Corporate Blogging

Perhaps question blog is the wrong phrase, but it's as close a description as any at this point. While attending Gnomedex, I talked about the Three P's of interacting with Bloggers.

When I left the main session room, I bumped into Chris Aarons and Geoff Nelson from AMD. We proceeded to have a long discussion about how large corporations can interact with the blogosphere, especially given the spec of "a modern, Internet age chip company constrained by an old school legal department".

We actually spent some time kicking around basic concepts and terminology, like "what is a corporate blog?". One view was that it had to be executive level commentary to be a "corporate" blog...and that sort of pre-digested, high level content was in fact less useful than a more personal tone.

Bryght's corporate blog (which is what you're reading right now, at least my corner of it) is simply the sum of all of the team's posts. There is no on-message vs. off-message, and really no constraints. We all have personal blogs (as well as a few other places we put content), so we tend to post technology or business items that are more closely related with Bryght here. But a lot of the time there is great relevant content that doesn't end up here :)

Charlene Li is kicking off an open process to define the needs of corporate blogging. Of course, I jumped right in and suggested that perhaps we had to define what corporate blogging meant as the first step. Thanks to Darren for jumping in and suggesting Bryght. Here's the comment I left on Charlene's site:

@Darren: thanks...one of these days we'll productize the more corporate features...

@Vassil Mladjov: "Drupal is great for personal blogging". Actually, no. WordPress is great for personal blogging...Drupal should not be deployed unless you want massive scale, multi-user :P I think you would be surprised at some of the corporations using it...

Charlene: I'm not convinced that you're asking the right questions yet. What do you mean by "corporate blogging"?

1. Corporate Blogging as Blog: a way for all interested people at a company to have a blog, integrated or not with the main company site (e.g. company.com/blogs or blogs.company.com)
2. Corporate Blogging as Intranet: a corporate intranet based on blogging technology to be used for everything from project logs to internal communication to competitive intelligence.
3. Corporate Blogging as Inforouter: a system that aggregates all info from different systems within the company using everything from RSS (lowest common denominator) to direct APIs (maps from Google, contacts from Salesforce).
4. Corporate Blogging as CMS: replace the public/private website and/or portal with a system that has its roots in easy editing and updating.

Charlene Li is kicking off an open process to define the needs of corporate blogging. Of course, I jumped right in and suggested that perhaps we had to define what corporate blogging meant as the first step. Thanks to Darren for jumping in and suggesting Bryght. Here's the comment I left on Charlene's site:

@Darren: thanks...one of these days we'll productize the more corporate features...

@Vassil Mladjov: "Drupal is great for personal blogging". Actually, no. WordPress is great for personal blogging...Drupal should not be deployed unless you want massive scale, multi-user :P I think you would be surprised at some of the corporations using it...

Charlene: I'm not convinced that you're asking the right questions yet. What do you mean by "corporate blogging"?

1. Corporate Blogging as Blog: a way for all interested people at a company to have a blog, integrated or not with the main company site (e.g. company.com/blogs or blogs.company.com)
2. Corporate Blogging as Intranet: a corporate intranet based on blogging technology to be used for everything from project logs to internal communication to competitive intelligence.
3. Corporate Blogging as Inforouter: a system that aggregates all info from different systems within the company using everything from RSS (lowest common denominator) to direct APIs (maps from Google, contacts from Salesforce).
4. Corporate Blogging as CMS: replace the public/private website and/or portal with a system that has its roots in easy editing and updating.