Corporate blog: IDC Conference on Content&Document Management

Nonetheless I am no Robert Scoble, I’m honored to have been invited by FIDAInform, the National Federation of the Associations of Information Management Professionals, to give a speech about Corporate Blogging by the IDC Content & Document Management Conference 2007 held last tuesday here in Rome.

Being a neo-blogger I took the chance to share with the audience, mostly Public Administration managers, a little bit of my own experience and insights into what I have learn in the last few months.

I started talking about the five key things that have influenced corporate blogging:

  1. The blogosphere dimension
    doubling every 236 days, 100 times bigger than 3 yrs ago;
    .
  2. Mainstream media vs blog
    only 3 blog in the first 50 positions, but the “long tail” belongs to blogs;
    .
  3. People talk
    the value created by group-forming network grows exponentially with members:
    .
  4. Push vs Pull
    web feed formats changed the way we keep ourselves informed;
    .
  5. Blogging
    is simple.

Then I gave few examples showcasing the above issues at work.

External blogs.
I mentioned how blogs can be Marketing’s nightmare and dream, or tools to leverage market conversations. Networked market often knows more than companies do about their own products. Blogs might help also to build connections with key audiences. An external corporate blog through transparency might add a level of credibility unobtainable from standard media, like showing a different side of the company.

Internal Blogs.
To open to the whole organisation the decision making process blogs can avoid the hierarchical vertical confirmation process, exploiting lateral thinking and collective intelligence potentialities. The blog becomes also the written memory of the organization, replacing emails, which are not the best information sharing tool.

Feeds.
Posts and comments are easy to reach and follow without the need to visit the blog, either if it is an internal or external one. Within an organization RSS spam-free method can easily discover any sort of information through basic search applications, making financial or technical news at hand. Last but not least the cost of producing RSS content is mostly negligible. To see how a feed-reader works I suggest to try on-line tools: Andrea Martines developed Excite-MIX a really easy to use widgeted page.

My Experience.
I started blogging just three months ago, and I keep talking daily about Corporate Blogging with Robin Good and Nicola Mattina. I have also signed up for some “persistent news searches” using “corporate blog” as my search keyword.

I also work very hard to make mistakes, so that I can always learn something new.

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