Published April 23, 2007
URL : http://www.businesstimes.com.sg
BT-IBM FOCUS
Blogging, the new frontier for corporates
Firms need to decide on a business case for this new phenomenon, writes AMIT ROY
CHOUDHURY
BLOGGING is the latest flavour on the Internet and everyone wants to blog or has their favourite
blogs which they read regularly. In fact, blogs have become so happening that all manner of
enterprises are looking at blogs from a business perspective.
Some see it as a potential marketing tool, while others look at it as a good way to improve lateral
interaction among employees. Yet others, like media companies, look at blogs as potential online
competitors in terms of viewership - a sort of citizen's media to keep watch on the professional
media.
Indeed, in a classic case of join them if you can't beat them, many top newspaper columnists run
blogs which are linked to the online versions of their commentaries. And sometimes the blogs are
at least as popular as the commentaries - the blogs give the journalists more freedom to explore
their ideas which may not be possible in the structured confines of a newspaper column.
Blogs have been made possible by social computing tools which in their turn have become a
reality thanks to Web 2.0. Social computing refers to the use of a class of software and tools that
allows greater social interaction and communication over the Internet.
Web 2.O itself is not a specific technology or a set of technologies. Rather Web 2.0 implies two
paradigm shifts on the Internet which are dramatically changing our online experience. One is
more 'user-generated content', and the second is 'thin client computing'.
User-generated content, as the name implies, is online material created by the Internet users
themselves as opposed to going to fixed webpages put up by different organisations. Such user
generated content comprises blogs, wikis and social networking sites, such as MySpace and
Friendster. Photo and video sharing websites such as Flickr and YouTube also form part of this
social media developing from the ground up and not controlled by corporations.
Wikipedia, the vast online encyclopaedia, is a classic example of user generated content - it is
maintained, updated and kept accurate by its users with no intervention from the organisation
which created it in the first place.
In thin client computing, the second aspect of Web 2.0, data and applications are stored not on
servers and hard disks at the user's premises or computer but on Web servers which could be
scattered across the world.
Users have access to this data from any computer via a Web browser. The advantage of this is
obvious, you no longer have to carry your data with you - all you need is a computer with Internet
access.
This ability to source your data from any place coupled with tools that allow you to generate your
own online content is changing the way we use the Internet - from passive browsing to active
content creation. And companies are noticing this and looking at what kind of business
opportunities this creates.
It must be noted that Web 2.0 itself has been made possible because of the availability of greater
bandwidth. More and more individuals and companies now have access to broadband and as a
result the demand for Web 2.0 is self-sustaining.
Coming back to blogs, while people can read them just as they do pages found on other websites,
one capability that makes them different is that they can be subscribed to via a syndication
technology developed in 1999 by Netscape called RSS (also referred to as Really Simple
Syndication or Rich Site Summary). Once an RSS feed is enabled on a blog, other users can
receive automated updates. This typically requires specialised subscription management software
on the user's client machine to periodically scan, aggregate, and download updates to a blog
reader.
Some analysts are of the opinion that blogs bridge the gap between the public, static webpage,
and more private asynchronous communications. Blogs allow people to communicate one-to-many
without burdening their targeted audience with unwanted e-mail notifications.
While estimates of the number of Internet users using blogs vary immensely, it is safe to say that
the phenomenon is not yet as ubiquitous as e-mail. One estimate says that almost a quarter of
people on the online space are reading blogs at one point or the other. However, the same report
says only about 12 per cent or so are reading them on a daily basis.
The interesting point, however, is that estimates by analysts suggest that people in the age group
of 26-40 and teenagers are reading blogs on a daily basis.
For companies, that is an important piece of news as the 26-40 age group represents big spenders
and the teenage group represents future big spenders. It's no surprise that so many corporates
have suddenly become interested in blogs as a marketing tool to sell their products.
Many companies which are at the forefront of developing social computing tools that exploit Web
2.0 argue that blogs have a huge benefit for enterprises.
According to them, blogs are a tool that can help workers refine and adapt their cognitive model
on various work-related activities by observation and by making people aware of credible
resources and subject-matter experts. However, analysts argue that before a company decides to
use blogs as a tool for internal communication, it should decide whether it should at all use blogs
or whether it should leverage existing tools like e-mail, internal messaging, intranet portals and
discussion groups. The decision should be based on needs and not on following trends.
Decision makers should begin by understanding the basic capabilities of blogs, determining where
success has been achieved (consumer and business), and assessing whether such success can be
applied to their own circumstances.