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Yep, I have a bunch more items on the topic of blogging professionally that I’d like to share with you. (Here’s the first part of this grab bag.)

TOP OF THIS LIST: Internal Blogging More In Focus - Blog Consultants Beware, Corporate Blogging Blog, Jan. 10. Fredrik Wackå wrote, “If we compare to web communication in general an intranet is for many companies more effective in terms of ROI than an external site. Blogs will, I believe, be another example of this - and that should worry blog consultants… It’s one thing to for example build a personal brand with blogging for an individual. It’s an entirely different thing to try to change corporate culture, working methods and so on with blogging as one of many tools. Where a good writer and decent businessman can build a blog consultancy to do the first, it takes strategic organizational and communicative competence to do the other.”

I respectfully disagree with Wackå on this one. In my humble opinion, and in my experience, an outsider is usually the best person to instigate real change in an organization. Often the people on the inside are so mired in habits, politics, and inertia that they need an outside perspective in order to imagine a different way of working.

And in the case of clarifying collective knowledge and enhancing communication, you can’t do better than putting a really good writer on the job. After all, clear thinking is the essence of clear writing. A really good blog consultant already possesses “strategic organizational and communicative competence.” We call it insight – and it’s the best skill any blogger can offer.

Read the rest of this list…

1. Marketing’s Flip Side: The Determined Detractor, The New York Times, by Nat Ives, Dec. 27, 2004. Excerpt: “Determined detractors are persistent critics of a company or product that mount their own public relations offensive, often online… The Internet and affordable digital technology have made it far easier for detractors to contact and mobilize sympathizers… Now some public relations agencies and research companies are studying determined detractors, dividing them into different groups defined by motivation, monitoring their complaints and trying to help corporate clients decide how to react.” (Thanks to Dana VanDen Heuvel for this link.)
2. Flipping the flip side. With Fans Like These… by Matthew Oliphant, Business Logs, Dec. 20, 2004. When an organization faces determined detractors online, sometimes they don’t have to face them alone.
3. Business Blog Case Study: Stonyfield Farm, Dec. 16, 2004. Rick Bruner interviews Christine Halvorson, company blogger for yogurt maker Stonyfield Farm, which publishes four blogs. (My favorite is Strong Women Daily News.) Don’t miss it.
4. Wanted: Podcast producer, a Dec. 17, 2004 job posting by Jason Calcanis, Weblogs Inc. OK, granted this is an old posting and the job has probably been filled by now. However, I’m pointing it out to demonstrate that bloggers and podcasters have a lot of common interests and complementary skills in the consulting world. Where there is room for bloggers to consult, there is also room for podcasters to consult.
5. Different audiences, different purposes, different blogs. On Jan. 3, Matthew Oliphant published an interview with John S. Rhodes, publisher of the blogs WebWord and Oristus. It includes this thoughtful advice for bloggers who feel that different audiences need different approaches: “WebWord is a strong brand in the world of usability. However, WebWord is a focused blog. It is not a business web site. It is a place where I write what I think, and I tend to focus very narrowly on usability and related topics… Regular business folks definitely get lost in the WebWord jungle. (I have data on this.) If business folks don’t “get it” then I won’t get clients. That’s bad. I like clients. Clients are good. In light of this, I put together Oristus. Where WebWord mostly talks about the problems of the world, Oristus is the place to go if you need solutions.”
6. Why There’s No Escaping the Blog, Fortune, by David Kirkpatrick and Daniel Roth, Jan. 10, 2005. Excerpt: “Robert Scoble has been at Microsoft only 19 months and has neither a high-ranking title (he’s a “software evangelist” who works with outside programmers) nor such corporate perks as a window in his office. What Scoble does have is a blog of his own, Scobleizer, on which he weighs in daily with opinions about happenings in the tech world – especially the inner world of Microsoft… Scobleizer has given the Microsoft monolith something it has long lacked: an approachable human face.”
7. Greg & Pete: Getting Shit Done! By Peter Caputa, PC4media, Jan. 10. Bloggers in general, and pro bloggers in particular, seem to spend a lot of time networking with their peers. Believe it or not, this is not a waste of time. In fact, it’s a key part of how we make projects happen.
8. The Cluetrain view of corporate blogging. In Chief Blogging Officer, Chris Locke (one of the Cluetrain Manifesto authors) gives the “gonzo marketing” perspective on corporate blogging.
9. Living in the Lever Age, a good reality check on blogging from Doc Searls, Dec. 16, 2004. Excerpt: “Lots of people will make money with blogs. But many more will also make money because of blogs. We’re talking about leverage here. Blogs are great levers. But jeez, is money the only measure, or the only point, of anything? Money is just one measure of leverage. Since a lot of us bloggers need money, it’s a Big Deal, sure. But it’s not the only deal. And if it was, most of us wouldn’t bother. If you’re only following the money, you’re missing the fulcrum.” (Thanks to Cutting Through for this link.)