Do European corporations view internal blogs as a way to make employees more effective or as a waste of time, are internal blogs in multi-national companies being written in English or in the local language.

Since we are talking about internal blogs, the situation on getting information on this terms is a little different from external blogs. We know of IBM, challenging it´s employees to blog, we have heard of Sun's approach to get their people into it, but this is mostly external blogging again (although both companies provde internal access/aggregation to these topics). Too much public information is not available on internal blogs - at least for me.

So, talking about my perspective and experiences, I have recently setup an internal blogging plattform for my company. Goal of this blog is to gather and share creative ideas, files, documentations and to bring multinational teams together. At least virtually.

For other internal projects I would rather prefer wikis instead of blogs, since they offer much more collaboration features and give all readers the possibility to add content, not only as a comment, but inside the article. I have seen a presentation of Ross Mayfield on Les Blogs in Paris about his product socialtext, which could be a tool of choice for internal wikis.

Here we are, time to launch our fourth day on the IAOC blog, you have some times to leave comments while we are going to sleep in our old Europe...

Meet you here tomorrow to discuss the following topics: do European corporations view internal blogs as a way to make employees more effective or as a waste of time, are internal blogs in multi-national companies being written in English or in the local language.

I am everything but comfortable with BlogHarbor, even with screenshot sent by Steeve I can't change my previous post, so I have to post a new note with additional informations (Sorry Steeve and Don, I haven't been able to make it, a shame...) ;o)

In fact I'd like to react on Octavio's post when he talks about the Nokia story... I was not far from forgeting this case study and that would really have been a shame (again)... More over, the Nokia story might be the Nokia -Siemens story...

What happened... One week after the other, Nokia & Siemens both launched a communication program using blogger and blogs. "Bloggers" for Nokia as they've been offering a Nokia 7710 to about 20 french bloggers ( I am taking about France here, but the overall program was on 1800 people around the world....people, not bloggers) expecting from them to blog about the mobile phone they received, while "blog" for Siemens, who quite at the same time, has been hiring 15 bloggers to test the SK 65 BlackBerry phone and share their thoughts on a dedicated blog for the time of the campaign. In both cases, we've been given (ooops, forgot to say, I am one of the rare lucky frenchy to have participate in both campaign...) the phone which might be seen as a "income" but of course it didn't affected our posts as we've been saying the good and the bad about both products...

What I found very interesting in both those experience as PR blogger, is that following some thoughts about the death of  PR or about DIY PR thanks or because of blogs,  2 big brands have been using blogs as PR tools... And this has been a famous idea, as from my point of view, blogs are not the end of PR but an important evolution in the way PR folks have to think about communicating information.

In Spain, there are some companies that are seeing blogs as new media and bloggers as new analysts and as an emerging class of opinion leaders.

Nokia distributed his model 7710 to some of the most important bloggers with an "Open Blogging Policy" - bloggers can write whatever and whenever they want about the mobile.  The impact in the blogosphere was important, causing a "conversation" with hundreds of comments and posts.

Nokia is commited with the blogosphere since it has invested in advertising in Xataka, the most important gadget blog in Spanish.

Editorial Planeta is trying to reach important bloggers to post comment about their books.  It seems that this strategy was original, but it is not working as good as Nokia's.

Maybe because books are not a "hot" issue for Spanish bloggers, or at least not as relevant and important as a state-of-the-art mobile telephone.

SME's are using blogs following different strategies:

- Isoco, a software and internet solutions company, uses blogs as intranet to share knowledge about the industry.  IT department is in charge of updating the blogs.

- kiu, a local advertising and PR company, uses its blog to promote their own clients.   Its blog is kind of a online press center.

Blogs are gaining in importance rapidly in both big and SMEs, but still are on their way to be considered as serious new media or as a communication tool for most cautious and traditional companies (who are the vast majority).

But, as we "evangelists" bloggers say in Spain...

Todo llégará... Time will come...

Blogs have become part of the range of internet tools of Spanish politicians.  Internet sites and political marketing mobile (ring tones, sms, etc.) are heavily used too.

