Municipalist

More on why corporate blogs fail

Among the valuable comments here following the Wall Street Journal's Business Technology blog post on the recent Forrester report on the sorry state of business-to-business blogging:

• I maintain and manage what I’ll call a “pr dispersal site” for a Fortune 500 company, and all efforts to “spice it up” with engaging content and an honest voice have been met with shrieks of terror from PR, marketing, corporate HQ, and the vast sea of go-betweens.
• ... A blog isn’t a pulpit, it’s a conversation. B2B marketers need to step back, understand this newer medium, and craft new strategies for successful implementation. Applying strategies from other media to the blog is like trying to induce a car to go using a buggy whip.
• Successful blogs have three things in common. 1) Personality. 2) They offer information that is valuable and/or entertaining to readers. 3) Time and resources are invested; Postings are not an afterthought. Most corporate blogs have none of the above. Like anything else, you get what you put into it.
• Most corporate blogs are strangled at birth by having to go through the legal department post by post.

Or, there is another explanation, however painful. And that is that blogging for the most part is a Gen. X/Y thing, and as long as the Boomers and their previous-century business practices remain in place, blogs will not have any real impact on how corporations -- and the public sector -- do business.

Time for the Clintonian Post

Politico blogger Ben Smith notes that Peter Daou, Hillary Clinton's Web guru, will apparently continue to stick around "Hillaryland." Daou's job, among other things, will be "keeping a handle on" the vast email database the Clinton campaign assembled.

His new role reflects a striking feature of contemporary politics, in which online organizing allows defeated candidates — notably Howard Dean, though Wes Clark was also among the first — to keep their supporters and some of their power in the form of their e-mail lists.

No word as to what "keeping a handle on" actually entails. But apparently, not a blog. So here is what we would like to see: The Hillary Clinton blog. This is a great time for it. Everybody tells defeated candidates from both parties to sit down and shut up after the primaries. Instead, we say: Blog. And we have a name: The Clintonian Post.

She could even occasionally let What's His Name contribute. We'd read it.

Business-to-business blogging: Learning how not to do it

For the mere cost of $379 (about what I pay to gas up the mini van), you too can own this crisp, clean new report from Forrrester Research, showing how "B2B" blogging is not what many first generation users thought it was. Is. Whatever. The report checks out 90 blogs run by Fortune 500 companies. If you can't spare the cash for the PDF, you can read about it here in this Wall Street Journal blog [helpfully titled "Business Technology."] That blog headlines its post on the Forrester Report: "Most Corporate Blogs are Unimaginative Failures." Yeah? Tell us what you really think next time.

From the report, an example of a good B2B blog: the blog by Jonathan Schwartz, CEO of Sun Microsystems. Helpfully called "Jonathan's Blog."

All of this stuff is important to public sector bloggers for many reasons, including the focus here on measuring impact. More on these issues in the days ahead.

Great comments following the WSJ post. More coverage at Content Nation and The Science of Marketing.

This site offers plenty of useful blog tips for everybody

A site called ProBlogger is a great place to learn about blogging. Plenty of very readable, useful stuff. Scroll down to the "Best of" section.

Here is an extensive list of blogging tips for beginners.

Here is a good piece on generating blog comments.

And here is something on the confusing world of TrackBacks.

Wachovia: Big commitment to Web 2.0

Good post here by Ann All at IT Business Edge linking the federal government intelligence community's Intellipedia to such private sector internal Web 2.0 efforts such as the recent major commitment by Wachovia. Her crucial topic: cultural resistance. From an IT manager at Novell:

Make sure you are not just giving people a tool to use and saying, “Go use it.” Set them up to use it successfully. You need to lead people to use it slowly over time.

More about Wachovia's Web 2.0 venture here.

The Sunday Read: The Web to the rescue

How social networking saved New Orleans, by John Fontana, Network World.

