Public Relations
News travels fast: A single post on one lowly blog can be syndicated on hundreds and thousands of other sites, even picked up by social bookmarking sites like Digg. The blogosphere won't contact your public or media relations department before slamming your company.
"There's a culture of 'ready, fire, aim' in the blogosphere that doesn't exist in the traditional media," says Sam Whitmore, an expert on tech media relations. "I think PR people have to be emergency responders and basically out-communicate, both in number of posts and richness of posts, whatever the counter-message is."
IT can help PR pros stay on top of what's being said about your company, but it's a daunting task: Technorati, a blog search engine, claims more than 1.6 million new blog posts come online every day. Offer training to PR departments on how to use Internet search engines and Boolean operations effectively.
Technorati and Google can create RSS feeds based on search queries. RSS is a Web feed, or syndication, file format written in XML that enables automated delivery of data to other Web sites or end-user feed aggregators. Typically used for news headlines, RSS can deliver any compartmentalized data, including file-change logs, new pages in a wiki and blog posts. Alternately, you could develop an internal Web site that will track, archive and aggregate multiple feeds into Web pages. Myst Blogsite and Umbria offer services and software to track the blogosphere.
We Built It, So Where Are They?
Q: Who'd have predicted that a poorly produced video of a goofy guy dancing would get a few billion hits?
A: No one, which illustrates both the beauty and the pain of new media.
A tiny company with a cool presentation could be the next new-media darling, if it follows some rules. First, content must be easy to find and bookmark by the casual Web surfer. Some organizations place links from their home pages to the corporate blog site. Make it easy to hyperlink to individual blog entries. Publish RSS feeds, and use standard image tags to denote them. Users should have no trouble finding podcast feeds and direct file links. If you allow feedback, comment spam will be a huge hassle and will drive away readers, so consider moderated posts or use an anti-bot verification mechanism.
Message boards have unique technological challenges. There's a higher level visibility, and there must be a balance to the number of board topics: Not enough, and messages become lost under hundred of threads. Too many, and the place feels deserted. Consider letting users view messages without registering.
Stop That Data!
Blocking confidential or embarrassing data from being leaked onto message boards from your network or posted on external-facing blogs housed on servers under your control is possible using content monitoring and filtering products. This market is taking off--jumping from between $20 million and $25 million in 2005 to as much as $40 million to $60 million this year, according to Gartner. Products from Tablus, Vericept, Vontu and others let IT discover potentially confidential content within the organization, such as posting of Social Security numbers. Tablus actually hosts a monthly podcast on its site.
Problem is, content inspection products work best on structured data, not subjective opinions. They can't determine if a post about senior management is negative, or if a person is talking about future projects without revealing specifics or code names. That's where a policy comes in.
Despite the "everyone can read, everyone can play" attitude of new media, access-control mechanisms should be deployed for blogs and wikis meant for internal use. In our review of enterprise wiki software, we examined authentication, access granularity and role-based rights management. We weren't completely thrilled with the security features on any of the four offerings tested, but Atlassian Software Systems' Confluence, our top pick, did impress us with the granularity of its access rights. wikis and blogs can authenticate against an LDAP directory, and you can set the wiki to not reveal any content unless a user has authenticated. The IT department must educate skunk works blog and wiki admins about security issues, and assist with directory integration.
