It's not just about YOUR blogs... by Ron Lichty

Hmmm. In envisioning the July 27 Community/Collaboration event, I left out an entire aspect to organizations engaging with this stuff.

I was focused on the blogs, wikis, message boards, RSS, etc. that organizations will, of necessity, implement in the coming five years.

What I skipped was the necessity for organizations to connect with their constituents (customers, members, citizens, etc.) who are writing about them in online communities other people created.

Once again, Lee LeFever's blog has come to my rescue, pointing me, this time, to the Church of the Customer.

This entry cites examples of Continental Airlines CEO Lawrence Kellen being responsive to the FlyerTalk online community for frequent flyers; and Starwood Hotels being responsive on this and other internet discussion boards, by assigning an employee known as the "Starwood Lurker" to solve customer problems with its frequent traveler programs and build customer loyalty. See this earlier blog entry to get a sense of the Starwood Lurker's impact.

I'm not sure there's room in the event to shoehorn in this aspect to things. But we should be cognizant of it, as we discuss how we architected community and collaboration solutions on our own sites that delivered dramatic results.

Customer Facing vs Dark Blogs; Blogs vs. Wikis by Ron Lichty

Dark blogs?

That's emerging terminology for blogs behind the firewall.

There's more in this internet.com article on dark blogs as well as those that are customer facing, in the context of the first hours of the Supernova conference, a conference focused on "the decentralization of computing, communications, digital media, and business."

Meanwhile, Lee LeFever has added to his insightful differentiation of blogs and message boards with "A Blog Post Says 'Here It Is, Dig It'".

ROI for RSS by Ron Lichty

One of my Avenue A | Razorfish colleagues, Tracy Cohen, pointed me to a great thread on Charlene Li's blog about RSS.

Charlene, a Forrester analyst and author of Forrester's blogging reports, prompted readers for examples of how marketers use RSS (aside from blogs, of course). As examples, she cited Purina's RSS feeds for dog and cat care advice (which also happens to have exceptionally clear RSS usage instructions that could serve as a model for yours), and RSS feeds of coupon and bargain sites like Slick Deals and TechBargains.

Her readers responded:
* Burpee's seeds: product specials, newsletter content
* Dealazon: Amazon's API plus RSS
* US Cycling: news
* IBM Press Room: updates
* Tech Recipes: tutorial updates, information
* Deals on the Web: stuff
* Amazon deals: stuff
* Frontline: PBS - TV programming and news
* Luftgrop: travel
* Continental: travel
* Pheedz: travel
* Deals on the Web
* Apple: PR
* The Corcoran Group (NYC real estate): open houses, newest listings
* Craigslist: everything on the site
* SmartTravelDeals.com: travel sales and offers
* PBS: Frontline
* simplyhired.com: new jobs that fit the criteria you set
* MarCom:Interactive : marketing communications trend briefings, trend tours, new webcasts, and news
* Gallup: their content
* Intel: press releases, products, software updates, reseller center, IT operations and IT for classrooms

(If you want to subscribe to any of the above youself, there are URLs to most on Charlene's blog.)

Unusual uses of blogs:

Charlene notes, in her November Forrester report, a number of less-obvious uses of blogs, including:
* Nike, with Gawker Media: an "adverblog"
* Lee Dungarees: "90 Ft. Babe" blog chronicling the adventures of a clearly fictional giantess looking for a date
* Microsoft recruiting: what the company looks for in inbound product managers

Enterprise collaboration with blogs and wikis by Ron Lichty

Enterprise collaboration with blogs and wikis Great InfoWorld overview of enterprise use of blogs and wikis.

To quote: “Blogs and wikis play opposite roles,” says Martin Wattenberg, a researcher on the collaborative user experience team at IBM Watson Research Center. “Blogs are based on an individual voice; a blog is sort of a personal broadcasting system. Wikis, because they give people the chance to edit each other’s words, are designed to blend many voices. Reading a blog is like listening to a diva sing, reading a wiki is like listening to a symphony.”

Says the article, "A blog is like a presentation. It’s a one-to-many form of communication: a single person speaking to an audience who can comment on, but not change, the content. By comparison, wikis are a many-to-many collaborative tool. Anyone with access can add to, change, or delete information contained in a wiki. Think of it as a huge whiteboard, one where everyone has a marker and is welcome to scribble."

In that context, the article provides insight into how corporations will deal with, leverage and utilize these technologies, citing use of blogs by Microsoft evangelist Robert Scoble (his first blog while at NEC; Sun CEO Jonathan Schwartz and XML guru Tim Bray; and 3,000 active internal-to-IBM bloggers. And use of wikis by customer support personnel at a consumer bank to share, in real time, news of the latest cyberthreats devised by malicious hackers; and by a tech support guy for his customers to share issues and solutions not only with him but with each other.

More ROIs for community/collaboration software by Ron Lichty

More interesting ways community and collaboration solutions are used to delivery measurable ROIs for the organizations that field them:

Create your startup virtually. Ross Mayfield says, "Real Estate is the leading cause of death for startups," and leveraged a set of tools to let everyone at SocialText work from home - globally:
* Socialtext -- the building and garden
* IRC -- the hallway
* FreeConference.com -- the conference room
* Skype -- the meeting rooms
* IM -- talking over the cubical
* VNC -- peeping over the cubical
* Our blogs -- the front porch
"The benefits go beyond cost... generally it is more productive."

Thinkcycle: a forum for designers and engineers to create open source solutions to the problems of developing communities and the environment

URLs: blog-building, map to services and tools, the future by Ron Lichty

Re-architecting a website with community features: Jason Coward recounts how he relaunched TheVirtualHandshake.com web site, at the behest of its owner, online-community author David Teten (with coauthor Scott Allen, the forthcoming book by the same name, The Virtual Handshake). Here's what he did, why he did it, and how he did it while spending very little of David's money.

Highly worthwhile Map of the Social Software Landscape -- really a table of categories of community and collaboration applications areas and the companies providing solutions.

Setting up blogs at your university, college or school -- runs through some of the options for serving blogs.

Wikis foster trust: That's the word from Time magazine, in its coverage of companies setting up wikis. "Business wikis are being used for project management, mission statements and cross-company collaborations... at a hundred companies, including Nokia and Kodak." Includes a couple paragraphs of wiki history, including its founding in 1995 by programmer Ward Cunningham, a few of whose comments they share. The rest is on Wikipedia.

Not sure about this community stuff? Not yet bought in that you need to re-think how to enable communications with and among your customers, members, constituents, and clients? Consider that your next generation of customers is the current younger generation, which is growing more and more virtual. How virtual is the subject of this blog entry, Teens Set Trends in Online Interaction