I just got done listening to the “Blogging in Business” session from BloggerCon, being held at Harvard this weekend.
You can see my notes under the extended entry. The notes are rough and I have bracketed a couple of things to represent my added thoughts.
Update: Here is the wiki Jeff Jarvis set-up as a starting point for the session.
I was following some links through the Amazon’s new A9 search engine. I found some references on to a site called BlogRunner. I followed the link and found everything from my blog was basically available from their site. Check it out.
It looks like the site is tracking lots of blogs and trying to keep track of conversations going on.
Wayne, we need your insight.
Is anybody else familiar with this site and what they are trying to do?
Seth pointed everybody to it this morning.
You need to go check out Worthwhile.
My first thought is “These guys going to take a run at Fast Company.”
I hope so.
The main prose in KaosPilot A-Z is organized alphabetically into sections. The first heading is Arrival and talks about the arrival of the first team of KaosPilots in 1991. The original marketing material described the school in this way:
…the KaosPilots is a project management education for you and your drive for culture, action and good ideas. Because the world needs pilots who can navigate the high voltage between education, work, and culture – and use it as a platform for new projects. Projects that can show new flight paths – alternatives to the ways we usually think about identity, quality of life and personal potential. Because the world needs skilled, visionary, enterprising project managers. Because the world needs inspiring model projects…
Each section ends with cross-references to other sections. At the end of Arrival, the recommended sections include Frontrunners, Facts, Aarhus, Cutting Edge, Hall of Respect, Logo, Name and DNA.
Under the letter A, you will find the aforementioned Arrival, along with Apple, The Arts (& Business), AIDS, Authenic, Aarhus, and AGF. The book ends with the a section titled Zen and the quote, “When the student is ready, the master appears”.
I wanted to give you a feel for the fact that this book covers a lot of ground in a unique way.
I know I have been linking to Cuban a lot since he started his blog. I really like his latest post on business and passion.
The best team I ever worked on understood what Cuban is getting at. We would put ourselves into a conference room, close the door, and often scream and yell at each other as we worked out project details. After the meeting, we would all go out to lunch and life would go on.
It was tough because everyone needed to be in the same place for it to work. It required a lot of trust built over time. Team members had to understand it wasn’t personal. The primary objective was to come to the best solution for our customers.
It worked for us.
I have been busy with the BBBT the past couple of weeks. This is the first chance I have to highlight some new kindred spirits.
Q: I would like to get your thoughts one of your case studies – Mark Cuban and the Dallas Mavericks. What do you think of his new blog?
A: Cuban is an incredibly smart and savvy businessman, and a brilliant marketer. Someone asked us during the course of our research for “Creating Customer Evangelists” if Cuban was smart or just lucky for having sold his former company, broadcast.com, to Yahoo for nearly $6 billion. Our answer: If luck and good fortune were the streets of a city intersection, Cuban would own all of the property in the neighborhood.
Considering how computer-savvy he is, we’re wondering why it took Cuban so long to launch his blog (which debuted earlier this month).
That said, what’s he written so far is pure Cuban: provocative and outrageous. In explaining why he’s referring reporters to read his blog for quotes, he writes: “[It’s because of] the satisfaction of knowing that each [reporter] will have to explain to their editors what a blog is — and argue for who knows how long about whether or not BlogMaverick.com is an attributable source.”
Dan Gillmor asks Mark Cuban five questions about his new blog.
You are going to need to add Mark Cuban’s blog to your daily reading habit.
It shows so well how the power of the media is being drained by the creation of new outlets. Cuban tells stories about Dallas Morning News columnist Kevin Blackstone blatantly misquoting him and Chicago Tribune’s Sam Smith starting rumors about Cuban talking to Pat Riley about a coaching job. In the past, there would have been no way for Cuban to set the record straight. His blog changes all of that. Both of these writers look foolish now.
[via scoble]
Ben at the Church had a post last week about Robert Scoble. Being hailed as World’s greatest blogger, I had to check him out.
I wanted to point you to his Corporate Weblog Manifesto. This goes along great with what I was talking about last week. The Manifesto consists of 21 points. I think they are all good, but #20 and #21 I like the most. They both go together well.
