Back from Blogging4Business

Got back yesterday from the Blogging4Business conference in London where I was talking on behalf of IBM, my employer. You can see the full agenda and recap here.

These are some of the thoughts I take away from this conference:

Internal blogging is gaining interest but people struggle with "guidelines" and the legal side of "opening up communications".

• My view is that if you do not have any guidelines in place about collaboration and communications in the company then do not blog internally. Not all organisations are culturally ready to embrace this.
• Internal blogging is about trust, professionalism and knowledge sharing.
• If the corporate culture is not at ease with the concept of sharing information as widely as possible (within the company and across the layers of management and business units) and if Management doesn't support this line of thought then your internal blogging initiative is doomed to go wrong.

ROI of blogging and measurement.

• Good to hear that none of the companies who represented the blogosphere "analysis/monitoring" industry have a definite model to prove ROI of blogging strategies.
• I loved the quote: "ROI is not important - monitoring is" (sorry didn't write down your name). Doesn't mean I agree on this - if you're in a business communications function you need to show ROI everyday.
• Bringing visualisation to the connections between blogs and their "influence" is certainly a space to be watched closely.

Main Stream Media and Citizen Journalism

• Also good to hear that MSM and Citizen Journalism people do not know how "all this will develop"... Everyone is trying out several new media tools and testing what goes well and what doesn't.
• Refreshing to see that this uncertainty of not knowing what the ROI is doesn't hold the "classic media" back to start initiatives and learn as they go.
• "Citizen Journalists are not driven by profit" was one of the quotes that I wrote down. My questions was; what about political profit ? I think this topic needs to be looked at in more depth. Same as "bloggers controls/double checks the classic media on accuracy, but who checks the bloggers ?

Overall feeling:

This was a good conference (thanks Matthew Yeomans and Bernhard Warner) and certainly needed - but it is a bit sad to see that every time the same success and scary stories pop up. We definitely need more business cases in this area.

It are still the same "issues" that are being discussed: losing "control" of the message, what the hell is RSS, legal aspects of blogging, moderating comments or not...

The almost traditional "PR bashing on a regular basis" was also present... I made a comment on that during my time on the panel being a PR professional and all ;-) It was also good to meet up with Guillaume from Edelman again.

That the same topics and questions arise at these conferences simply shows that apart from the "incrowd" the business world still has a lot of basic questions on new media and that instead of talking technology, we need to start making the link to business objectives, professions and industries.

If you want to hear what I covered re: IBM you can check the podcast

You can also have a look at the pictures of the conference on Flickr.

Comments

[Matt O'Neill]

I've just been reading Naked Conversations (Scoble & Holtz). They summarise business blogging well by stating that it's the third evolutionary stage of organisational communications.

1. Communication was conversation.
2. Communication was broadcast.
3. Communication is beginning to become conversation again (through blogging).

For me, blogging is all about the community. Having only run a blog since early February, I can safely say it's changed my business and opened up a whole new world!

Thanks for the summary post.

Cheers,


Matt

[David Phillips]

If blogging is implemented by a company, it is done for a reason. Erg there must be an objective. Objectives are SMART. Did you meet the objective? Then you will automatically have a Return on Dicounted Cash Flow = ROI.

Why is this so hard?

[Philippe Borremans]

Matt,

While I agree blogs are about community and connecting with people I heard some sound critisism by a Dutch Prof. that comments (on blogs) are not really a conversation because most of them are limited to just a one line response... Interesting thought...

David,

You would be amazed how many companies do not know what SMART is... I know at least some of them are "jumping on the trend" without thinking about ROI.. A lot of education (and research) still needs to be done.

Thanks both for the comment.