Fortune Magazine : blogging the top tech trend for 2005
"When everybody has a tool for talking to the rest of the world, you can't hide from your mistakes. You have to face them. Once you commit to an open dialogue, you can't stop. And it's painful." As the impact of blogs spreads through global business, that pain—and promise—will be something companies will have to deal with. And if they don't? You're bound to read about it in a blog.
Mainly an intro and summary to the world of blogging, concentrating on the public side - companies [mainly through individuals ] talking to customers.
Going back to this post of mine from a couple of days ago - Internal Blogging, Harder for Consultants, I agree with Fredrik that there is a large, large difference between internal and external blogging, and that some blog consulting companies [I'm still not sure how one can really specialise in consulting on blogs, or even position oneself as mainly specialising in the consulting of blogs] will find that pushing blogs as a one size fits all universal solution for internal communications merely results in polite disinterest in any meetings they manage to get set up.
Livio sums it up well in a comment to Fredrik's post saying
although many consultants have recently focussed on blogging, this is in a sense the 'easy' end of the scale and social software developments have already moved on (as my colleague Lee Bryant recently observed in 'Blogs Are Not the Only Fruit' which touches on some of these very issues: please see http://www.headshift.com/archives/002270.cfm)
The bit that a good consultancy will help with include the stuff Livio continues with:
strategic advice on relevant social software tools and techniques (i.e. much wider than just blogging); a professional requirements capture process, coupled with inclusive, collaborative design consulting (this needs to include visual design, information architecture, and usability/accessibility issues)...
but also some of the wider and softer issues: culture and communication style within an organisation, change preparation and management, examining the overall communication mix within a company and where and how to include these social tools. Should they even be positioned as social tools, at least to start with ? Using blogs as project diaries, alerting and notification systems, audit trails, or setting up a wiki to act as a collaborative prototyping tool for an new intranet subsite can be ways of introducing some of this stuff that we know is good in a non-threatening what that fits in with and supports current practices, rather than overthrowing them [at least at first !].
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