Sun's Blogging Policy's Sage Advice

Here's some great advice from Sun's blogging policy for those of us who blog about their company.

Think About Consequences
The worst thing that can happen is that a Sun sales pro is in a meeting with a hot prospect, and someone on the customer's side pulls out a print-out of your blog and says "This person at Sun says that product sucks." In general, "XXX sucks" is not only risky but unsubtle. Saying "Netbeans needs to have an easier learning curve for the first-time user" is fine; saying "Visual Development Environments for Java sucks" is just amateurish. Once again, it's
all about judgment: using your weblog to trash or embarrass the company, our
customers, or your co-workers, is not only dangerous but stupid.

NewPR Wiki a font of PR-blogging knowledge

I highly recommend that PR professionals interested in expanding their blog perspective check out the NewPR Wiki . It contains a significant number of resources such as examples of corporate blogging policies and a list of corporate executives' blogs.

Corporate Blogging Advancing Slowly - Survey

Trade journal Warren's Washington Internet Daily reported that corporate blogging is still in an "early adopter" phase, but those who have jumped in are having success. Respondents to a survey sponsored by Porter Novelli and Cymfony said more companies (92%) are monitoring blogs than have blogs (78%). The survey also stated the obvious that blogs are screened by corporate users to check developing trends, gain competitive insight and gauge company buzz. This doesn't seem to talk about individual users' business blogs but about "corporate" blogs.

"New!" -- We'll call it 'Text Mining'

I applaud the efforts of the folks at UC Irvine in the area of text mining and believe it's vital for reserach to continue in this area, but this press release does make it seem that they've uncovered something new. According to the release:

"The demonstration is significant because it is one of the earliest showing
that an extremely efficient, yet very complicated, technology called text mining
is on the brink of becoming a tool useful to more than highly trained computer
programmers and homeland security experts."

I would have to argue that folks in the business world have already established text mining as a useful tool. (Hopefully Homeland Security isn't just learning about it!)

Setting up Factiva NewsPage 2.0 -- the YouTube version

Whenever people talk about blogs written by Factiva employees, Daniela's name comes up. She comes up with great ways of getting her clients engaged through the interactivity of blogs. Here latest idea is posting YouTube videos of her demonstrating new product features. Nice.

Mining Even Deeper into the Long Tail

Factiva Insight is offering content for our clients to mine from nearly 2 million of the most-read blogs (among lots of other content). We often have the discussion about the value of continuing to add more blogs from the end of the long tail. One argument goes that adding blogs that are read by EVEN FEWER people can't be good business. (It costs money to process more content and there has to be a point of diminishing returns.) But at least one person, Chris Anderson, who has authored a blog and a new book called The Long Tail, and an article by the same name in Wired, would disagree. He argues that there's gold in that tail. (Listen to him on NPR's ATC.)

Models like Netflix and Amazon show that there is money to be made when you continue to add lots of esoteric content because there are buyers for seemingly every last title. (Something like 98% of Netflix's huge list of titles have been rented at least once.)

Wal-Mart fighting in the blog trenches

Interesting stuff about how Wal-Mart is engaging in a blogosphere battle with its critics, in part, with its creation of its paidcritics.org blog, subtitled "a project of working families for Wal-Mart". It seems to me to be a thinly veiled attempt to look like a non-corporate voice against the company's critics.

Dell Tries to Be More Approachable

Dell follows McDonald's, Google and others online with a corporate blog. McDonald's did it to fight its hurting public image. Google did it to foster it's image of hipness. Dell is probably in the camp of the former. Either way, it will be interesting to watch develop.

The blog, one2one is subtitled, Direct Conversations with Dell. (Hey, that's something even they don't offer via their customer service phone number.)

And one might question the name choice. Be careful with the URL. The site's name is one2one, but the URL is dellone2one.com. Leave off the "dell" and you can have some sexy chat with lovely ladies just standing by waiting to talk to you.

Eastman Departs Biz360

Some changes at the top of Biz360 as Deborah Eastman, its CMO and EVP of sales and marketing, leaves.

Where is the line for people who blog about work?

A few of my co-workers were chatting this morning about how much a person like myself should say when blogging about product development issues. It is a tough question. In my role at Factiva, I'm privy to product development and business plans which would be very interesting to write about. The things we wrestle with when deciding new product features and where to take the business would make for interesting writing. However, revealing such things could be ba for business. We don't want to tip our hands to the competition. (Are you reading this, guys?)

But at the same time our customers (and even our Sales team!) appreciate when we talk about our innovation and what's coming next. So it's a fine line.

Factiva has taken a very bold step encouraging its employees to blog. Trusting that we will figure out where the line is and not cross it. Perhaps one of us will say too much, but I think the trust that our employer gives us also fosters loyalty which would discourage us from doing something to harm the company.

The other aspect is the challenge of balancing honesty with common sense. This is the harder one. How much can I or should I say about my feelings about bad decisions or corporate mistakes. I don't think there are lots of them at Factiva, but let's face it, all companies make 'em. I'm still not sure where that line is.

