Blogging for Business

Ran into Anil Dash of Six Apart fame last week and we got into a conversation about business blogging and the resistance towards this in general.

What we talked about and somewhat agreed on is that enterprise blogging is all about deployment and management by an IT person, not just by the user who is the "business". While this may seem insignificant, this is huge in terms of who gets to install it, run it and maintain it. Standards and supportability come in the door. The other issue is the bottleneck-is-usually-at-the-top syndrome; without the blessings of powers-that-be (or atleast a fundamental recognition of the need) this thing has a small chance in taking off.

I've been trying for a while now to get WordPress installed in my enterpise to no success. The reasons are multitudinous - we dont know wordpress (horror!) to we got it but cant install MySql in the enterprise firewall to you can run it on Oracle but we need to procure more database licenses.

And when I tell them that I can get all of this thing done and get it up and running in 1 hour, they look incredulous; perhaps for good reason - the number of permissions, approvals and other "stuff" that's needed here on the enterprise side to affect a change is truly mindboggling.

Which leads me to the real question - will enterprise blogs really ever reach critical mass? Will IT consider this as a strategic investment just like say SAP?

Here's a decent article from "the undersigned" why blogging for business makes sense.

Why blog?

Business blogs can be a good choice for both large and small companies - most companies already have a profile on the internet, but especially smaller companies are struggling to get visitors, and have serious problems reaching people interested in their field of business. Start a blog and use various ping services to reach out to millions of readers all over the world!

• You know your field of business the best
  To run a company you will have to know what you’re doing - you know your field of business, maybe even be a “guru” on the topic - why wouldn’t you share your knowledge? Why wouldn’t you also be known as the “guru”?
• Reach more people
  You might already have a news-section on your website, but who is reading it, besides your existing customers? With a blog it is easier to reach new readers!
• Let your employees compete
  Give each employee a user on the blog, and let them blog about your companies business field too. While they compete on getting most comments, they write better and better content, in your companies best interest.

Read more on "the undersigned"