The Connectbeam Social Computing Blog

Susan Scrupski on Rules for Blogging Success

I recently came across, through Jerry Bowles' post, How to Be a Successful Blogger: The Scrupski Rules, some excellent rules for bloggers by Susan Scrupski. Susan e2.0 Evangelist at Austin-based nGenera, which strategic advisory and technology design & deployment firm. Her blog is on my list, as is Jerry's. I will not repeat all the rules here as you can find them at Jerry’s post, but they are all ones I try to follow.

One of the rules is to participate in the community. Blogging is not a solo activity (though that is probably one of the greatest myths about blogging). Linking and commenting are key to the experience of blogging. I find a lot of good information from the bloggers on my list and others. This list is one example.

Birth of a Business Blog – Joe Nocera

I was interested in reading Joe Nocera’s post on Birth of a Blogger. Joe is the Talking Business columnist for The Times. His new blog, Executive Suite, “offers his take on topics from Steve Jobs and iPhones to the future of General Motors — and much more.”

In Birth of a Blogger, Joe explains why he started this blog. Joe said he resisted starting a blog for some time. He claims he is “an ink-stained wretch in his mid-50s; people my age have a hard time adapting to this new world. But I’ve come around, for several reasons.” First, his weekly column only appears once a week, and there are good stories everyday. Joe also said he gets hundreds of emails after his column appears and it is not possible to carry on individual dialogs with each reader. So the blog should consolidate these conversations and make them accessible to others to join in. His solution is that “every week, I plan to post a short preview of my column on Friday, with a link to it once it is posted on nytimes.com, after which I hope you’ll weigh in with your own response.”

I find it encouraging when an old media guy starts using the new media and when he says he will take more risks with the new media. We started this blog at Connectbeam to also have more frequent conversations with our customers and the market. We hope you find it useful and please share any observations you have.

Great Advice on How to Comment About Your Company on Blog Posts, Without Being Spammy

As someone who writes a company blog, I was pleased to see this excellent advice from Marshall Kirkpatrick on ReadWriteWeb in his post: How to Comment About Your Company on Blog Posts, Without Being Spammy. ReadWriteWeb often writes about new technology and gets many comments so the post draws from their experience and reactions and speaks to those who might comment on their blog. I think their advice generalizes well to any one who comments on technology, whether it is through a blog comment. Michael also offered the interesting statistic that less than one in a thousand who reads a post leaves a comment.

ReadWriteWeb welcomes five types of comments from company representatives: updates on new product developments, clarifications on your product or market position, articulation on product differentiation, kind words about the other companies, and comments that add humor or insider insights. Michael adds concrete examples in his post for each comment type. He adds that these comments work when they are delivered in humble manner and writes they are most effective when, “gently engaged with competitors and focused on adding value to the discussion of the whole sector.” You are also advised to be transparent about yourself and your interests.

This makes sense and is excellent advice. ReadWriteWeb welcomes comments since they want to known as a source for discussion on social media. As they write, much of their advice to blog commenters is common sense. I would add one more suggestion. I think the same rules for conversations in-person meetings apply to social media. Treat conversations on the web like those at events. For most situations, the conversation has already started, the group has already gathered. You need to understand what is being said before you enter the dialogue and then add value.

I also think Michael’s advice applies to those who write company blogs, not simply to the making of comments. Your blog is like a comment to the larger blogosphere. While I do not think your are limited to the five types of comments when you write your company blog, I do think the sprit of humility, transparency, and the attempt to add value to the conversation as a whole still applies to your efforts. I always invite your comments here.

Daniela Barbosa Chitchating about Information Delivery

Daniela Barbosa writes the wonderful blog, Chitchating about Information Delivery. The very prominent blog, ReadWriteWeb recently named her one of the Seven Leading Corporate Social Media Evangelists. It said, “Daniela Barbosa is the Business Development Manager, at Synaptica, a division of Dow Jones Client Solutions. Barbosa is one of the most prominent advocates of semantic technology and data portability inside of a legacy institution. Her personal blog leverages almost every bleeding edge web technology you can think of.”

Her blog also includes a beautiful banner of photos across the top and then excellent content underneath with a lot of cool widgets running down the right column. I need to ask where she got some of that stuff. The archives go back to February 2005.

Daniela gives bloggers some good advice in her post, I Knew There was a Reason I Never Started Smoking, I Was Waiting for Something Better. She writes that it is important to understand the behavior that drives people to read blogs if you want to make them successful. Then Daniela covers a small sample study she found on the blog, Paid Content. Many of the bloggers were more obsessive than me about reading their favorite blogs but the idea that stuck out for me was the comment by one of the respondents that she quotes, “Rather than focusing on helping readers wade through a deluge of information content, one could envision tools that focus on the reader’s relationship with the blogger or allowing more fluid, nuanced interactions between bloggers and readers.”

