Blog Posts About: Weblogs and Business

My wife just started a class on Information Systems for her MBA. Last night she came home from her first class with a new version of the Microsoft SPOT watch (Suunto N3). Apparently Microsoft has made an arrangement with Seattle University to have students test market the watch in certain classes.

Not only that though. The students are supposed to create a blog and blog their experiences with the watch. Then, at the end of the quarter, the URLs for all the blogs will be turned in to Microsoft.

This is interesting on a few fronts:

1) Cool- my wife gets to try out a SPOT watch (which means I do too). I’m interested in seeing what it’s all about (and seeing my wife blog).

2) The class is being asked to use blogs. She said that some of the people in the class asked “what’s a blog?�? Interesting that it was assumed that people would know what to do. They were told to use Blogger.com.

3) Is this a new form of blog-enabled test marketing? Test marketing has always been about getting people to use a product in real life, but I don’t remember people reporting their experiences so publicly via blogs.

At first I thought that the blogs were just a handy way for Microsoft to collect information. Then I realized that there is likely more to this story. By asking participants to blog their experiences with the SPOT watch, Microsoft is enabling a blogosphere buzz machine while doing market research- killing two birds with one stone.

Product + required blog reporting = Buzz. I suppose it could backfire, but I thought it was an interesting development.

I sometimes hesitate to post about these types of articles because they seem to be the same type stories over and over. It's another article pointing to the ways in which weblogs are transforming the business world and I'm sure I'll be one of 10k to link to it.

Then I think that this is my business and these articles back-up what I am promoting to clients-- I should be a resource for these links, even I consider them redundant.

So with my internal conflicts aside, here ya go- a link to a well written and entertaining article: Fortune: Why There's No Escaping the Blog

"If you fudge or lie on a blog, you are biting the karmic weenie," says Steve Hayden, vice chairman of advertising giant Ogilvy & Mather, which creates blogs for clients. "The negative reaction will be so great that, whatever your intention was, it will be overwhelmed and crushed like a bug. You're fighting with very powerful forces because it's real people's opinions."

Via Scoble

I just signed up to attend the Blog Business Summit in Seattle on January 24th and 25th. It's great to see an event like this in my backyard and I'm looking forward to it.

The sessions seem to focus on a lot of the issues that are near and dear to me like "Corporate Blogging: Strategy and Policy". It also looks like we'll be getting Scobleized on more than one occasion, which is fine with me.

I've really enjoyed David Sifry's multi-part look at the state of the blogosphere. His latest entry is about something near and dear to me- corporate blogging. I'm with him in saying that 5000 corporate bloggers is a small number and we're at the beginning of blogging becoming an acceptable part of corporate policy.

Here's how he defines this group:

These are people who blog in an official or semi-official capacity at a company, or are so affiliated with the company where they work that even though they are not officially spokespeople for the company, they are clearly affiliated.

Sifry's Alerts: State of the Blogosphere, October 2004

David Sifry of Technorati describes the big picture in the growth of weblogs recently. Amazing.

Update: #2 in the series has been posted: 4.6 weblog posts per second.

Update: #3 in the series: Blogs and Big Media

Ross has posted some notes from his talk at the Web 2.0 Conference on the SocialText blog:Wikis Gone Mainstream at Disney

Here's an excerpt from Mike Pusateri's presentation, on: How do you get users to accept the new methodologies and paradigms?

• Don't tell users there are new methodologies and paradigms, they don't care or need to know.
• Show them that the new systems allow them to get their work done
• Show them that you can fix problems that prevent them from getting their work done going forward.

I love it. I think it's an uphill battle to get people to buy into the value of "RSS" or "Wiki" if they get stuck on understanding the terms and all the cool things they *could* do.

Instead, I agree with Mike in making the technology invisible and focusing the value on the specific outcomes that affect real work.

It's all about implementation and how we choose to talk about and test drive the technologies.