School district automated parent-call system that works not quite all the time: $143,000 annually. School district blog: cheap. Calmed parents: Priceless

The Washington Post's "hyperlocal" news site covering Loudoun County, Virginia links to a recent Municipalist post here regarding Loudoun County Public Schools' recent decision to hold students after school because of a storm, relying on a call system to notify parents, while ignoring use of the Web completely. The call system, at $143,000 per year, did not perform up to standard, apparently. We make our point again at the Post's site in a comment posted after the story.

Russert and Wikipedia: The story that won't, er, die

'I killed Tim Russert (on Wikipedia)' is the headline on this Toronto Globe and Mail analysis piece that points out that the employee of an NBC contractor who updated Russert's Wikipedia page to announce his death, scooping much of American mainstream media, was fired this week. We have written in this space recently that this tale illustrates an important shift. The quaint notion of major network TV czars up on the 28th floor puffing away on their cigars as they order their sycophantic middle managers to prevent the Russert death news from getting on TV for 20 or 30 minutes, or whatever, just boggles the mind. That world doesn't exist anymore.

Keep puffing away, guys. Just keep puffing away.

McCain's 'computer illiteracy': What the media missed

Missed in the media coverage over John McCain's supposed lack of consumer tech-product savvy is this from Wired:

To be fair, what this online branding obscures is the fact that McCain is probably more familiar with, and better versed than most of the roster of the 2008 presidential candidates on the nuances of telecommunications and internet policy because of his work as a longtime member and former chairman of the Senate Committee on Commerce, Science and Transportation -- work for which he has received frequent praise from consumer advocacy groups and think tanks.

'To be fair'? Why start now?

We don't need a president who is down with the Facebook generation. We need a grown-up who can parse the type of complicated but absolutely crucial policy work demanded in this new communications age, so that in the end, the Internet remains available, accessible, affordable, and not pawed over by government tax hikers (as in the state of New York beginning this month.)

By all means, let's have the debate over who really is computer illiterate. Because it is about the capacity to govern, not just about who has the larger online donor lists, and much more important to this country than a shout match between partisans at some geek conference. Exactly what is Obama's capacity to discuss the details and nuances and repercussions of such issues, under pressure in a national campaign? And: Why don't we hear this angle over and over from the McCain campaign?

It may be too late. The Washington Post becomes the latest to (re)write the silly campaign story of the month.

Should the intelligence community tutor the entire federal government on Web 2.0?

Here is a plan to get government comfortable with Web 2.0: Deploy these applications in-house, get comfortable with them, use them to build collaboration between employees, then deploy them publically. That is one lesson from the apparent success of the Intellipedia project, which is that government agencies -- uncertain about Web 2.0 -- would have a great chance to look before it leaps.

There has been a lot of talk lately about Intellipedia, including quite a bit of that talk by its founders themselves. Which seems odd since Intellipedia's home is in the Office of the Director of National Intelligence. That agency apparently enjoys sending spokespeople to tech conferences and yacking about it's Wikipedia-like internal collaboration space, which seems to be a hit.

From a history of Intellipedia at the CIA's site:

Intellipedia and other “web 2.0” tools available to the Intelligence Community are making individuals more productive and efficient. Intellipedia’s vibrant environment has played an important role in improving morale, unleashing creativity, and helping officers across the world feel more connected with their colleagues.

Federal Computer Week's Ben Bain reports: In addition to its best-known Intellipedia application, the Office of the Director of National Intelligence offers five user-generated Web 2.0 tools that analysts use for collaboration, including:

• A YouTube-like video-sharing application.
• A photo-sharing application similar to Flickr.
• A tool for bookmarking Web pages that is similar to del.icio.us.
• Instant messaging.
• Blogging software.

“The real power comes from integration of all of these tools,” Robert Waller, chief of the customer team for ODNI’s Intelligence Community Enterprise Solutions, told Bain.

