Steve Shu's 21Publish Blog: November 2005

Boogie Medien has partnered with 21Publish to launch and manage an blog community for HLX, one of the leading, low-cost provider airlines in Germany (likened to JetBlue as I understand things - Stefan, why not Southwest?). Travelers can now share their experiences on transit, destinations, etc. Stefan posts more about it here. Congrats to HLX!

Blog communities are definitely something that companies with inherent, sizeable bases of customers should consider (can also be considered for small communities too, but ones with large communities may simply be missing the boat if they don't give any consideration). Consider the MBA blog community 21Publish launched for BusinessWeek, which draws from BusinessWeek's large online reader base. While an older Scoble post has got me thinking about whether we should be calling communities like these end-user generated content, participant-generated content, etc. communities (I had to think twice about this 'cause I don't want to be in the slave business!), in my mind companies are trying to use these online presences to make things work both for the company and for ~~end users~~ people. A loose analogy can be drawn to the sitting areas in Starbucks - it is a nice way for companies to facilitate a conversation in a loosely-defined but themed atmosphere.

Earlier this year, 21Publish released a whitepaper on corporate blog intranets (PDF file). The paper may have been a little before its time, but then I posted an update here, which indicated that I was starting to see trench-level activity in the corporate intranet space.

Today, 21Publish is releasing a whitepaper (PDF file) that I authored on corporate group blogging. Stefan has more to say about the topic of corporate group blogging here.

Like my prior presentation on blogging for non-profits (Powerpoint format and PDF format), the new corporate group blogging whitepaper is intended to be an introduction to those wanting to learn more about group blogging. For this paper, I've set the discussion context around a customer loyalty framework, which has some different effects in a group blog versus an individual blog context.

Given the recent survey by PR Week and Burson-Marsteller, I hope that people find the 21Publish whitepaper and presentation resources timely. The PR Week article reports two good stats that managers should be aware of:

About 59 percent of CEOs surveyed said they find Web logs, or blogs, useful for internal communications, while 47 percent see them as tools for communication with external audiences ...

About 18 percent ... say they plan to host a company blog over the next two years.

Technorati Tags: groupblog, blog, blogging, corporateblogging

Update (11/8/05): Niall Cook and Fredrik Wacka provide some commentary here and here on the subject of group blogging (btw - thanks for the coverage of 21Publish). I suppose I should clarify that the summary of benefits I provided early in the paper (of group blogging over individual blogging) seem to be tripping people up a bit. My fault. Since I address some of the detailed items of concern later in the paper, the message at the earlier point in the paper should have been even higher-level: that group blogs benefit from both concentration of information and a larger scope of linkages to a company brand. That is, the underlying arguments for group over individual blogs are opportunities for better scope and scale - a concept similar to that discussed in core business/economics strategy frameworks. Not evey one can have the stature of individual bloggers like Robert Scoble, Seth Godin, or Steve Rubel - group blogs are an alternative.

See the post over at Susan Mernit's blog. No direct connections to blogging as far as I can tell (upon cursory analysis), but there is a strong connection to internet and online businesses in the referenced articles.