Time is clicking away (as Forty4 rightly shows on his blog) and our assignment will soon be evaluated by our teacher.

I would like to recapitulate the whole task starting with my own blog.

As for a person who does not love computers and all this technology I must say I have learned a lot during this assignment.

For many reasons I was not able to write about the company I work for, so I just wanted to check the subject of blogging in general in the companies. At first I did not quite knew what the blog was and I did not know how to set it up, so I just watched other students in our group doing it. After initial hesitation I found it fun to add posts and to read people’s comments as well as reading other blogs. All this plus monitoring our groups blogs takes time. I spent more time on this assignment than on any other I must say. And here I have one request for our teacher: Rille, when you evaluate our blogs please take into consideration that we all have extremely demanding jobs and the lengths and content of our blogs reflect that.

Before the task I never realized how many blogs are out there in the blogsphere. I read many of them, trying to understand the concept behind them. I read the theory. I read tips. I discussed blogs among my working colleagues from different branches. And I must say I am still blogproof as I was, however I now understand that blogs could be sometimes useful. It could never work in my company due to the type of the business we are in, but for example in IT companies it could work perfect.

It is a pity that many of our blogs consist of one or two posts only. It would be really nice to see more of us interacting. I would like to thank all of you who did interact, for your comments, valuable opinion and advice, as well as for interesting blogs that you have created. It became a habit that we discuss blogs not only via comments but also when we meet in reality.

And finally - this assignment did not make me a blogger, but had definitely broaden my knowledge about digital business enhancements, which I suppose was the main aim of our teacher.

I was discussing the subject of corporate blogging with some friends and colleagues of mine who come from different businesses and different industries. Majority of them are against corporate blogging. However more than half agreed that this could be used in big companies as an internal communication tool.

I found a great article on this subject in Business Week. Perhaps internal blogging would be the future of corporate blogs? A lot of companies are afraid of external blogs, as this may damage company's reputation when the competition or opponents leave unfavourable comments. Although sometimes this critisism can be used by the company to improve its services or products.

What do you think? If you were to decide about your company's blog would you rather have internal or external blog or nothing at all? And why?

Do you think it is ok that our teacher would not grade blogs of these who have yet not created a blog or who have just one or two posts?

Dzejdzej asked me does my compay have a blog? She mentioned that hers did not. Well mine does not have a blog either. And frankly speaking the company's policy towards blogs is - let's say - not blog friendly. For this reason I decided not to divulge any information about the company I work for in the blog. I had a long discussion regarding this subject with our main bosses and they are against corporate blogging.

What about your bosses? Did you ask them what they think about it? Do you agree with their point of view? Or are you afraid of asking perhaps?

 

Today during my lunch break I was following some of our MBA group students blogs. Some of them are very interesting, like Borys, belamba, m4rio5, man1ana, e-grasshopper, BP, Forty4, dzejdzej (the sequence like in the groups). I suppose the rest of the authors are very busy at work..

At the same time I noticed that MBALuke developed his blog most recently and chose similar subject in his blog to mine. Luke, although we are not in the same group, perhaps we could join our efforts and try to do something toghether on the corporate blogs in Poland, what do you say?

After doing some research the simple answer is: NO. Polish companies seem not to appreciate the value of corporate blogging. They do not believe blogs could be used as a marketing or a communication tool. The majority of people in Poland who use internet still associate blog with diary rather than a valuable source of information. Will it change? The number of internet users keep increasing, there are already over 10 millions of them. Can the companies afford to ignore blogs any longer?

What is your opinion? Does it depend on the type of the business the company is in? Does your company have a corporate blog policy?

 

 

Corporate blogs must not look like their advertisments. It should look authentic, so it should also contain some negative comments regarding the company's operation. The information which is published on blogs should not be available anywhere else. It has to be updated quite regulary (I cannot say I did this in my blog...), otherwise the readers will fine other more interesting blog to read. Company's blog should be adequate to the company's profile. Employees should be allowed to blog as well, but there should be a policy regarding blogging and revealing confidentaial information.

Company should monitor competitors blogs.They should also measure effectivity of their own blog with the help of RSS.

All e-tools used in the company should be integrated: e-mails, blogs, websited, PR should be in one line. This is very important for the company's image.

 

So far most of Polish blogs are written by teenagers and IT specialists. Few newspapers created recently their own blogs (Newsweek and Polityka). Compared to for example United States where 40% companies think there should be official policy regarding the corporate blogs, corporate blogs in Poland have just started their existence in blogosphere. Polish companies started to realize that blogs could act as an excellent communication tool with the clients. It gives them unofficial but very useful informatio on how the comany is perceived on the market. It could be also used as a discussion tool for the employees of the company. According to Jupiter Research over 35% of big international companies who have their branches in Poland intends to create their corporate blogs by the end of 2006. That means that these internet diaries will be used by all parties, and may help the companies to improve their image. Companies could allow to have closed blogs, only for the employees for example. Blogs could be used especially in very narrow specialties where sharing knowledge decides about the success of the company. But it is not so easy to create a good company blog.

Blogs started to be popular in Poland between 2001 and 2002. The first Polish service which enabled blogging was nlog.org, it started to operate in June 2000. Few months afterwards Blog.pl was created and now it is the biggest Polish blog service.

According to statistics 33% of all Polish internet users at least once read some blog. That means there are over 3 million people who read blogs. Most of them are women (55%) and most of them are between 15-24 years old.

David Sifry in his report about blogosphere reveals that Technocrati is now tracking over 50 milliong blogs!!!

I couldn’t believe that nowadays the blogosphere is doubling in size every 200 days. Perhaps it will reach 100 millios in February 2007 if the trend continues..

David report also says that there are about 175,000 new blogs created every day.

Total postings numbers increase – statistics show about 1.6 million postings per day! Bloggers mostly blog in English (41%) and… Japanese (31%).

Rush hour for most bloggers who blog in English is between 10am and 2pm of the Pacific time…

I wonder – who needs so many blogs?  How many of them have more than one post? How many of them are inactive since a long time? There is no control over blogosphere and this is what bloggers love, but is it really to our advantage?

 

Unfortunatelly I didn't manage to post any articles on my blog in August. But... August has been the busiest month in our business and although MBA studies are important for me, as well as for all of us here, we all agree that the job is number 1 priority. I had to attend a few conferences, a number of business trips (I hate flying, recently it got even worse due to the new security controls introduced), I spent endless hours trying to cope with the sudden increase demand of our clients. My family and friends call me workaholic. But I still love this job..

What about you? Would you change your job for the one with less hours, less stress, fewer challanges to get more time and peace of mind?