These tools were built to be used by the intelligence community alone, in a secure space. Deploying any Web 2.0 applications out there into the public space is admittedly a different challenge to achieve different goals. But the plan of internal first, then external, would seem to hold loads of potential.

Information Week reported on a recent presentation by the CIA about Intellipedia at the Enterprise 2.0 conference. Here is USA Today on Intellipedia from 2006.

Dear constituent/ voter/ obvious angry idiot

From undoubtedly the funniest blogging state legislator out there, our friend Stacey Campfield, Tennessee Republican, blogging about the typical comment and email he receives:

Dear (Hillbilly/ Redneck/ Loser/A**hole):

As a life long (Republican/ conservative/ voter of yours) I have to say how (embarrassed/ ashamed) I am that you mentioned you (don't worship Al Gore/ Like guns/ have and speak openly about faith/ Don't love abortion) … You and your (bible thumping/ toothless/ uneducated) friends should go back to your (Cave/ clan meeting/ beating your wife/ snake handling) and forget about making laws.

Sincerely, Bill in San Francisco

P.S. I read your blog every day. Will you link to me?

[Via Stateline.org.]

Also: Read Municipalist's Q & A with Stacey from November 2007.

Survey: Business and government like Web 2.0, but are cautious

More than 40 percent of corporate IT decision makers in government and corporate sectors have rolled out Web 2.0 tools in their organizations, but more than half of them may be hesitant to adopt such applications because of concerns about proper usage and security, according to a just-released survey of business and government organizations by CDW Corporation. Also: 31 percent worry that Web 2.0 will be used for personal use instead of work, 28 percent are concerned about information security, and 27 percent worry about employees wasting time. And, a finding that is coming up more and more: 68 percent and 61 percent of corporate and government IT decision makers, respectively, feel that Web 2.0 will be important in attracting and retaining the next generation of workers.

Pennsylvania digital government summit: Web 2.0 could be big benefit

Computerword Reports:

Web 2.0 tools could significantly improve state and local government communications with constituents, as well as aid in recruiting top college graduates for IT positions, according to speakers and users at the Pennsylvania Digital Government Summit last week.

However, speakers also warned that local and state government officials would have to move slowly, since they face perpetual IT funding and manpower constraints.

Municipalist likes the thinking behind the notion that when government leaps ahead with new, useful technology, that alone could attract a set of workers who just might show up with some awareness and enthusiasm. Which is what government needs, wayyy more than a brand new wiki.

Thank goodness all these blogging and democracy forums are not ideologicially biased!

A McCain campaign aide was verbally smacked around today at the Personal Democracy Forum event, reports Politico's Ben Smith. The stunning charge: John McCain is inadequately computer savvy. A partisan Democract bogger apparently claimed that the key to presidential governing competence these days is a deep understanding of ... Twitter. Go to Smith's blog and read the entire, tedious exchange. A commenter there left this:

Somebody needs intimately to know Twitter to be able to govern? Absurd. What a ridiculously small world (and how ironic!) some of these individuals live in. I'll upturn the scenario: Do John McCain and Barack Obama also need an intimate knowledge of nineteenth-century literature and history to understand the fundamental origins of much of the shape of our world today--from democratic principles to the carving up of the Middle East by former colonial powers? Neither candidate has as of yet displayed this kind of knowledge, but yet this is vitally important to me!!! It is, after all, all about ME, ME, Me--what arrogance.

Get used to it.

We know the Millenials are not quite ready to take over the world. The question is at what rate their brainless ideologies will do so ahead of them. Obsession with so much pointless technology is at the head of the list.

Update: Dan Gillmor opines briefly on ideologically biased tech-media conferences, referencing the recent National Conference on Media Reform, with lefty Bill Moyers the big star:

The conference is a gathering of mostly left-of-center media activists. That’s too bad in a way, because there are plenty of people on the political right who want media reform, too. They may want a different kind, and for different purposes. But there’s enough common ground that it would be valuable to have a more diverse community here.

