So, corporate executives are saying, it sounds like we need to be doing something about this “blogging” thing. So what do we do? According to Marketing Sherpa, there are five steps for major corporations launching blogs: set goals, assemble stakeholders, decide who can blog, write a formal blogging policy, and announce the policy. Sounds sensible, right? Not according to Robert Scoble, the most-read of the 1,000 plus Microsoft employees blogging to the world at large. “Oh joy, we’re going to get more committee-run blogs… Wrong first step, too. The right first step is to read blogs!” Robert provides a link to one of the more outspoken (and unauthorised) Microsoft bloggers, whose disclaimer on his Mini-Microsoft blog reads:

These are sole individual personal points-of-view and the posts and comments by the participants in no way represent the official point-of-view of Microsoft or any other organization. This is a discussion to foster debate and by no means an enactment of policy-violation. These posts are provided “as-is” with no warranties and confer no rights. So chill. And think.

In one recent post, Mini points to problems with the release of Visual Studio 2005, which may have been done before the product was mature. Immediately, Channel 9, the blogging and communication site for Microsoft developers, which is visible to outsiders, took up the issue and debated it. No stonewalling and corporate PR. Customers got to see what Microsoft developers personally thought about it, including strong reservations. Do customers trust Microsoft more as a result? Absolutely. They know they are seeing the reality of the debate, not just the corporate hype. Incidentally, all Microsoft blogs are stated to express personal opinions, not corporate ones.

Yes corporates do need to start with having some clarity on what they are doing, and establish appropriate parameters for blogging. But if this results in exactly the same communication as you get from the PR machinery, why bother? It’s just pretending that you believe in genuine discussions with your community. I should also add that the discussion about corporate blogging over-emphasizes external communication. Blogging is absolutely an immensely powerful tool to improve every aspect of your external relationships, not just in reputation management, branding, and loyalty, but also in areas like customer-driven innovation and quality improvement. However the use of blogs and other social software “inside the firewall” is equally important, as it represents the next phase of effective communication in large organizations, moving on from email and intranets, which today constrain as much as they enable effective collaboration and work.

Update: For a slightly different point of view see this post from former Microsofter Jim Fawcette on how Microsoft’s corporate blogging is helping to steer attention away from “real, insightful, internal criticism of Microsoft… with more bite than gums” such as Mini-Microsoft. Robert Scoble believes he’s the supposed decoy here and says that if that’s his role, he’s failing miserably.

I am based primarily in Sydney (though I also have US residency and a secondary base in San Francisco to run the US operations of Advanced Human Technologies and for my speaking and consulting work there). As such, I find it extremely frustrating when I find that Australia is significantly behind in the adoption of key technologies. Australia has some fantastic talent, and the best of what is happening here is truly world-class. Yet often this doesn’t diffuse more broadly, notably into the Australian corporate sector, which can be rather slow on the uptake. A case in point is blogging.

It is over 3½ years since I submitted my manuscript for Living Networks, opening with a description of how corporate blogging was changing business. When I spoke at The Blogging Goes Mainstream conference in New York in May of this year, the conference title was describing the reality of the US market. As mentioned in this blog, not just companies like IBM, Microsoft, Google, and other technology companies are blogging, but also generally sceptical Fortune 500 companies such as Morgan Stanley, Boeing, Dresdner Kleinwort Wasserstein, General Motors, McDonalds, Disney, and a whole raft of mid-tier companies across all industries.

In some domains, Australia is doing very respectably in the global blogosphere. A number of Australian-based blogs rank in the top blogs globally, such as Cameron Reilly and Mick Stanic’s The Podcast Network, Darren Rowse’s ProBlogger (and other blogs) and Duncan Riley’s The Blog Herald. Journalists are fairly well represented, with The Bulletin’s Tim Blair, the Sydney Morning Herald’s Charles Wright, the Australian Financial Review’s Mark Jones, and The Age’s Leon Gettler all prominent and dedicated bloggers.

Yet despite this, virtually no major Australian corporations have even experimented with blogs, let alone applied them to useful effect.

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Newspaper circulation appears to be on a slippery slope, with over the last six months U.S. newspapers showing a circulation drop of 2.6% for weekdays (after falling 1.9% the previous six months) and down 3.1% for Sundays (after a 2.5% drop in the half-year before). The worst was the San Francisco Chronicle, down 16.4% over the last six months, though this was the result of a deliberate strategy to cut unprofitable circulation. In this context, Robin Miller, editor-in-chief of Open Source Technology Group, the publisher of an array of online technology media sites, including Slashdot, has written a very interesting article titled A Recipe for Newspaper Survival in the Internet Age.

For those who haven’t come across it before, Slashdot (whose tagline is “News for Nerds”) is one of the founding examples of the power of participatory media. Readers submit to Slashdot news articles they think are interesting. A group of moderators then select the most pertinent articles, and readers can then submit their comments on the articles. Where the real magic happens is that every reader has the ability to rate the value, relevance, and interest of everyone else’s comments. Even though every story gets hundreds of comments, you can quickly sift through to find the ones that a large, sophisticated audience has collectively deemed most worth reading. Anyone can quickly delve in and get the condensed insights of this eclectic and intelligent group of über-nerds. Those whose comments are most highly rated are invited to become moderators for a period. The community collectively filters and creates the news, which is why Slashdot is one of the top few technology media sites in the world.

In his article, Miller uses lessons from Slashdot to provide recommendations to the newspaper industry. He discusses the need to draw in reader contributions, while addressing issues of both the value and propriety of their input. Most relevantly, Miller focuses on the local community strengths of newspapers. There is a massively important role to play being a voice for a community, something that newspapers have long proclaimed they do. Yet today they truly have the capability to provide their readers with that public voice. If they can do that effectively, there are a wide range of ways to build effective and sustainable business models around that, and absolutely keep their readers. However few newspapers today seem to be following this path other than half-heartedly.

The BBC has just announced that its television channels will be available on the internet. “MyBBCplayer” will initially give access to selected programs, then potentially simulcast entire BBC channels. It will also give access to selected television archives. This a significant step towards the internet becoming a true broadcast medium, though that will play out over a quite a few years yet. BBC taking this step will definitely encourage other broadcasters to consider their play in this space.

On another front, video blogging (known as vlogging) is rapidly gaining traction. There aren’t many vlogs yet, however they are growing apace as tools such as Vlog It! become available. What kicked blogs off in the first place were the early tools such as Blogger.com, that meant anyone could create their own personal web presence for free and with no technical expertise. In between the free-format vlogs and online television, you have initiatives such as former Vice President Al Gore’s new cable television network Current TV, which asks for its viewers to submit their own video content, for example on news ignored by mainstream media. The channel still acts as a filter and arbiter, however it gets its content from the community. Perhaps the biggest impact of Current TV, for now, will be to build video production talent in the community. Less than a month after launch, the jury is still out on whether it is, as it claims to be, true community television. Douglas Rushkoff believes it’s a “kind of MTV-News, without the news.”