20. Be the authority on your product/company. You should know more about your product than anyone else alive, if you’re writing a weblog about it. If there’s someone alive who knows more, you damn well better have links to them (and you should send some goodies to them to thank them for being such great advocates).
21. Know who is talking about you
I had a publisher contact me this week to give me additional information about a book I had blogged about. That shows me companies are starting to look at what bloggers are saying about them.
If you learn better through lecture and interaction, check out BloggingWorks put on by Coudal Partners and 37signals.
Jack Vinson has a number of posts at his blog Knowledge Jolt with Jack about his experience at the workshop:
Today I want to talk about a Harvard Business Review case study called “A Blogger in Their Midst” This was put together by Halley Suitt and released in September 2003. I have seen a couple mentions of the case in the blog world, but no in-depth discussion of it.
The case study is about a fictional company that make gloves for the medical community. At an industry conference, the company is upstaged by “Glove Girl”, an employee who is blogging about the company and has been invited to the same conference. She has talked about everything from the medical practices of customers to conditions at the company’s overseas plants. The reader sees the story swing from the company wanting to fire Glove Girl to her receiving in a job offer from a customer. This is a story that is yet to take place at many companies.
The case contains commentary by four people – David Weinberger of Cluetrain Manifesto fame; Law Professor Pamela Samuelson of UC-Berkley; Ray Ozzie of Groove Networks; Erin Motameni, VP of human resources at EMC.
To no surprise, the tech contingent is sympathetic to blogging and offers words of caution. Weinberger says that Glove Girl is just talking about what she and the customers are interested in and that is why the company so worried. Ozzie and Weinberger both stress the importance of making clear who the blogger is speaking for. At Groove, they have developed a weblog policy around four ideas:
Samuelson warns of the liability the employee and the employer by proxy could have by the information posted. Motameni is the only one who has real problems with Glove Girl. Motameni thinks Glove Girl has overstepped her bounds as an employee and claims management is failing by not reeling her in. She think marketing and senior leadership should be talking to customers, not a renegade employee.
If you are trying to get people in your company familiar with blogging, I think this is a great primer to examine the issue from many different angles.
I am on a quest. I want to find businesses that are using weblogs to communicate with their customers. I want ones that are doing it well. I want companies that are creating conversations with their customers
I have highlighted Jewelboxing in the past.
I am looking for more good examples.
Please leave your examples in the comments section or send me an email – todd at apennyfor dot com. Please include your thoughts on why you think they are using weblogs well.
To sweeten the offer, I will send a copy of Seth Godin’s Purple Cow to three people who provide the best examples.
In addition to stopping at B&N, I stopped at the library. On a whim, I did a search on blog in the electronic card catalog. The book that came up was We Blog: Publishing Online with Weblogs by Paul Bausch, Matthew Haughey, and Meg Hourihan. I checked it out to find out what they had to say about business and blogging.
They spend a chapter talking about using blogs in business. Here is what they have to say about adding blogs to an external site:
These ideas also describe everything that is great about weblogs in general. My question is why aren’t more businesses using them?
I have become pretty interested in blogging and its effects as it relates to business. There are a number of different aspects that I want to cover this week.
Today, I want to point you to Lee at Commoncraft. Last month, he posted an entry on George Dafermos’ paper, Blogging the Market. Dafermos covers a lot of interesting ground in this paper.
He starts by talking about the agora of Ancient Athens.
In the city-state of Athens, about 3,000 years ago, Athenian citizens used to meet regularly at the “town centre” to announce projects, discuss politics and military affairs and decide on matters of common interest. What was so peculiar about this congregation – that came to be known as ‘agora’ – is that all Athenian citizens had the right to speak their own mind about almost anything and address their fellow citizens and when a decision had to be made, no one’s vote mattered more than someone else’s.
Dafermos believes weblogs create these coversations again.
He talks about Gizmodo’s for-profit blogging model. He discusses Macromedia’s strategy to use blogging as a new products communication tool. He devotes a section to the risks of allowing employees to talk openly about the company. Some of the more interesting sections discuss weblogs as knowledge management systems and how weblogs can motivate employees to share knowledge by giving proper credit to its origins.
Check it out.