The Business of Blogs by Debra Chamra
I was reading a friend's blog the other day when I came across a post about the Business of Blogs. Naturally, my ears perked up in curiosity. Over the past couple of weeks I have been a bit immersed in the concept of Business Blogging and finding this gem on a non-business, non-social networking site was very interesting.
I'm not familar with the journal that this article was originally published in, but it seems geared towards a very business crowd, not that that's remotely a bad thing. This doubles my belief that the business world is the crowd immediately at the edge of the blogosphere and itching to cross over.
As the author writes:
Blogs are about to storm the corporate world — but not via the CIO's office. They are appearing in companies most often as the convenient records of engineering or design projects. In fact, blogs are following the same bottom-up adoption path that was created by instant messaging (IM), another collaboration tool originally used for personal communication. As blogs bubble into businesses, they introduce new ways to create, share, and leverage knowledge — and that is why they should be on your radar.
[...]
While most companies have knowledge management and corporate portals to organize internal data, they don't have a way to effectively deal with external information. To overcome this challenge, blogs are providing them with easy-to-use tools to manage this information, which is extremely critical because it affects relationships with customers, internal decision-makers, partners, and investors. They, in effect, allow users to integrate internal and external information, giving people a self-service way to find out what's happening within the company. Specifically, business blogs can be used to:
- Manage corporate knowledge
- Humanize a large corporation
- Deepen relationships with customers
- Coordinate group projects
- Consolidate product and industry news
- Communicate research information
- Create knowledge communities
It's difficult sometimes to tell if the world is thinking about what you're thinking about or if you're just saturated by people and sensitized to filter out things that don't match your focus. I'm hoping it's the former, in this case.