Last Thursday we organised an event on eMarketing, hosted ING. Our guest speakers from IBM, P&G and and Attentio (www.attentio.com) gave us their views on how emarketing was changing communication.
We had some good discussions, and an interesting (if a little chaotic) workshop following the presentations. The presentations of the speakers will be uploaded on our site shortly (I will post an update here).
Just a few words on our IBM speaker, Philippe Boreman and the fascinating topic he raised: blogging at IBM. He runs his own blog called Conversation Blog: http://www.conversationblog.com/ where you can get some more highlights on his approach to online communication and the power of blogs.
On the week-end I was invited to a discussion by blogger Shel Israel and Rick Segal. Shel gave us a copy of his book (which had already started to read in preparation for the event) called ‘Naked Conversations’ – you can check out the blog: http://redcouch.typepad.com/ which follows their journey around Europe in search of a virtual community. In the book the authors describe how Microsoft has approached blogging. So in the last few days we got an inside view of how Microsoft and IBM had been approaching blogging (the meeting, by the way was hosted by Microsoft and co-organised by Simon McDermoth from Attentio).
What did they two companies approach to blogging have in common:
1) They both say blogging is important and are putting a great deal deal of energy in making it work for their company
2) They both say that you need some kind of rules for blogging although these need to be kepts simple and common sense is the real basis for blogging.
3) They both seem to indicate that blogging is changing both the culture and the perception of the organisation from the oustide world.
From what I understood, IBM has focused more on the internal communication than the external one, and Microsoft feels that blogging has done a great deal to change its brand in the developers community, softening the image of the company and opening it up to the world.
Clearly blogging is very much the zeitgeist (more on this soon).
Phil