Learning to tell good, meaningful stories is at the heart of good corporate blogging. This is where narrative analysis can play a part.

Read more…

A good comprehensive post on what to watch out for with corporate blogging. Beyond the technical issues, Flixya also highlights potential pitfalls around informal corporate communication, eg:

“Brace yourself; there are even deeper pitfalls with much more severe repercussions to consider. For one, businesses that allow misrepresentations – faulty or misleading information to appear on their blogs can create a public disaster.”

Read more…

Arghh, we can’t help ourselves. Whether it’s for the top movies or best stocking fillers, we compile top ten lists with customary zeal at this time of year to help us benchmark our lives and what’s happening around us.

Debbie Weil rounds up some of the top trends in the blogging space. Read, if you dare.

Read more…

Search engines like relevance, according to the new eBook by Net Marketing daddy Seth Godin. Corporate blogging works particularly well in this context as long as you remember to update your blog from time to time!

Read more…

So, should you dump your blog in favor of a full-blown social network? Chris Baggott thinks not. Beware of social networks - the idea that if you build it, people will come is not, unfortunately a truism.

As Chris points out, you can have a better chance of setting up your stall on Facebook and see who comes. But a blog is a different animal - especially as far as Google rankings are concerned.

Read more…

There’s been some posting and comments around the rules of the new social media. I guess it’s those statements you see in presentations by ‘consultants’. Stuff like the press release is dead and blogs should have RSS.

The point is get going anyway - we live in the era of the permanent beta. Start small and you can grow from there. Also, if you are not familiar with what the ‘Social Media Release’ is, you can find some pointers here.

Read more…

I’m still trying to cover less blogging tips in this news feed but maybe I need therapy. I still get pulled in. It could be I’m after some nugget that will turn my blogging efforts from cream cheese into gold.

But these are good - for instance John Battelle comments on how blogging helped him write his book ‘The Search’: a lot of it was drafted on his blog and comments and feedback were taken into account.

Read more…

When I first heard about Knol, Google’s new product to build a repository of expert pages, I, like many others, wondered what the hell - how different can this be from Wikipedia? Is Google stooping so low as to churn out another hideous me-to rerun of an old idea that was conceived well the first time around.

Although as I dig further into this, some key differences trounce the more obvious similarities.

For a start, as the San Jose Mercury points out, one of the big differences is personality. Google Knol pages are very clearly owned by a single author, whereas Wikipedia are very clearly not. This difference is substantial and could lead to experts considering keeping a presence in both places.

On this point, ZD Net throws up another plus point in the mighty G’s favour. People will hoard knowledge unless there is a compelling reason to divulge. For Wikipedia the motivation isn’t that great - you only become one of the contributors to a page. Under the Knol model you can take full credit (and some payment if you add advertising) which can definitely be a major draw. The system appears more like a blog than an encyclopedia.

The drawback around this area is more dispersed content. Whereas Wikipedia benefits by keeping related content on the same page, the Knol system could hold pages by multiple authors. It will then be up to Web2.0 tools like voting and comments to help rank the best content.

Given that Wikipedia currently enjoys many top rankings across the big G, it will be interesting to see whether the Knol can steal any of this limelight. Right, now how do I go get my own page…