There are a number of politicians that are using blogs, but just during the campaigns.  After that, they just abandon their weblogs.

Juan José Ibarretxe, PNV nationalist party candidate for the Presidency of the Vasque Country launched a blog that was not written by him but by some members of his staff.  This blog was available in Spanish, Euskera, English and French, since this party states they represent a country that is part in Spain and part in France, and speaks its own language: Euskera.  Comments were moderated and that made that some bloggers didn't participate.

María San Gil, Popular Party candidate for the Presidency of the Vasque Country launched a blog that was written by a high representative of the party in the Vasque Country.  The comments were open and received both support and bad words about her candidacy.

The metablog Elecciones Vascas was a success since it was the first blog entirely dedicated to a political campaign in Spain.

Anxo Quintana, BNG nationalist party candidate for the Presidency of Galicia is writing his own blog, well... sort of, since comments are not allowed. 

The metablog Elecciones Gallegas is not doing as well, but this could be because only 26,5% of the population of Galicia has an internet connection.

As far as I know, bloggers don't receive the same treat as journalists... but time will come, since the political parties are aware of the importance of the blogosphere.

You have to remember my yesterday statement, regarding the fact that the role of blogs after the Madrid terrorist attack was fundamental, as they were platforms of opinion and political activism that result in the victory of the PSOE.

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Octavio Rojas will launch his book "Public Relations: The effectiveness of the influence" in Spain. There is a microsite available of the book (in Spanish).  http://octaviorojas.com/librorrppini.html

He is looking for an editor to publish it in English and/or French.  Volunteers? ;)

He has a personal Web site: http://www.octaviorojas.com and a blog: http://octaviorojas.blogspot.com in which he offers articles and news about communication, media and PR on a daily basis.

He is member of the Media Bloggers Association and of Bitacoras.org, the most influential blogging organizations in the USA and in the Spanish speaking countries.

We do have in France some of our main politics blogging. The first one has been Dominique Strauss-Kahn, left wing, he began his blog in september 2004 so he might be considered as an early adopter. His last posts have respectively 295 and 623 comments ... As far as I can remember he must be an active politics for more than 30 years...
A she said several times, his blog gives him the opportunity to talk to so many people that he could never ever have in his office...
From the right wing, we have Alain Juppé who is blogging since quite the same time, his blogging solution doesn't allow to have such a quick visibility on the number of comments he ususally gets, but it's definitely not  the same kind of popularity.
 The  third example I will use is the one of Jack Lang, blogging since few weeks, impossible to get any informations about number of people participating on his blog, this is the weakness of his blog, there is a moderator acting before one can post, the best way to loose comments... Why those 3 exemples ? Because all three have  been former ministers in the past years.

Of course there are a lot of other politics bloggers in France, of different level, the referendum of the European Union Consitution has been a good opportunity for bloggers to claim their position, see on this topic what Netpolitique has to say, the first politic portal blog in France.

I've been organizing with Loïc Le Meur, VP Executive of Six Apart Europe an event called "Les Coulisses du blog" at the end of 2004 and begining of 2005 in Paris, the second session was about blogs and politics, we had if I remember exactely about 180 attendees with just 3 weeks notice prior to the event... It was the first event on the topic in the french blogosphere and also one with the most passioned people interacting... Speakers where from both politic wings and it was amazing to see how the volume rapidly increased ...

We also have some citizen initiatives in France strongly related to politic and I'd like to share with you the story of Monputeaux.com. Authored by Christophe Grebert, leaving in the town of Puteaux, close to Paris, this blog is giving informations about what's happening in the city, what kind of decisions are taken by the mayor and his staf, etc.... He is rather against the power in place, and is actually on court as they want him to close his blog. The judgement should come in the very next days. He has already been persecuted by the police, he is everything but welcome to access local shows, he became the one undesirable... A first time in France.

French people love polemic and for that reason I assume blogs & politics still have a long way together to do...

