Social Media Success, and Free Resources

We're amazed and excited by the incredible turnout for yesterday's online seminar, Enterprise 2.0: Using Social Media in the Workplace, which we co-presented with Forrester. The hundreds of enthusiastic responses and active participants who attended really show just how much potential there is for businesses to make the most out of social media tools such as blogging.

6A: This really depends on your community and the conversation at hand. Inside an organization, if you're blogging on an intranet, people will generally be pretty civil because of the social pressure to act appropriately around coworkers. On a public blog, you can often keep even a contentious conversation from becoming uncivil by simply requiring some form of identification from your commenters. But platforms like Movable Type have very robust tools for moderating conversations -- if you see a topic that's really becoming heated, you can always set comments to be moderated by default, and then publish only the comments that are appropriate. It's a lot easier to err on the side of being more restrained and then open up over time than it is to try to shut things down after the fact. For more, see "Control Your Comments: It's Your Lobby", or consult the Six Apart Guide to Business Blogging, which has an entire chapter on creating a commenting policy.

Q: When should we use blogs or wiki software? What's the difference?

6A: Blogs and wiki software are very complementary tools, with slightly different goals. Platforms like Movable Type give you the rich ability to easily update web pages, host conversations, store media assets, and create standalone web pages, all within the easy experience of a blogging platform. Wikis are a great supplement to these kinds of tools if you want to add in the ability to have a number of people collaborate on a document to reach a consensus. In contrast, blogs are a great tool for providing status updates or for discussing topics where multiple individual viewpoints can be useful.

One major social consideration in deploying these tools is that since most wiki tools allow anyone to edit a document, contributors can be concerned about getting appropriate credit (or blame!) for their contributions, and discussions where people have opposing viewpoints can become difficult, resulting in successive edits to replace other people's content. Those caveats aside, wikis and blogs enhance each other's functionality, and page 9 of the Business Blogging Guide offers a more in-depth compare-and-contrast look at the two technologies. If you're looking for a platform that integrates these tools, you should consider SuiteTwo, an Intel-led Web 2.0 suite for the Enterprise which incorporates wikis as well as using Movable Type as its flagship best-of-breed blogging component.

6A: The right techniques for promoting a blog vary widely, depending on what audience you're trying to reach. Inside an organization, you should take advantage of the other channels that people are already using to get information. Include links to your blog in company newsletters, list your blog's web address in your email signature, and display recent headlines from your blog on your company's intranet homepage. (Most portal software applications let you include RSS feeds pretty easily.)

If your'e trying to reach an audience outside your company, you'll want to use all the traditional methods for promoting any communications channel. Make sure all of your staff members who talk to customers or the public know about your blogs and are comfortable describing them to others. Don't be shy about including your blog's address on your business cards, in any materials that are included with your products, or even on direct-mail communications or in print ads. Every channel that you reach your audience with now has the potential to become a two-way ongoing conversation through your blog.

Thanks again to everyone who participated in the web seminar yesterday. Please be sure to check out the seminar resources we've posted, and if you want to be the first to know of similar free events in the future, subscribe to our feed and we'll keep you in the loop on upcoming events.