Daniela went on the think of some ways to expand the engagement between readers and bloggers such as matching the readers 'Attention' to specific blog posts so the first posts the visitor sees when visiting a blog are the most relevant to them based on their current attention profile, allowing readers to comment beyond text for example with video replies, and allowing 'real-time' chat on blogs once you post some content.

I find the first one the most intriguing. You can do that manually now in a primitive by going to the categories on this blog that interest you but a more sophisticated multi-dimensional tag-based profile might provide better matches. We also have Google site search on this blog to help you find past content that is off the front page. Perhaps adding more social features like we do with the Google Search Application for the enterprise might enrich the readers experience and the connections with other readers of the blog. When we integrate Connectbeam with Google Search Appliance inside the firewall the combination provides additional ranking based on number of times tagged. This Google integration also offers related tags, related users, and related communities. You are able to see who else did the same search, what they found, what they thought about it, and are provided with the ability to contact this person with a similar interest. What do you think? Daniela asks for more ideas and I do also.

eContent - Rich Hoeg’s Blog

Rich Hoeg, Manager, Technical Education & Engineering Information Services at Honeywell, writes the eContent blog with the tagline, Technical Knowledge Management Online Resources. The blog is almost two years old as the archives go back to August 2006. He notes that his 28 year career has moved in tandem with the rise of the micro-computer and the web and includes a focus on knowledge management tools and learning. Back in the 1980's he started Honeywell's computer training program. In the 1990's he built some of Honeywell's first internal and external web services, and now in the new century he is focusing upon knowledge collaboration tools and eLearning for Honeywell. This experience is evident in his blog.

Rich is a client and has written a bit about his experience with Connectbeam on his blog. In his post, Tagging Inside the Firewall, he wrote, “we've brought online a pilot project which is one of the very first, if not the first, internal corporate social networking / tagging applications. By internal I mean the service and server are running inside our network domain, yet our employees will be able to tag both internal and external content…this application is inside our firewall and will allow our engineers to perform knowledge discovery, research and sharing across the miles even if they don't know each other! Connectbeam works in tandem with our internal Google search appliance.”

He recently wrote, the post Data Mining for Knowledge - Educypedia, which he said it could be titled, why I blog, or why I wiki. He commented, “One huge advantage of being the "owner" of an active blog or wiki site is that my site visitors (i.e. you) leave a data trail. This data helps me understand how folks are conducting research, and if I am intrigued, I can re-run their queries and/or links. As my mind is wired in its own peculiar manner, this process allows me to learn from my visitors ... even those who never comment or contact me.” This transparency is one of the big benefits of enterprise 2.0.

In this case he was preparing a presentation on data mining and explored the term “domain engineering” in his internal search. Rich clicked “upon the first user name profile link listed in my company's social search results (runs in tandem with Google). The end result was a tag and link to Educypedia.” He said that this site was an excellent online encyclopedia that focuses on offering valuable links to other content on the web. Now he is adding Educypedia to the Manuals Section of his firms Engineering Learning Wiki. The tools provided Rich with a way to discover connections but it also took his desire to explore and share knowledge to make the system work.

There is much more on the blog and I encourage you to explore it. Rich also uses his blog to raise awareness for good causes outside work. He supports a small mountain town (JiaYou) in southern China near the Vietnamese border with his Run for China's Children that has built a new school.

Effective Collaboration - Michael Sampson’s Blog

Michael Sampson, who writes the blog, Effective Collaboration, mentioned our re-launch in his Enterprise Collaboration and Virtual Teams Report (April 14, 2008). I certainly appreciate the recognition and it caused me to take a look at his blog. The tagline is "improving the capability of teams that can't be together, to work together." Michael runs a consulting company in New Zealand that has this same focus. He frequently runs his Enterprise Collaboration and Virtual Teams Reports that aggregate news in the field. There is also a nice mix of conceptual posts.

His most recent series covered the Brightstar 6th Annual Information Summit in Wellington New Zealand. There was a useful case of a major Sharepoint implementation at the Bay of Plenty District Health Board that included lessons learned. The organization wanted more than document management, but also better standards compliance with accountability, auditable, controllable, and compliance. So they drove a change of culture and process, along with the implementation. To this end they were able to use the features of Sharepoint to support collaboration, as well as document management. One of the features we are including in our next release of Connectbeam is the ability to integrate our social networking and tagging with other applications like Sharepoint through bidirectional open APIs. This feature can increase the collaborative potential of Sharepoint as I will discuss in an upcoming post. Michael covers Sharepoint and collaboration extensively in his blog and offers a number of white papers on the topic.