What Blogging Brings to Business

Blogs are powerful communication platforms that allow you to capture information you find interesting and to share it with an "audience" who can talk back to you. This panel of five business bloggers with a combined blogging lifetime of 19 years has generated business, communicated the concerns of its customers, experimented, and broken new ground through their blogs. Topics we'll cover include: Blogging as knowledge management, Blogging as a conversation, Blogging for "fame and fortune", Blogging as a platform for experimentation, and Blogging to reduce internal spam. Come join us to share your experiences and have the chance to speak at length with experienced bloggers.

• Moderator - Jessica Lipnack, CEO, NetAge
• Speaker - Bill Ives, Web 2.0 Consultant and Writer, Portals and KM
• Speaker - Cesar Brea, Partner, Force Five Partners
• Speaker - Doug Cornelius, Knowledge Management Attorney, Goodwin Procter LLP

My Notes:

I was on this panel, so I have limited notes, but will try to reconstruct some information. You should also checkout some other blog posts about this panel:

• Enterprise 2.0 Blog post by David Spark
• I will add any others in the comments. You should feel to also link to your blog posts in the comments.
  

As Jessica posted [Bloggers at Taste], the panel got together to discuss an agenda. We had a great conversation and thought it would translate well to the audience.

Our audience was very interactive. Maybe too interactive. It was hard to keep pulling the discussion back to the topic. The participants seemed to be looking at two different aspects: What external blogging can bring to business and what internal blogging can bring to business. My take is that internal blogs (at least in the classic sense) are just limiting their audience. But blogs are flexible tools that you can do lots of things with inside the enterprise.

The session started with an introduction by the panel about their blogs:

• Jessica Lipnack
  Endless Knots [http://netage.com/endlessknots]
  
  
• Bill Ives
  Portals and KM [http://billives.typepad.com/portals_and_km ]
  Fast Forward Blog
  Art and Photography Blog
  Ives Family History Blog
  Sharp Family in NC
  
  
• Cesar Brea
  http://octavianworld.org
  
  
• Patti Anklam
  Net Work http:/www.pattianklam.com/
  
  
• Doug Cornelius
  KM Space [http://kmspace.blogspot.com] - Blog on law firm knowledge management, enterprise 2.0 and legal technology
  Real Estate Space [http://realestatespace.blogspot.com] - Blog on commercial real estate finance.
  Internal Blog: Real KM
  

Then Jessica asked the bloggers in the audience to introduce themselves and their blog. I was not able to grab the whole list, but here are some:

• Zo Knows-www.zoknows.wordpress.com
  
• Zo Knows Tech-www.zoknowstech.wordpress.com
  
• Zo Knows Food-www.zoknowsfood.wordpress.com
  
• Zo Knows Gaming-www.zoknowsgaming.com
• Caselines by David Hobbie
• (Audience members feel free to add a link to your blog in the comments)

We moved onto why we blog and who we blog for. One common theme among the panel was blogging as a personal knowledge management tool. We all found the blog to be a great way to capture information in a way that is easy to categorize, where it is easy to find the content. As a personal knowledge management tool, I blog for me. These notes are for me to reuse. That you are reading is a by-product.

We spent some time off on a tangent about who should blog, who should be forced to blog and who should not blog. I spent a fair amount of this conversation time in the back-channel on the Enterprise 2.0 Community site for the Conference.

A blog is an excellent way to display expertise, whether the blog is internal or external. It is one thing to paint yourself as an expert. It is much more effective to prove your expertise through your writings and information you push out.

We ran out of time, but here are some other thoughts I wanted to get out:

Internally, the blog can act differently. Scott Niesen, Director of Marketing, Attensa brought this up nicely earlier today in the Enterprise RSS session when he said you should draw a distinction between what "need to respond" and "need to know." A blog is a communication tool. It is well suited to what you need to know. Email is better for information that has a need to respond. Take a look at you email flow and think about how much of this you need to react to. Most of it is just information you need to know. But by the information being pushed into email, my inbox is acting as my content management system. A blog or a collection of blogs makes a much better content management system. It is easier to search, easier to find content and easier to add content.