Forrester report on corporate blogs

I just published a report on the corporate use of blogs, including best practices on when and how companies should be creating them. You'll need to have a subscription to Forrester to access the full report. Here’s the executive summary from the report:

Blogging: Bubble Or Big Deal?
When And How Businesses Should Use Blogs

Although Weblogs (blogs) are currently used by only a small number of online consumers, they've garnered a great deal of corporate attention because their readers and writers are highly influential. Forrester believes that blogging will grow in importance, and at a minimum, companies should monitor blogs to learn what is being said about their products and services. Companies that plan to create their own public blogs should already feel comfortable having a close, two-way relationship with users. In this document we recommend best practices, including a blogging code of ethics, and metrics that will show the impact of blogs on business goals.

Comments

[Gary Potter]

Great research - too bad you can't distribute it beyond your Forrester subscribers.

[Piers Fawkes]

Hey Charlene,

I got a glimpse of your new report - it looks very good and very contructive to business understanding of the power of blogs.

You should check out what we're writing on PSFK Trend (http://www.psfk.com) about blogging. Here are a few recent articles:
Employee Blogging For Your Business - http://www.psfk.com/2004/10/robert_scoble.html
PSFK Feature: Business Blogging Report - http://www.psfk.com/2004/07/psfk_feature_bu.html
RSS Feeds : The End Of Email News?
http://www.psfk.com/2004/10/rss_feeds_the_e.html

Piers

[Robb Hecht]

How can I get a hold of your report?

[Charlene Li]

Robb: There are two ways to get the report: you can either purchase it as a "Click and Buy" from the Forrester Web site, or become a Forrester client and have access to that and all of the other Forrester reports. You can go to the URL below and click on "Buy This Document" (price is $349.00). And if you'd like more information on becoming a Forrester client, let me know and I can direct you to the right person.

http://www.forrester.com/Research/Document/Excerpt/0,7211,35000,00.html

[Charlene Li]

Gary: Agreed on the distribution of the report -- I would love to give a copy of the report to everyone who asked for it, but if I did that, Forrester would go bust and I would be out of job. I have posted the blogging policy samples from the report, and also have them on a wiki, as I think the readers of this blog in particular would benefit from further discussion. Hope that helps somewhat.

[Rob Howard]

Read the report today and found it to be a good summary. Would love to talk to you next time you want to chat about building communities.

I previously worked for Microsoft where I helped develop much of the community based technology that Microsoft uses.

My new company Telligent Systems (www.telligentsystems.com) builds Community Server (www.communityserver.org) which is a blogging, forums, and photo gallery platform - the same technology that drives Microsoft's blogging sites, such as blogs.msdn.com, as well as the forums software for channel9.msdn.com and several other large organizations.

We're helping a lot of companies understand and apply collaboration technologies both publicly and internally. Blogging, while important, is only one part of the 'communities' puzzle. Again, would love to chat with you sometime :)

[tyler]

Thanks for the report. It was a good read.