This week IAOC member Philippe Borremans has agreed to talk about the way IBM is embracing internet technology to foster collaboration within the company. You may remember Philippe from his post about internal Blogs at IBM and the use of RSS in crisis communication. With news breaking May 13 of their 320,000 employee corporate wide blogging initiative, it appears Philippe could have lots of blogging company.

We'll also take a look at how IBM used wikis, instant messaging and something called "jamming" to define their corporate values and set guidelines for IBM bloggers.

Whether you’re confounded about how to communicate with them, or you’re dreaming of becoming one of them, you won’t want to miss next week’s focus on professional blogging. Leading the discussion is Steve KIng, a senior advisor at the Institute for the Future (IFTF).

King has been looking into the blogsphere at IFTF and finds that an increasing number of blogs are being authored by professional bloggers. He defines professional bloggers as those who see blogging as their primary business, or as an important marketing channel for their primary businesses.  He says blog oriented micro-publishing firms like Gawker and Weblogs Inc. have emerged, and  many individual bloggers have quit their day jobs to pursue a living through blogging.  These "professional blogs" are attracting relatively large audiences and gaining influence across the blogosphere. 

King will give us an overview of professional blogs, their economics, how micro publishers are changing the communication landscape, and what this will mean for corporate communications and public relations.

It’s a good thing RSS feeds have no weight, or Cliff Allen might have to be a body builder to carry around his complete collection, which he once told me numbers in the hundreds.

In his latest email to me, he admits, “I still seem to collect RSS feeds faster than I collect bookmarks!”

Both his consulting firm and his CRM software firm are focused on sales and marketing, and that’s also the focus for much of his blog reading. Some of his current favorites:

CRM Mastery is a blog by Jim Berkowitz on Customer Relationship Management (CRM). StartWithALead is the apt URL for a “B2B Lead Generation Blog” by Brian Carroll, which focuses on leads and marketing for “the complex sale.”

The next blog is for a book, which should warm the heart of our Book Blog host, Steve O’Keefe. Read this item from the Thursday, May 5th post and your heart may be warmed, too. The blog title, Never Eat Alone, is the same as the book title. I happened to see the book at a local book store on Sunday and almost picked it up. After seeing the blog, I’ll go back and get it this weekend. If you want a good tutorial on the process and rewards of making honest, personal connections with strangers (and sometimes even the people we work and live with are strangers), this will do it. While it seems to be largely a handbook for face-to-face connections, we are seeing that the same dynamics apply to blog connections.

For his final RSS feeds, Cliff likes a blog that aims high: How to Save the World is Dave Pollard's collection of “environmental philosophy, creative works, business papers and essay.” And if you’ll forgive a bit of self-congratulation, he concludes, “the iaocblog looks great!”

I was in a marketing committee meeting last Thursday at the United Way of Gloucester County in New Jersey, when executive director Jere Hoffner called our attention to this poster.

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For those who’ve wanted to share your thoughts but were hesitant to commit to an entire week’s discussion, we’ve got good news. Starting today, weekends are now open to any member of our growing community. If you are one of our 35 trusted posters who have already contributed to this blog, there’s no need to contact us first. Just jump right in any weekend. If you’d like to become a weekend blogger, contact me (ddunnington at ktron dot com) or our PR Diva, Gwendolynn Gawlick (gg at roadgirl dot com).

IAOC member Dee Rambeau is your host next week (April 18-22) for an exploration of how the Internet is employed in sports marketing and PR, and increasingly in delivering sports content. Dee is Managing Partner of DVCO Technology in Denver, Colorado and comes to sports with experience as both a participant and a marketer. You can see Dee’s personal blog at Adventures in Business Communications.

Topics will include:

The Sports Message
- Is it different than a regular PR message
- Is “fun” easier to deliver
- A look at the sports media…a tougher or easier relationship?

The Sports Venue
- Tying online into live events…websites, instant messaging, text messaging
- Booths, kiosks and on-site promotions that use the Internet
- Driving the dot.com message from the PA and traditional on-site methods

The Sports Fan
- More viral?
- More avid?
- Driving the dot.com message from radio and TV
- Online game viewing and listening from the desktop
- The PDA and the cellphone

Gambling
- Can advertisers and legitimate marketers take advantage of this?

Booze
- While restricted somewhat on-air, are there more sponsorship and advertising opportunities online?

Sports Video and TV on the Internet
- Distribution options via the web…streaming, clip of the day, etc.
- Podcasting now…video-casting next

Starting Sunday, March 27, Bob Geller of Fusion PR hosts a week-long, hands-on forum about the practical uses of RSS technology. Topics include...   more »

In 2002 I made two trips to Russia to teach MBAs at Moscow University Touro. You can read about my early January trip, “Christmas trees in the Kremlin,”  in Rowan University’s magazine. I returned in November of the same year to teach an e-commerce class, where we got into a discussion of how Internet technology has facilitated the growth and speed of feedback loops.

