BloggingWorks: Business Uses

Rather than diving into details about what blogs are and how they work, the workshop took us through a number of ways people and businesses are using blogs full of examples and discussion around the utility of blogs in these areas. Many of these are familiar to regular bloggers and some overlap with each other. Businesses (and people) can use blogs to express: Interest, Promotion, Experts, Transcripts, Business, Scrapbooking, Support, Micro-content, Klogs. In a business setting, these uses all have the goal of building cache for your business and building repeat visits to a site that wouldn't necessarily attract repeat visitors. They can also be used to keep track of information or to expand a support presence with continual information about changes and suggestions from other users.

Blog tools are also being used in unusual ways as content management systems, such as the United Center web, in which the blog is used to document upcoming events, rather than the past. Here, the blog is a piece of the website (micro-content), instead of the whole thing. Again, the value here is the ability of the people at the United Center to easily add events, update ticket status and related functions. In this particular case, they have an added layer of control before events are released to the public to check veracity, etc.

The claim is that internal business blogs are primarily of the knowledge log (klog) form. Project teams are using blogs, particularly blogs enhanced to support a number of functions of the team, to communicate and track information related to the project at hand. In fact, 37signals is working on a tool that does exactly this. They have created a blog-driven space where they can securely (as possible) share project information with their clients without having to pepper each other with emails and attachments. They claim something will be available "soon" to the public, initially as a hosted service.