What's so productive about blogging?

You can find/discover ideas from the web/blogosphere and shape them into whatever or wherever they fit or makes sense. In this case, I am talking about a simple idea for businesses to interact with customers that has far-ranging implications on work and play.

Wikis, Weblogs and RSS: What Does the New Internet Mean for Business? from Knowledge@Wharton

The Internet may be entering a new phase:

• decentralize control inside companies,
• enable employees to collaborate more easily,
• drive efficiency [and innovation].

On the marketing front James Cherkoff from Collaborative Marketing Services, has Scoble's Test. " Scoble mentioned that a company that was prepared to let its customers add commentary to the front page of its website was a modern organisation." James adds that we, as customers, always check around, google, technorati, et al, for background information on products/services. " Companies that understand the simple fact that their customers are swapping notes about them regardless of their involvement are going to be at an advantage in many ways. At the very least they will be living in the real world - at the very best they can embrace it as part of their marketing".

The Scoble test is one of the main building blocks for invention and innovation. There are many great ideas floating around the net 24/7 that every business has the opportunity to participate in.

BTW If you have not read James's manifesto, " Open Source Marketing Goes ‘Outside-In’ ", I highly recommend it, even if you're not in marketing. His ideas have many applications to improve internal communications. I wrote a post, Connect people, places, and things to ideas and information yesterday that goes over the resources we are using to find/discover information and how they can be applied in business.

Internal communication at a dead end is a post from Corporate Blogging about the results of an internal communications survey of Scandinavian companies. Their answers paint a dark picture.

"The survey points to three main problems.

• Top management is neither visible nor credible. Just 4 out of 10 think the top execs do what they say.
• Strategic communication doesn't succeed. Only 50 % of the employees say they know the goals and strategies of their company.
• 50 % feel that they are not enough informed about changes in the company."

There you have it, from what is happening on the net to how businesses can use new tools to communicate. What's your next step?