the editorial calendar for these ideas is me, not an editor.” Exactly.

Andrew then goes on to relate a conversation with Paul Levy, the CEO of Boston’s Beth Israel hospital and his Facebook friend. Paul and Andrew are also my Facebook friends, although I have not yet met them in person, and I trust them anyway (a reference to my last post on trusting bloggers). Andrew words again tell the story quite well.

“He (Paul) brought up the same point - that he can blog on issues he cares about as much as he wants. If the topic is of broad interest and his posts are good, they’ll continue to be read and can help shape thinking on the issue. It occurred to me that without a blog, his ability to do this is greatly reduced. Because of his position he might get to write a single opinion piece in the Boston Globe, and I guess his staff could continue to send out PR releases, but that’s about it. His blog greatly amplifies his voice.” Exactly.

I learned about Paul’s blog through my friend Jessica Lipnack who has the blog, Netage Endless Knots. Jessica has organized a panel on what blogging brings to business for the Enterprise 2.0 Conference in Boston. Our session will be June 10 at 2:15. Hope to see you there and we can continue this conversation in person.

Here is a nice postscript from the blogger, Kevin O'Keefe, who writes the blog, Real Lawyers Have Blogs. Kevin says, in response to the posts around this issue, "Thousands of people read my blog. They must trust something I say. I'm not that entertaining. People put their butts on the line at least once a month asking me to speak in front of large groups. Just received invites to speak at the Texas Bar Annual Conference and to keynote at a Wisconsin Bar Association Conference. I don't know any of the people who invite me. They're reading my blog. If they didn't trust what I was writing, would I get an invite?" Kudos to Kevin. There have been a lot of legal blogs for the start. It is a category that makes a lot of sense. I ma glad to see Kevin getting good take up.

Can You Trust Your Blogger? What is the Role of Blogs in Business Communication?

Joshua Porter recently wrote an interesting post, "Why people don’t trust “bloggers” in response to Jeremiah Owyang who claims that people don’t trust bloggers. As Joshua wrote that Jeremiah based his observations on three studies by respected marketing research companies: Forrester, Edelman, and Pollara. These studies found that bloggers do not elicit much trust when compared to other sources of information. Then he makes an excellent observation, “I can’t help but think that these studies weighted the questions…oh just a little bit. I mean, who would trust someone based solely on the fact that they happen to write a blog? Does merely creating a blogger account and whipping out a few blog posts make one a trusted authority on…anything? Of course not.”

I totally agree with Joshua. If the question had been, as he says, “Do you trust bloggers who you read regularly/subscribe to?” most people would answer that they do.” Why would they read them? As Joshua said, I am sure that Jeremiah hopes people trust him. There are many bloggers out there. Just because you know how to start a blog, which is not rocket science, does not mean that you know anything else. As two of the commenters on Jeremiah’s blog posts said:

“Contrary to what you may imply, you are trusted by many of your readers. You’ve earned this trust by being transparent, by being consistent, by slowly building a reputation, and by the multiple channels in which someone can learn about you.”

“I think that you are confusing two categories. Of course people don’t trust a generic category called ‘bloggers’ But they do trust people they ‘know’, and in these days of social networking ‘knowing’ someone may mean you have never met them in real life. But if a relationship of trust & authenticity has been developed between you & them, then they could trust a blogger

Blogs are conversations and they do put more responsibility on the reader to judge the material than say, the New York Times, with its army of fact checkers. But even the NYT gets it wrong some times and everyone has some type of bias. Blogs are also a medium. You could ask, do you trust people on the telephone more than in person? Do you trust a magazine article more than television? In each case, the answer would be it depends on the person. A blogger has to build the trust of his or her audience by being consistent and transparent as the first commenter wrote above.

The Edelman study compared bloggers to academics, industry analysts, CEOs, regular employees of a company, etc. to “bloggers.” Guess what, many of these people in the other categories write blogs. So does the New York Times. The study compared one channel to people who write in multiple channels, including blogs. The Forrester study compared review by a known expert to a review by a blogger. What if the known expert expressed his views through a blog? Blogs offer an expanded platform for business communication. Whether you believe the blogger is more a factor of the blogger than the communication channel.

Many bloggers I read are also friends that I have meet in person. Friends had the highest trust ratings in the Forrester study so where do blogger friends fall in the ratings? I also read other bloggers , like Joshua that I have not met. However, I already respect his thought process. That does not mean that I will trust or agree with everything he writes. But I do think he got this one correct. I have also never met Jeremiah but I know his blog and respect his expertise. I also agree with much of what he writes. I just think he got it wrong this time. But that can happen with close friends. It does not mean I will stop trusting Jeremiah. In the end it is up to the blogger to earn your trust and you to grant it, regardless of the communication channel they are using.

As a post script, I ran across this blog post from Andrew McAfee, Evidence of the Value of a Blog, where he said he was "pretty sure that this blog is the main reason I made the list." The list being the Ziff Davis Enterprise list of the ’100 Most Influential People in IT" where they put him as #38. Andrew is another blogger who earned trust through many sources, but he credits the blog as a major one. I looked at the list and noticed a few other bloggers on it.

What if the question was do you trust what a person says more in his or her own blog or in a magazine interview or a PR release? They are different channels and hopefully the answer is the same in each. But that would make an interesting study.