Bill Gates may be the most obvious public face of Microsoft, but Robert Scoble is giving him a run for his money. Scoble is a tech evangelist at Microsoft who has played a big part in helping the company win at 'the new PR' of the blogosphere. And here he is, giving some free advice to Southwest Airlines on the content with which they should be filling their blog:

Some other things I'd love to know? Is there free WiFi near their counters anywhere? What's the best restaurant in each airport? Who makes the most reliable luggage? Some craft definitely have funnier crews than others. Any way to know whether you'll be on one of those flights? ...What are their favorite online travel resources? (Flight trackers, etc). Where do they go when they want to have fun on a layover?

When I talk to groups or individuals about blogging, I often hear the same statement from at least a few people: "I don't know what our company could actually say on a blog that would get us millions of hits."

Scoble poses only a few questions here, but they shine a light on the kind of value that a company's employees can give through blogging. He has had quite a lot of practice doing just that for Microsoft. But if you start by asking yourself what people tend to ask you when they find out who you work for/what your company does/what your role entails, the ideas for what you could possibly say on a blog start to roll thick and fast.

As for the 'millions of hits'...Well, do you really want to appeal to as many people as possible, or just the people who are most likely to be your customers, potential customers, and industry peers? Most smart businesses have a niche (or a few) that they attempt to cultivate offline; online is no different. Social media just allows for much more rich and far-reaching cultivation and conversation. More on that in future posts.

Adriana Cronin-Lukas, who will be taking part in the Blogs & Social Media Forum on May 17 (and who actively encouraged VNU to stage this event), uses the social bookmarking tool Furl to flag up this Center for Media Research item on internet radio listeners:

A new study by Arbitron and Edison Media Research finds that the weekly Internet radio audience increased by fifty percent from 2005,(satellite radio awareness tops sixty percent of the U.S. population, while the AM/FM radio audience remains strong. The report chronicles this expansion of the radio market and its implications for advertisers and media planners. The monthly audience of Internet radio tops an estimated 52 million; an increase from 37 million people in 2005. The weekly Internet radio audience also increased 50 percent over the past year, with 30 million listeners last year.

Adriana comments:

So much for those who say that the internet is for geeks and not their main customer base. Also, it is worth noting that "Online radio listeners are 36 percent more likely than the average consumer to live in a household with an annual income of more than $100,000." Now tell me that it's not worth making full use of the internet communication potential!

Cluetrain co-author David Weinberger says he thinks of 'user-generated content' as 'us-generated content'. I like. David also links to the Economist article Among the audience, which mobile marketing expert Tomi Ahonen mentions here. Great quotation re Barry Diller:

"What an ignoramus!" says Jerry Michalski, with some exasperation. He advises companies on the uses of new media tools. "Look around and there's tons of great stuff from rank amateurs," he says. "Diller is assuming that there's a finite amount of talent and that he can corner it. He's completely wrong." Not everything in the "blogosphere" is poetry, not every audio "podcast" is a symphony, not every video "vlog" would do well at Sundance, and not every entry on Wikipedia, the free and collaborative online encyclopedia, is 100% correct, concedes Mr Michalski. But exactly the same could be said about newspapers, radio, television and the Encyclopaedia Britannica.

David Weinberger, co-author of the Cluetrain Manifesto, offers this remark about how we may be learning from Wikipedia:

What are our students learning from the success of Wikipedia? We hope they're learning that they can't be passive recipients of knowledge. But they're also learning that authority doesn't come only through chains of credentials; that we can get on the same page about what we know; that knowing involves be willing to back away from your beliefs at times; that knowledge is a social product, or at least heavily socially contextualized; that the willingness to admit fallibility is a greater indicator of truth than speaking in a confident tone of voice; that knowledge lives in conversation, not in the heads of experts; that certain people who do not need to be named are just impossible.

Yes, David's comment was directly aimed at students, but anyone who has even the most minimal experience using Wikipedia can probably relate to some of the sentiments he relates. Now ask yourself: Could I, or anyone in my company, or my customers, benefit from moving that experience from the personal to the business realm?

You may not think so, but even the most basic office functions could benefit from wikis. Too much dynamic content is locked up in static formats. Even if you only grow by a few heads a year, how much sense does it make to keep a staff phone list in an Excel spreadsheet? And I bet there's a lot of information floating around your company, and that everyone has some of it, but no one has access to all of it.

Are you using wikis at work? If so, how? The applications are endless, but I'm interested to hear how you may be using them.

Welcome (again) to the blog for the upcoming Blogs & Social Media Forum. This is a space where delegates and speakers can talk about the topics which will be up for discussion at the event on May 17, and perhaps open up new areas of exploration for the event.

I'm Jackie Danicki, and I'll be taking part in the Making the right connections open space forum at the event (see the Blogs & Social Media Forum conference programme for more details). A bit of background about me: I started out in the humdrum world of e-commerce marketing, as the Editor-in-Chief of a Swiss financial institution's b2b website. I also dabbled in freelance writing for the web, and eventually started blogging. In early 2004, I joined the Big Blog Company, where I consulted companies on using blogs to perform better as a business (read: make more money, get more personal fulfilment, and spread those benefits to employees). In 2005, I became the head of marketing for Latitude, Europe's largest search engine marketing agency, where the social media intitiatives I introduced saw the company's press coverage increase sixfold, website traffic increase 7000 per cent, and sales enquiries via the web increase tens of thousands of percentage points. (Latitude was also named the UK's fastest growing media company during my time there.) I am now working on a contract basis with various companies to bring similar benefits to their businesses, as well as heading up the Engagement Alliance.

Now that the autobiographical bit is out of the way, I'm looking forward to bringing you frequent points to ponder in anticipation of the event, and your responses and feedback are definitely encouraged!

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