In the last couple of weeks i found my self frequent involved in discussions about the question why blogging is not that popular in Germany. It was even discussed on „Les Blogs“ in Paris. It seems, blogging is some how not that attractive in my country as in all countries next door, in the US or in Asia.
This again influenced the way that blogging was perceived by journalists. The majority of traditional media talked about bloggers as nerds, geeks that are socially unprivileged. The chief editor of Spiegel Online Matthias Müller von Blumencron once said in an interview "99% of all blogs are rubbish or at least without any relevance to a journalist".

Since a couple of weeks the focus starts to change slightly, especially due to the fact, that we had a lot of cases in which traditional media was corrected by bloggers. It is still not a big think in Germany, but the awareness is getting higher and the credibility better and better. Magazines and Newspapers like Handelsblatt, Focus and Bunte have started own blogs (but no public bloghosting so far) and Die Zeit offers a Blog Award for the second time in this year.

Still not sure, if the negative standing that traditional media showed about blogs influenced the public, or if the public feeling about this form of media was reflected in the press.

Anyway, things are getting better, we are close to having about 100.000 active blogs in the next weeks. It is more than obvoius, that the election this summer will offer big opportunities for blogging in Germany too.

With about 200.000 unique visitors per month, even the A-list bloggers in germany are far from making any money out of it, even some projects have been started lately.

Politics in Ireland, as in every country, has the ability to bring people together and drive them apart, in equal measures.  Of course Ireland is an interesting political environment with two political territories on the one island adding a lot of opinions from people with wildly differing viewpoints.

A cursory look at one of the one Irish blog aggregators such as Planet of the Blogs or the Irish blogs directory  provides a whole range of different political blogs.

A large number of Irish political leaning blogs, such as Gavin Sheridan’s blog, and Mick Fealty’s blog on Northern Ireland politics Slugger O’Toole have already built a large, loyal and often influential audience.

Mick was kind enough to send me some of his thoughts on the state of Irish political blogs[1]:

"Judging by the increasing number of acknowledgements (the) Slugger (O'Toole blog has) been getting, we are now beginning to get beyond being the journalist's dirty secret - ie that they read blogs at all. But there's no signs yet that they know what to do after that acknowledgement - ie get into blogging themselves.  One key member of the DUP's (Northern Irish political partner) HQ team suggested to me two years ago that hold(s) the attention of all politicians of all parties. I know that leading politicians read Slugger on a daily basis. Nearly the back room staff in all parties are plugged in to Slugger's stories and commenting zones.  In 2005, Sinn Fein became the last of the big parties to send Slugger notices of press conferences and allow contact with some of their big players out on the streets. I spent a large part of the campaign
following (former First Minister of Northern Ireland) David Trimble with his full co-operation."

Sharon O' Suillibhan, who I quoted in yesterday’s post commented that[1]:

"As a 'political blogger' , I find a blog can be useful in driving home a political message - but , on its own , it may as well not be there at all ! When the blog is occasionally 'linked' to a political organisation it , in my opinion , assists that particular political organisation to gain some credence …. In my experience , politicians and their hired suits will only give access to bloggers whom they know to be 'friendly' towards them…if a blogger was 'blacklisted' the public might never hear about it ; other outlets (ie print , radio and TV)  would be more inclined to publicise a similar event if same happened to one of their colleagues in the same field . I believe 'The Sunday Tribune' is the only national newspaper with a regular column on Irish blogs : until such time as other media outlets follow suit , the blogger will continue to be ignored by the politicians .….Still , we get great satisfaction from our blog and are , hopefully , helping to assist our readers better understand the reasons for the political situation that now exists in this country."

However, in terms of how the political parties are using blogs, the results are less impressive.

During a recent by-election, a number of the candidates (or their handlers) created blogs to support their campaigns.  While their initiative was to be welcomed, the blogs were unimpressive and highlighted the fact that blogging in Ireland is still in its infancy.  Some of the candidates did chart their campaign progress through the blogs but they all disregarded the very essence of blogging, namely providing honest, personal opinions on the matters that concerned the electorate.  At best the blogs were online diaries, at worst they were nothing more than a couple of web pages with re-printed collateral.  It’s expected that during the next election we’ll see a major growth in candidate blogging and it’s a step that most welcome.

