Saturday, January 22, 2005
Blogging Predictions for 2005
Mike Manuel at Media Guerrilla has five predictions on new media and tech PR for 2005. 
Here’s what his crystal ball shows:
- More Co-op Blogs: Lack of time will make the co-op blog - involving small groups of like-minded bloggers teaming up to distribute content via multiple contributors - more popular.
- More Corporate Blogs: There will be a significant jump in the number of companies with corporate blogging programs, quickly changing the landscape for communications in the new year.
- More Big Media Bloggers: More Big Media journalists will take up blogging under their corporate brands in an effort to remain competitive and perhaps grow ad revenue.
- A New Company Position – Blogmaster: Which department will take ownership of the blog (e.g., will it be corporate comm., product marketing, website dev, etc.)? Or will there be a new formal designation for the blogmaster - a person with a blend of journalism, marketing and PR experience?
- Boost for Online PR: Companies will look to the web to re-energise their brands by re-thinking how they engage customers.
Read about Mike’s predictions on Neville Hobson’s blog. He cites Forrester Research’s predictions on the growth of blogging in organisations and predicts blogs will be a catalyst in the beginning of changes in the workplace leading to an integrated communication and information-sharing system or process as envisioned by Forrester Research below.
Forrester envisions a day when new employees on their first day will be handed a sheet of paper with their phone number, email address - and a URL for their blog. The company would give all of its employees a personal internal blog where they could provide project updates, trip reports, and market intelligence - anything that they think others should know about the work that they are doing. This information could then be tied into the company's VoIP phone system - for internal calls, the caller's photo, title, bio, and a link to his blog would appear on the computer screen. The blog content would give context and background for the call, making it unnecessary to send extra emails or to have extensive discussions about a project.
I don’t really share his enthusiasm. I kind of tend to side with Fredrik Wackå who believes that many business people today lack natural writing ability.
A lot of people I know just plain hate writing a sentence. Not everyone can write well. And not everyone wants to read either. Take the popularity of audio or multimedia for instance.
Sure you could go ahead and say let them have audio or multimedia blogs, but think of the learning curve. Is it really worth it?
Some things are so much easier to communicate face to face, in a conference room, or even through the old telephone. Should blogging evangelists try to convert even those not keen on blogging? I don’t think so! 
Let’s not get so carried away by the technology, that we forget that there are often more appropriate ways of doing some things. 
I believe that companies should employ people good at what they do, and passionate enough to keep doing it well, for any task, especially one as time-consuming as blogging.
People like Scoble, Microsoft’s geek blogger, are the exception, not the rule. To ask a busy coder to take up any task over and above their programming tasks, could instigate nothing short of a mutiny.
Blogging is simply not for everyone. It would be wrong to demand it from those who hate it. 
