One of the things we’ll look at on SocialMedia.biz is the use of weblogs (and other social media) in the workplace. Here’s an update on corporate uses of weblogs.
Companies that have launched blogs include:
• Microsoft, whose Channel 9 community weblog features 1,000 Microsoft employees using text and video blog tools. The blog drew 700,000 unique users a month as of July 2004.
• Sun Microsystems president and chief operating officer Jonathan Schwartz started a blog in June 2004, reasoning in his first entry, “Why shouldn’t an officer of a public company start a blog? Hey, life is short.”
• At Verizon, Paul Perry, a director in the company’s eServices division, started a blog to keep up with news about competitors. Using a news aggregator, a popular blog-world tool that grabs and assembles syndicated “feeds” of content from Web sites and other blogs, people in his group can quickly post news they find on those feeds to the internal blog.
• Software maker Macromedia, one of the first companies to adopt blogs for customer service, saved tens of thousands of dollars in call-center support when it released a crop of new products for software developers in 2002. A trusted group of employees started blogs to answer users’ questions, and the blogs have grown into online communities that give Macromedia valuable customer feedback.
• DaimlerChrysler employs weblogs at a few of its U.S. plants; managers discuss problems and keep a record of their solutions.
• The Hartford Financial Services Group is already finding success using blogs in one of its mobile groups. A team of 40 field technology managers, who serve as links between The Hartford’s network of insurance agents and the home office, set up a blog in August 2004. They use it to share information about e-commerce features and solutions to technology problems. Before, email and voice mail sufficed, but email threads would die, and there was no way to search past shared information. “We don’t get a chance to talk with each other as often as we’d like,” says Steve Grebner, one of The Hartford’s field managers, who thinks of the blog a little like a town square.
• Nokia has a photo phone blog.
• IBM began blogging in December 2003, and by February, some 500 employees in more than 30 countries were using it to discuss software development projects and business strategies. And while blogs’ inherently open, anarchic nature may be unsettling, Mike Wing, IBM’s vice president of intranet strategy, believes their simplicity and informality could give them an edge. “It may be an easy, comfortable medium for people to be given permission to publish what they feel like publishing,” he says.
• Dr Pepper is using blogging both as a medium to market products and monitor brands and as an internal knowledge-management tool.
• American Airlines, where only 20% of the company’s highly mobile workforce has corporate email, is considering blogs as a way to give employees more channels to management.
• To help companies find bloggers who fit their target, Internet marketing firm Richards Interactive has started ProjectBlog.com, a database of bloggers who’ve completed demographic surveys.
• StonyField Farm (maker of yogurt and other dairy products) has a customer-facing weblog.
• Jones Soda weblog
• Richards Interactive invited bloggers to participate in product launches.
JD Lasica, founder of Inside Social Media, is also a fiction author and the co-founder of the cruise discovery engine Cruiseable. See his About page, contact JD or follow him on Twitter.
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