Municipalist

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.

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.

Documenting Congress's Web "underperforming"

This report reveals that individual members of Congress still cannot figure out the Web. Here is the money quote:

Congress needs to recognize that the Internet is an essential information and communications medium. Citizens are online, and it is up to Congress to catch up with them.

That's a quote that's valid with any elected official.

The 2007 Gold Mouse Report: Lessons from the Best Web Sites on Capitol Hill is by the Congressional Managagement Foundation, a non-profit, non-partisan organization. CMF also hands out Gold, Silver, and Bronze "Mouse Awards," to those best Web sites to members of Congress. [Check out video and slide presentations. PDF of entire report is here.]

But according to CMF's 2007 report, only 11 percent of all members blog.

A legal guide for bloggers

The Citizen Media Law Project has created a legal guide for anyone who puts content online. This is all new territory, legally and otherwise. So this type of serious effort is very valuable to public sector bloggers.

CMLP also provides a valuable set of comparisons of the major blog-hosting services. Check it out. Their resources page offers plenty of interesting stuff to bloggers.

Researcher studies impact of blogs on state government

Emily Metzgar, based at Louisiana State University, is producing a dissertation examining, among other things: Who are these bloggers who are focusing on state government? What motivates them? Why do they do it? How do they impact politics? Her Web site here offers a great place to learn about her important work.

Those in government who blog or who are considering blogging, who are Municipalist's focus, need to follow her work and the work of others in recent years who have addressed these questions. Someday soon, we will have an academic study of those in the public sector who blog, because there are more and more of you out there all the time. To all academics: If you know of such work underway or already published, drop me a note: municipalist (at) municipalist (dot) com.

Q&A: David Wyld, government blogging researcher

"I truly believe that in a Web 2.0 world, we're going to increasingly expect Web 2.0 interactions with our elected officials," says David Wyld, in an interview with Municipalist. Wyld's recent report, "The Blogging Revolution: Government in the Age of Web 2.0" published by the IBM Center for The Business of Government, has been referenced and discussed across the Internet. [Download a copy here.] Wyld is a professor at Southeastern Louisiana University:

The Baltimore Sun quotes you saying that in five years about 50 percent of elected officials will have blogs. What data do you base that on? Is that more than a guess?
Well, it's an educated guess (coming from a professor, does that make it better?) What I'd say is that we're going to see blogging -- or at least more interactive websites -- become more expected of elected officials. If you look at the blog growth trends in corporate America and in the public sector as well, what we're seeing is that leaders are fast-recognizing the power of blogging as a communications medium, and they are also sensing that the blog audience is a highly desired demographic (and yes, voter group). Thus, I feel that really, this may be a conservative estimate, because the days of "static" websites are indeed numbered. I truly believe that in a Web 2.0 world, we're going to increasingly expect Web 2.0 interactions with our elected officials.

Do (local as well as some national) campaign blogs (often) make you sick? Or am I alone on that? As opposed to office holders who blog about policy, ideas, and their vision and work.
Well, I'd say that you're looking at two really completely different animals in talking about campaign blogs versus those of elected officials. Everything about them (goals, writing, etc.) are different. Campaign sites sell -- and often attack, while the office holder blog is meant to inform and to be interactive. Yes, it's all PR -- but what isn't.

What is your quick analysis of local and state office holders and their take on blogging? You show that Congress has been slow to adopt blogging. How are local and state office holders doing? Are they ahead or behind the Washington crowd in your view, if that is possible to discern?
OK, this is the question for the final exam! I'd say state and local are ahead of the DC bloggers in sheer numbers (to be anticipated with a closer relationship to their constituencies), but don't count out the folks inside the Beltway. We have two cabinet secreatries blogging and over 30 members of Congress doing so as well.

Finally: When any elected blogger swears that he or she is actually doing the blogging and not their staff, should we believe it? What are the tell-tale signs?
Hmm ... That's right up there with defining "what the meaning of 'is' is" ... I think that by and large, we have seen elected officials at all levels who make the decision to establish a blog commit to doing so personally.

Now, how much their posts are "made" by staffers is indeed a touchy subject, because it can certainly undermine the credibility of the official and the whole purpose of the blogging exercise. I think the more "PR-ish" posts sound, the more likely it is that there’s heavy staff involvement in creating the posts under the official’s name. On the other hand, I know of a corporate CEO who is a very noted and prolific blogger, but he never “writes” his posts -- they are all dictated and then “edited” to be entered as blog posts, but he regularly reads and responds to comments made about his postings -- so, is that true blogging or not?

Government blogging: This report nails the issues

The fact that an article Municipalist wrote in 2005 is listed as a reference in this recent major report on government blogging has nothing at all to do with my thoughts on whether the report has any real value. None. Promise.

So, perhaps not surprisingly: It's a great report! Authored by David C. Wyld, a professor at Southeastern Louisiana University, "The Blogging Revolution: Government in the Age of Web 2.0" is published by the IBM Center for The Business of Government here in Washington. In it we learn plenty about the state of government blogging, including that the U. S. Strategic Command has embraced blogging as a crucial piece of a bureaucracy-busting, internal information sharing network.

The report also provides a quick update on Clayton Wilcox, the blogging school superintendent of Florida's Pinellas County Schools. Municipalist interviewed Wilcox in 2005 for an article on blogging school leaders. The blog was published with the assistance of St. Petersburg Times newspaper. In April 2006, Municipalist moderated a panel on the same topic which included Wilcox, at a national conference. One month later, Wilcox abruptly announced he was ending the entire enterprise, claiming to be fed up with all of the rude comments the blog received. But Wilcox decided to start it all up again, bravely, a few months later, with comments more restricted. But now the site is gone yet again.

I will be referencing various pieces of the report in the days ahead. It is loaded with important stuff on public officials who blog. You can catch Wyld presenting from the report recently here on video, or see him live at this event in Reston, Va. on Nov. 1.

Governments cracking down on bloggers

Municipalist wonders: If more government leaders themselves were regular bloggers, would there be so much recent bad news for bloggers around the world? The Washington Post finds quite a bit to worry about within the annual Reporters Without Borders ranking of press freedoms among 169 countries around the world:

Government repression in some countries has shifted from journalists to bloggers, with the vitality of the Internet triggering a more focused crackdown as blogs increasingly take the place of mainstream news media, according to Lucie Morillon, Washington director of the advocacy group Reporters Without Borders.

"Countries that were not sentencing journalists to prison terms anymore have been doing it these last months for bloggers. This is the case in Egypt and Jordan," she said yesterday as the group released its sixth annual World Press Freedom Index. Egypt ranked 146th and Jordan 122nd in press freedom among the 169 countries for which data were available.

The Reporters Without Borders ranking is here. BBC also has this:

According to the group at least 64 people are currently imprisoned worldwide because of postings on the web, eight of them in Vietnam.

They flagged up the case of Abdel Kareem Soliman, an Egyptian blogger jailed for four years after he used his web log to criticise the country's top Islamic institution, al-Azhar university, and President Hosni Mubarak, whom he called a dictator.

Now, to be clear: Obviously, this is not to suggest that if only Hosni Mubarak had his own blog, Egyptian bloggers would not be treated so cruelly. My larger point is simply that blogging is certainly a powerful tool for freedom. So what would that energy look like if it came also from within governments, and not just from without?