So, I'll keep talking about things that I think are interesting, but for now I'll also keep holding back those things that are really interesting. (Like what the director of Factiva Core Products is really like.)

Found another blog after my own heart

Text Technologies

Tips on Making a Blog Work for Your Company

Good piece on corporate blogging from Factiva: The conversation has shifted to allow anyone with a keyboard and an interesting point of view the possibility of equal voice.

The Wal-Mart Parking Lot Phenomena

In the past folk songs were written about finding America on the New Jersey Turnpike or the like. The new window into America seems to be the Wal-Mark parking lot.

I've come across a significant number of mentions on the Web with the term "parking lot" near "Wal-Mart." In fact, "parking lot" is consistently one of the most frequently discovered noun-phrases occurring near Wal-Mart. When I first found the "Wal-Mart Parking Lot Phenomena" I figured it was some anomaly in the data, but no, it's real.

A lot of things happen in this new public space. A few I found just in the past 7 days: a person witnessing a mom slap her child, FEMA information booths for Katrina victims, geospotting caches, a suicide victim found, volunteer sign-up tents, fireworks sales, lab puppy sales, a man who reportedly hid under a woman's car and then licked her toes as she loaded the trunk, people finding Jesus, and young people finding love. Ah, Wal-Mart, your clarion call beckons us all.

Blogs: To trust or not to trust?

Paul Reynolds of the BBC responds: that is not the question. Whether blogs are trustworthy is not the point, he concludes in his piece, because blogs are not serving the same purpose as the media. They are often trying to make the reader consider alternate points of view. Reynolds writes:

Sometimes they come up with new facts and give you a lead on stories. ... Quite often, however, they just offer you a perspective you might not have thought about. You can use them to test your own judgment.

Free-Speech Via Blogging Gaining Traction in China

I try not to blog about blogging too much, but this caught my eye.

China, a country whose government is dancing with the twin sisters of individual freedom and state control, seems be allowing a bit more freedom to its people via the Internet.

According to the BBC, Xinhua, the official Chinese news agency says there are currently 60 million Chinese bloggers with a predicion of 100 million by 2007. Baidu.com, a major Chinese Internet search engine, says there are about 2.3 blog sites sites per blog author in China.

Naked Conversations -- Looks like a great book

Lots of bloggers post a list of books that they've read. Well, la de da. I think they're just showing off the fact that they have time to read. I'm not quite sure how to do that and still: work, have a life, spend time with my family, volunteer, blog, etc. Hate to say it, but reading, seems to pull up in that race with a lame leg.

However, if I had time to read, here's a book I'd be reading: Naked Conversations, How Blogs are Changing the Way Businesses Talk with Customers, by Shel Israel & Robert Scoble.

KD Paine Comments on New Media Measurement Proposal

An interesting discussion is starting over at KDPaine's PR Measurement Blog related to a new measurment standard the Canadian Public Relations Society is proffering. I've looked at it briefly and it seems logical and as good as any other "standard" out there. But this stuff is always harder than it looks because it's so hard to normalize disparate content in such a way that you can compare accurately.

For now, it seems like the discussion around media measurement will continue to be: 1) We have to do it; 2) We don't think there is a reliable way of doing it accurately; 3) See #1.

Factiva presents at Search Engine Meeting in Boston

Peter Cipollone, director of text mining and visualization at Factiva, spoke about text mining as a way to solve a business problem (in this case HR recruiting). His was one of the few presentations to get away from the science of search and text mining and talk more about the specifics as it applies to business.

It was a great presentation (Pete's my boss).

Endeca Still Pitching Guided Search to Solve 'Long Tail' Problem

Steve Papa, founder of Endeca, is still pitching guided navigation as a solution to the "long-tail" problem (at this years' Search Engine Meeting). You know, Google's 1-100 of about 72 million inherently buries good stuff down at hit number 71,567,567. "Google's great, don't get me wrong," Papa predictably said. "but..." there's something better, he implied.

He's not really convincing me how their guided navigation can be used as a general search tool. I'm convinced it works well within a (relatively) small database such as a Netflix-type library of DVDs.

I think I agree that it CAN be used in general search, however, it seems you need structured metadata across the documents to do it well.

Google's Enterprise Search Redux

Dave Girouard, general manager of Google's enterprise business, was the opening speaker at the 2006 Search Engine Meeting in Boston. He was pitching the new Google enterprise search appliance. (Girouard didn't impress me with what's new and different about the next version of the yellow Google blade. )

I would agree with him when he said: To date, enterprise search is hardly used. Because of this it is very costly, per use, to implement and run. His back-of-the-envelope calculations say each search at a typical large company can cost about $0.25; and enterprise search won't be successful until its orders of magnitude cheaper.

The goal, he said, is to move the search box from the corner of the home page of the corporate intranet to the the center and have it be the main entry point into the enterprise information.