While it’s still relatively early days for these blogs in terms of their impact on Irish society, the politicians are already taking notice.  You get the feeling that given the volume and quality of Irish political blogs, it will probably only take one major blog-led story to bring the power of the blog to people all over the island.

[1] Mick and Siobhan’s quotes have been edited by the author.

A friend of mine told me that MSM won't adopt blogs in Spain. 

They won't feel the need of blogs and won't allocate extra budget for niche media, he said.

Well, he was wrong. 

Spanish MSM first offered RSS feeds during 2004, and a bunch of them understood the power of blogs and began to use them heavily during 2005. 

El Mundo offers 6 permanent blogs written by columnists of the newspaper, and also has offered special blogs for great events such as the death of Pope John Paul II.

20 Minutos is organising a blog contest with a number of categories.  This free newspaper was the first to offer readers the opportunity to comment all its contents and had RSS feeds.

Qué! is a free newspaper that dedicates one full page to blog content created in blogs by their own CMS.

The example of blogs and MSM that I like most is Informativos Telecinco. Tele 5 is a private TV channel that actually hired one Spanish A-list blogger (Ignacio Escolar) and asked one of his journalists that also is a blogger (Iñigo Sáenz de Ugarte) to run its new internet project. 

Now they are offering news in a "traditional" internet site and have blogs about different topics... and they keep posting in their own blogs! 

There are another examples in both national and regional newspapers that have blogs or even offer their own CMS and I can tell that this is only the beginning of the adoption of blogs by MSM in Spain.

Regarding the topic that MSM may look bloggers as a threat, I can say that the main reason for the quick adoption of blogs by MSM was because they actually felt blogs were threating them because:

- They were not part of the conversation

- They were loosing awareness among influencers

- They were loosing influence

- They were not maximizing their contents' profitability

And also, the most important Spanish newspaper had its own "Elpaisgate".

El País launch a email campaign to promote the online version of the newspaper with this ad:

(Translation: Lots of things could happen in just one day... like September 11th  terrorist attack that change NY skyline).

The reaction for such a bad taste ad was immediate in the Spanish blogosphere and the pressure of dozens of bloggers forced El País to ask for apologies in the front page of the newspaper.

Also, the role of blogs after the Madrid terrorist attack was fundamental, as they were platforms of opinion and political activism that result in the victory of the PSOE.

Regarding the topic of bloggers making money out of their blogs, I can say that in Spain there is one blog publisher (Weblogs SL) that is on the right track to make its blogs profitable with 1 million+ page views a month and with advertising agreements with Nokia, Dell, etc.  As far as I know, some other blog publishers will be launched in the future. 

But I also want to point out that there are several blog companies in Spain: CMS, blog consultancy, blog development, design, agregators, etc.

Spanish blogosphere is a fast moving and pride community, that looks MSM direct to the eye and demand transparency not just to them but to institutions and political parties.

Irish writer Oscar Wilde once said that "the only thing to do with good advice is pass it on. It is never any use to oneself."

It neatly sums up the adoption of blogging among the Irish media.  The potential for blogs to reach, engage and inform an audience, has to date, made no impact on how the media in Ireland deliver news and opinions. The idea of participatory journalism simply isn't on the agenda, yet.

There is a growing awareness of blogging among the media, which is reflected in the increasing number of features on the subject in newspapers, magazines, radio and even television, but while the media has written on the subject, no one has seen it as a useful adjunct to their traditional activities – at this point.

We do have a small number of Irish journalists currently blogging, however these are typically personal blogs with little or no support from their employers.  Examples include Karlin Lillington , Bernie Goldbach and Sarah Carey.

While the Irish media might be dragging their feet, the same can't be said of the Irish blog community which is growing rapidly and capturing a sizeable readership.  Like elsewhere, the majority of these blogs deal with issues around technology and politics.  It's fair to say that many of the Irish bloggers are growing restless with the mainstream media and their approach and view of blogging.

Much of the coverage that has appeared on blogging has been dismissive and has focused on the blogging phenomenon outside Ireland, primarily in the United States.  Many Irish bloggers feel that their efforts are being ignored or misunderstood by the media.  They are unhappy with
the dismissive nature of much of the mainstream coverage of the blogging phenomenon.

