Corporate Blogging

It's a good thing Greg didn't attend this session - the first presenter started off by explaining that she doesn't believe in PowerPoint! I'd tell you who she was, but she didn't have any slides, and looking at the program, she's not in it ;o) She did have a good point in discussing the usefulness of blogs in the corporate world - their utility depends on what you're trying to accomplish, as they are a tool, not an end to themselves. You can build anything with a hammer, it depends on what you actually want to build.

In that vein, blogs can provide a means for forming relationships, for providing information about what's happening behind the scenes (to satisfy normal human curiosity). She suggested that blogs can supplant email as a communication device, which I agree with. She also seemed to imply that it can be used as a storage mechanism, which I would definitely NOT agree with.

Oliver Young from Forrester was doing a survey of corporate IT, and blogging was seen as lower value than most Web 2.0 tools - only 17% found it significantly valuable. This led to a discussion of ROI, and the information that of all of the companies that required an ROI study of email before implementing it, none of them did a follow-up study, since it wasn't worth it, since they couldn't put the genie back in the bottle.

The panel put forward the notion that the lack of popularity of blogs is a lack of understanding of the tool. As Oliver put it, if you have a hammer, everything starts to look like a nail. The anecdote there was the idea that when email was new, a department would have one email address, and the admin had to print it out and put a copy on every desk. Of course it isn't useful at that point.

Regarding risks, the panelists noted that the risk of blogs is only going to expose the risks that are already there - the person who will blog about comapny secrets could just as easily stand on the corner with a megaphone, but that doesn't make it the megaphone's fault. The suggestion was that the best blog policy is "don't do anything stupid."

Another point that came up is that the value of email erodes over time, as when people leave the company, you lose access to their email. On the other hand, blogs remain available, and can be annotated or tagged, which actually increases their value over time. One thing they talked about that we haven't enabled is the ability to cc: a project blog on an email. I can definitely see the usefulness of that - one public repository for all of the information about a specific project, available all together in one place, on demand, for anyone who has access. As opposed to being cc'd on 10 emails per day that may or may not be relevant to you at a given point in time. Of course, I think Notes 8.0 addresses some of the same things, really.

In general, I would agree with the panel's tacit conclusions - that there is value inherent in the concept of a blog, but we may not see that value realized for some time, until they become more mainstream.