Groove Networks company weblog
by Volker Weber
Richard Eckel, VP of Marketing Communications at Groove Networks, starts a company weblog, sporting an RSS feed right of the bat. And he explains why.
Comments
Hmmm... very cluetrain... but... what's the difference, if any, between a company weblog and a more traditional company press room?
Both seems to be oneway communication channels... and Mr Eckel's company webblog is no exception as it doesn't allow comments... sigh...
Same defect here. I will watch the Groove weblog a bit before jumping to conclusions. The main difference may be that press releases contain loads of b/s that one has to remove first. I will most likely never understand why PR tries to hide the news under loads of empty phrases.
I see... so... in other words... a company blog is basically a collections of press release lite, isn't it?
Yeah. You could put it that way. Then leave press out of the picture. It is a way to talk to the market without using the traditional press. That may work if the press is not adding any value.
Ok... I can see the value of a [press] release lite, if only to get something in a more digestible format :)
But this is still far from the cluetrain... because lite or not, a [press] release is still a monologue.
ah, so I'm defective now, eh?!?! :)
I hardly think of the lotus.com/weblog as a press room. First, I am not part of IBM Communications, and they are not involved in my content cycle (nor is legal). We didn't create it to have a means of talking to the market without using the traditional press; for the most part, Lotus is not lacking for quality press coverage.
My real objective was to have a place on lotus.com where we could put a human voice on our business. Not simply what's new, but also a way to share in the public dialog. Especially now that I have an RSS feed, I've been seeking additional ways to exploit that (and the lack of entries this week is simply because I've been really busy!).
One of the most interesting outcomes of the lotus.com/weblog is the number of IBM internal readers I have. In fact, there is a pilot underway right now to give every IBMer an internal weblog as part of our on demand workplace (and yes, my lotus.com/weblog was part of the inspiration for this).
You do understand that is not really a dialog when only one party is speaking, don't you? :-)
My point is, if we get into a topic that is interesting (like some of the Eclipse stuff in the last few weeks), my lotus.com/weblog can broaden the scope of who participates in that discussion. I've gotten out of the habit of doing trackback-like entries on that weblog, but maybe I need to do more of it.
As for why no comments, well, I guess I'm not quite ready to push that envelope. A colleague of mine is considering it -- putting a blog on developerworks (formerly LDD, formerly notes.net) that would be more interactive. However, the planned scope is different -- a technical blog, with "did you know you can do x y z in the Notes client?" kinds of postings. That merits discussion. But can you imagine if we had had discussion capabilities on lotus.com/weblog when the bogus hacker surfaced around a Sametime vulnerability? lotus.com/weblog would have become a /.
