Corporate blogging becomes Enterprise 2.0
Today BRW launched its flagship Australia Online issue (which is only available online at a hefty subscription price!), covering an interesting range of topics including the rise of online advertising (over $A1 billion annually now), e-commerce, online classifieds, travel, internet TV and music downloads. There is a truly atrocious full page picture of me facing their article “Business blogs on” (Don’t look – please!). This was intended to be a follow-up to their Blogging Power article of December 2005. In my interview for today’s piece, I tried to stress that the issue for corporates was no longer just blogging per se, but how activities across the enterprise are aggregated to enable more efficient working. The writer seemed to base the entire article on what we covered in our discussion, though only used a few anodyne comments from me. Certainly there is a real issue in getting corporates to use blogs for their external communication. Inside the organization, the game is now not about getting people to blog. It’s about creating an infrastructure whereby comments and activities by individuals have value across the enterprise. I’m hoping that Australian corporates will be able to leapfrog the phase of experimenting with blogs to start implementing enterprise-wide systems to tap collective behaviors, including document creation and viewing, bookmarking, annotating and more. A lot more on this later – I am currently developing a Web 2.0 framework (including enterprise and consumer), which I’ll launch sometime in the next few months.
Another article in the same issue was on internet TV and movie downloading, looking at competition among the online video platforms in Australia. I was quoted in the article (somewhat accurately) as saying:
Future Exploration Network chairman Ross Dawson says: “It surprises me how slow free-to-air TV channels have been to stream programs on the internet, especially as they can get a better idea of their audience on the net, and tailor advertising to suit them.”
Dawson says device convergence – such as Microsoft’s Xbox initiative – is also critical in how the market evolves.
“Manufacturers know convergence [will happen] and are desperately seeking to be at the centre of it,” he says. “ It happened with Apple. The sold people a physical device, an iPod, which led them to an internet site to make music purchases. Now this encompasses podcasts and video. They have moved from selling a single device to having a strong relationship with consumers selling content.”
Have a look at what I’ve written on how European telcos are positioning themselves to get some more insights into the foundations of this strategic positioning game.