Gillmor, no conservative, pleads for "a more diverse community here." Kudos to you, man. There is a conservative contingent at the Personal Democracy Forum Conference. But this is a loaded conference, like most of these.

This Congressman uses streaming video, live town hall meetings on the Web, and Twitter

All public sector bloggers take note. Republican Rep. John Culberson is cornering his colleagues in Congress and interviewing them using the video streaming service Qik. Techpresident has the details as well as video of Culbertson's first interview. Culberson hosted a town hall meeting on the Web on June 10. Culberson also uses Twitter from the House floor, and he has a fan at Sunlight Foundation, as well as a detractor here.

Google finds us. Somehow

To view the Google searches of others is an odd experience. We get to do that with our blog host's stats report. And we found here that among 86,000 pages returned for one search of the terms "Steve Harrelson Arkansas," in the third spot on the very first page sits Municipalist's December 2007 interview with the blogging Arkansas house majority leader. Steve's blog is called Under the Dome.

The Sunday Read: All Google, all the time

Is Google Making Us Stupid? by Nicholas Carr, the Atlantic Monthly July/August cover story:

"And what the Net seems to be doing is chipping away my capacity for concentration and contemplation. My mind now expects to take in information the way the Net distributes it: in a swiftly moving stream of particles. Once I was a scuba diver in the sea of words. Now I zip along the surface like a guy on a Jet Ski."

If Your Users Fail, Your Website Fails, Regardless of Intent or Design, by Scott Karp, at Publishing 2.0:

"On the web, in the age of Google, design has no margin of error, and there are no stupid users, only inadequate designs."

McCainiacs invade liberal blogs

The John McCain campaign told its supporters to show up at liberal sites and show the flag for their man. The reliably lefty Wired says this did not work. The reliably righty David All says it's a great idea. Ah, reliability.

Congress: Fatally late to the blog party

Why Congress doesn't blog, and why we would would have a hard time believing a damn word of it if they did, Vol 94: Here is a neat little piece about Rep. Don Young of Alaska, that details his arrogance, his sense of entitlement, his bizarre office structure, and his total sell-out to lobbyists. That should just about cover it, don't you think?

The piece is from the Anchorage Daily News, but we found the piece at the McClatchy D.C. bureau Web site. McClatchy has undergone plenty of financial distress lately -- as it pays its failed CEO millions -- and it loves to hunt Republicans, of which Young is one. But all of that is extraneous for now. This guy is a disaster. The comments following the piece are priceless. The entire Alaskan Congressional delegation has been under investigation, one points out. There is also a nasty little anecdote in there about the thoroughly unpleasant Ted Stevens, Alaska's long-time Republican Senator.

Here in D. C., these type of stories are common these days. Mistreating the help, ordering around Capitol Police, getting arrested stoned, etc. But the real reason Municipalist blogs about Congress only occasionally is that the potential and the energy and the awareness of the necessity of blogging by those in the public sector, elected or otherwise, is explored and worked out much more often locally these days, than at the federal level. Showing up so very late at the blog party is as big a problem as being thoroughly corrupt and utterly contemptuous of anybody except those who can stuff plenty of cash in your wallet. Combine these factors, and the result will be turning off the online community immediately.

Very few members of Congress blog. Of those who do, few have figured out how to blog effectively or compellingly. There is the occasional exception, such as Rep. Mike Pence of Indiana. But for the most part: Who would want to read a blog by a member of Congress these days?

Navy CIO blog needs to be updated more often

A good blog here from the Department of the Navy Chief Information Officer. But a decently-written mini essay once a month does not an effective blog make. Blogs work best when their publishers understand they are conversation starters, contributors, and inciters. Get the ball rolling, and keep it rolling. When it stops, you often lose your audience community.

By the way: Is anybody at the Pentagon, or anywhere else, blogging about this?

Somebody should be.