Sharon O' Suillibhan, who writes the Irish political blog 1169 and Counting  describes it thus:

"To try and get publicity for the blog is next to impossible , with one radio presenter suggesting that we take out a paid advertisement on their station !  Other than that , they seem to begrudge giving us a mention . I find that some journalists will visit our blog for details on an issue on which they are working ,  but never credit the site  - I no longer attempt to follow them up in the hope of receiving a belated  'credit'  .  Still , we get great satisfaction from our blog and are , hopefully , helping to assist our readers better understand the reasons for the political situation that now exists in this country ."

This is a fairly commonly held view of how the Irish media is dealing with blogs, particularly indigenous blogs.  However, it's not the total story.  One national newspaper is at least is attempting to bridge the divide. The Sunday Tribune, one of Ireland's largest Sunday newspapers publishes a summary of interesting posts from Irish blogs
each week. In addition in recent weeks we are seeing a growing number of formal references to Irish blogs appearing in the media.

There is no doubt that as blogging continues to proliferate, Irish media outlets will be forced to examine how they can use blogs to add colour, opinions and more value to their readers.  However, at this point in proceedings it appears that this process will take longer than expected and will probably be forced upon the various outlets.

Tom Murphy is Director of Corporate Communications with Cape Clear Software.  He's been blogging since March 2002 and covers Public Relations and Marketing, drawing on over fifteen years experience working throughout Europe and North America.
He's still learning....

I am more than happy to announce the beginning tomorrow of a whole week discussion around the art of blogging in old Europe . I'd like to thank you Don, for having inviting me to animate and organize this weekly discussion at the IAOC, it's a pleasure to share here with you our european blogosphere.

To let you know what the topic will be about, we are going to talk about the state of the blogosphere from various european countries, providing each time imputs from a national perspective on the same topics. If richness comes from diversity, we should have there some interesting things coming.

I've been inviting some of the main influent and recognize european bloggers in their country to participate and I am happy to announce already Tom Murphy from Ireland, Octavio Rojas from Spain, I am still waiting for an aswer to come from Germany and one from Denmark, we'll then be able to cover 5 countries. Each of the participant will provide some descriptions of themselves in case you don't know them, and the first topic will be "Blogs and journalism: how traditional media are embracing blogs, are there any competitions between bloggers and traditional journalists, etc..."

I will give the topic of the day each morning to launch the discussion, please feel free to participate also to share your thoughts with us.

Last thing, few words to introduce myself as animator of this weekly discussion: my name is Guillaume du Gardier, I am founder of PR Planet a PR boutique based in Paris and recently Blogging Planet,  the first european consultancy specialised on blogs, wikis, podcast, rss etc... I have launched the CEO Bloggers' Club in august 2004 and coproduced with Elizabeth Albrycht from Corporate PR the New Communication Forum in Napa at the end of January 2005. I blog daily (hmm...) at PR Thoughts.

See you tomorrow for our first stop at the IAOC's blog and let's see what Ireland, France, Spain, Germany and Denmark have to say about blogging.

Thank you again Don for inviting us here.
A bientôt

This week Guillaume du Gardier, Managing Director of PR Planet hosts "Blogging Europe" on IAOCblog Week. Guillaume has invited bloggers from France, Spain, Ireland, Denmark, Poland, Germany and Sweden. Topics include:

• Blogs and journalists: a country-by-country view of how European media are embracing blogs, and who, if anyone is making money blogging
• Blogs and politics: how do Europe's political candidates use blogs for their campaigns, and do politicians and government officials treat political bloggers the same as the press
• Corporate blogging (external): case studies, who's leading the way, do European companies see blogs as an opportunity or a threat, are any small, nimble companies using blogs or is it only the big multi-national companies
• Corporate blogging (internal): do European corporations view internal blogs as a way to make employees more effective or as a waste of time, are internal blogs in multi-national companies being written in English or in the local language
• Blogs and brands: Tracking European and global brands in the blogosphere