Dan Mitchell’s What’s Online column in the NY Times highlights the grey area of the Business Blogging Wiki:
For instance, Mr. Baker notes that Jason Calacanis’ blog, which focuses on technology, blogging and media in general, as well as personal stuff, is counted on the wiki as a Time Warner blog. (Mr. Calacanis created Weblogs Inc., which was bought by Time Warner.) But, Mr. Baker says, Mr. Calacanis “writes about his niche – not much about Dick Parsons or the layoffs at Time magazine.”
Still, the nature of a wiki, which can be edited or updated by any user, is to allow such problems to be ironed out over time…
But Steve Baker also noted:
Imagine if someone tried to write a McGraw-Hill blog, covering the textbook business, magazines, trades, and financial ratings and info services. It would be a mess.
Probably would, given recent turmoil. Instead, as is common with corporate blogging, you have to get bits an pieces of the story from many and many kinds of blogs.
So far, the BB500 has supported a binary research question, are they in, or out. I’d like to explore other facets of the Spectrum of Corporate Social Media:
Ranked from Lowest Risk (and Conversation)
- Sue and fire Employee Bloggers (e.g. Delta Air Lines Inc)
- RSS Feeds of existing content (e.g. Intel Corporation)
- Internal Wikis and Weblogs (e.g. DrKW)
- Executive Bloggers off-Site (e.g. guest blogging)
- Host Consumer Blogs (e.g. most media companies, Google)
- Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell policy for Employee Blogging (e.g. Apple Computer, Inc)
- Group Blogs on-Site (e.g. Yahoo! Search Blog)
- Executive Bloggers on-Site (e.g. SAP Executive Blogs)
- Public Wikis (e.g. Intuit)
- Encourage Employee Blogs (e.g. Scoble)
- Host and Employee Blogs (e.g. Sun Microsystems Inc, Microsoft Corporation)
I’ve put the above list in a wiki page. After flushing it out, we can use tags in Socialtext for faceted classification of corporate blogging and wiki use.
UPDATE: Line56’s editor notes:
The reason blog tracking becomes particularly important in the business context is that a large company can have tens of thousands of employees (and perspectives). The blog isn’t a monolithic form of corporate communication; two bloggers at the same company can offer radically different kinds of information in different styles and formats.
Ross Mayfield is CEO and co-founder of Socialtext, an emerging provider of Enterprise Social Software that dramatically increases group productivity and develops a group memory.
He also writes Ross Mayfield’s Weblog which focuses on markets, technology and musings.