To illustrated to the class the power of feedback loops, I described how the development of accurate feeding technology (see the sidebar below) depended on the microprocessor, which in turn depended on the ability of feedback loops to provide timely data on what’s happening outside the feeder.

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This is the last of today's conversations with Rudy Maxa. If you have questions or comments for Rudy, you can leave them here, and we'll try to hunt him down in India to get answers.   more »

First travel industry PR folks have to know who writes or broadcasts about subjects that relate to their clients. Sounds basic, I know, but you’d be amazed at the number of people who reach out to me with totally inappropriate press releases....   more »

This is Part 2 of our Q&A with Travel writer/host Rudy Maxa. Do you see travel blogs becoming a major influencer in how and where people travel? Are travel blogs impacting your work as a travel writer?   more »

Rudy Maxa is on a plane this morning from Orlando to St. Paul and from there heads off to India for a National Geographic Traveler assignment. So we're doing today's discussion with Rudy as a four-part Q&A. In part one, we talk to Rudy about how he got started as a travel writer and onair commentator and his early days as an online travel personality.   more »

Joseph Taylor is the founder of two industrial websites: www.PowderandBulk.com and www.WaterandWastewater.com. His is one of the early success stories of using the Internet as a tool to help engineers find industrial equipment suppliers.   more »

Paul Scrivens at BusinessLogs.com writes that blogs are the digital path to word of mouth marketing. In The Power of the Industry Blog, Scrivens declares, "Word of mouth spreads quickly. Get your product a blog and get it mentioned in your industry's blog (if there isn't one, why don't you start one?)."   more »

I first came across the primitive-brain-as-gatekeeper idea in You've Got to Be Believed to Be Heard by Bert Decker (1992), a good guide to effective speaking that also offers insight into communication theory.    more »

Does emotion play a role in online industrial communication? The question is more ofen addressed in the consumer market, as in Margie Weinstein’s report, “Getting Emotional about Branding” from the National Retail Federation’s 94th Annual Convention and Expo. Her post covers a presentation by psychiatrist and author Dr. Clotaire Rapaille.    more »

Industrial Blog Week is originating from South Jersey (Southern New Jersey for those beyond the reach of the Philly cheese steak). If you drove two hours north of here, you’d come to Paterson, New Jersey, where Alexander Hamilton founded the Society for Establishing Useful Manufacture.    more »

As we build a new model of communication for our new age, it’s useful to consider how we came by the old model.   more »

Our discussion of new (and old) communication models continues this week. Dan Forbush will lead the discussion tomorrow. If you would like to volunteer to take a day, send an email to our Blog Week coordinator, Gwendolynn Gawlick , at gg@prdiva.com.

Elizabeth's discussion of communication models sent me back to the PR textbook I used in graduate school. Grunig and Hunt identified four PR Communication Models in Managing Public Relations [James E. Grunig and Todd Hunt, Harcourt, Bace Jovanovich (1984), p. 21].

The two earliest forms of PR communication, according to the authors, were one-way publicity (such as a publicist promoting a movie), followed by the less overtly commercial communication of one-way public information (such as may be practiced by a government public affairs officer).

Grunig and Hunt held that public relations functions at a higher level when it practices two-way communication. They saw corporate PR largely functioning at the level of two-way asymmetric communication, and some regulated utilities achieving the ideal of two-way symmetric communication.

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IAOC is looking for blog leaders who would like to lead a week-long online forum about an online communications topic that is of special interest to you. Producer Gwendolynn Gawlick of PR Diva is ready to help you and your discussion group develop your special topic. 

At the New Communications Forum's Blog University in Napa, CA, Elizabeth Albrycht called for a Blog Week on blog ethics. You can volunteer to participate or lead this discussion, by leaving a comment on her blog.

This free program is made possible by IAOC members. To suggest a topic you would like to lead, please leave a comment here.

 

Join IAOC members for a free and free wheeling forum about the online communications issues that matter to you.

Here is the line-up so far:

Elizabeth Albrycht, Albrycht McClure & Partners
Topic: New Communication Models

Felix Laboy, E-site Marketing
Topic: Online Communications in the Travel Industry

Steve O'Keefe, Patron Saint Productions
Topic: Producing Blog Tours for Book Authors

Donald L. Dunnington, K-Tron International
Topic: Industrial Blogs: Do Blogs Make Sense for Companies that Don't Make Much News?

Suzanne Sparks FitzGerald, Rowan University
Topic: EduBlogs: Students and Professors who Blog

Watch for dates for these special blog weeks, along with new topics.

IAOC had its coming-out party October 26 at the PRSA international conference in New York. Appropriately, the next IAOC event is online and on blogging.   more »