OK, so I’m
a day late for this QOTW to be part of the week of June 19^th, but I’m
gonna sneak it in here anyway. After all, it’s still the weekend and the work
week starts on Monday.

So, I was downloading
and listening to some of the Supernova 2006 podcasts,
when I came across a PodTech interview
with Suw Charman (Corante blog: Strange Attractor). I have
mentioned Suw in the past (see Gettin’ ETech
Support), but I hadn’t heard this interview before.

Now, I was part
way through the interview and thoughtfully agreeing with many of the things
that Suw was saying, when I realized that this was actually a podcast from Supernova
2005, relating to Suw’s June 13, 2005 white
paper on Dark Blogs—a term that refers to business blogs that are behind
firewalls or password-protected.

Despite
the interview being almost a year old, I was amazed at how many themes that Suw
brought up are still relevant and applicable to anyone interested in starting a blog
(or implementing any kind of ETech) for your business today.

Here’s some of what Suw had
to say in the interview:

With Dark
Blogs, it’s not so much an issue of popularity, I think. With all private blogs—whether
they’re a personal password-protected blog or an internal corporate blog—the reason
that you’re blogging is to communicate information…It’s not about traffic
anymore.

And the
issue around traffic is a bit of a red herring to some extent, because we’ve
been focusing on blogs based on how many readers they’ve got, how many
[subscribers], how many links-in, and that kind of stuff. And these are all
interesting metrics up to a point, but they take away from the core purpose of
blogging, which is to allow people to communicate and converse around the
topics that are important.

[People
are] using them in very different ways; but at the end of the day, what is
important is the fact that it’s adding value to [a] persons working day…You’re
creating a team environment, but you’re also dealing with peoples’ needs and
enabling their working processes.

People are
using it as a business tool—not for self expression. So it ceases to be about
whether it’s fun to blog and becomes about “Does this help me”? “Does this
solve a problem”? “Is this useful”? And if you have any business tool, any
piece of software at all; [and]  if it
fits into your working day comfortably, if it’s something that is easy to use
which provides value to you [or] which is of benefit to the people around you,
then you’re going to use it.

Suw also
had the following to add, relating to the case study
that she mentions in her white paper, which examines the implementation of an enterprise
blogging application (Traction Team Page) to gather
competitive intelligence in a Pharmceutical company:

…You’re not
actually selling them a blog. You’re not actually saying “hey, we’ve got this
great blog and it’s fantastic.” What you’re actually saying is “we have a new
intranet site about competitive intelligence” and they open it up in their
browser and have a look at it; and they find certain things interesting, they
figure out how to leave comments and they use it because IT’S EASY…And this is
one of the key features of blogs that makes them so suitable to use internally,
because you don’t have the 5-day training course, you don’t have a 300 page
user manual—you don’t need them.

Suw really
put things into perspective for me. So, if you’re having trouble getting
buy-in for an internal blog, just let whomever is putting up resistance
listen to this interview and read Suw’s
blog and white paper, and I’m sure it will—at the very least—cause that person to pause and
reconsider for a brief moment.

This one goes on the Getting’
Etech Support list for sure.