I left Portland late Sunday night, or was it Monday morning? Anyway it was way dark thirty. I arrived in Boston at 11:00 am. I headed over to the Enterprise 2.0 Conference and sat down with CMP's Alex Dunne for this podcast interview. Excuse me if I sound rummy.

This occasionally crops up in our discussions with companies investigating Enterprise 2.0 technologies. In some corporations BLOG is four letter word conjuring up images of sociopathic rantings, and way too much time being devoted to cat pictures and reviews of LOST.

If you ask me, this paranoia boils down to fear of the unknown or maybe it's about lack or respect and lack of trust in employees to do the right things with the tools they have to work with. When you think about it, if you were inclined, you could do more damage to a company's reputation and morale with email and confidential attachments sent to the wrong people than you can with a secure internal blog post.

I'm not sure what drives this perception about blogs and I'm not the only one who has experienced this fear from corporate management. Six Apart's Anil Dash makes getting beyond fear of blogs a key message in his evangelism. The Burton Group's Mike Gotta has seen it and heard it too.  His take away is that companies need examples of how blogs can be used effectively to solve business and communication challenges.

I'm republishing the highlights from his post "Getting Over Fear of Blogs and including the list of blogging applications that make sense for business environments.

You can read Mike's complete post on Collaborative Thinking.

Mike takes it from here:

Regarding Web 2.0 and social software, I find that people are often captivated by the use of these concepts and tools in the consumer market. While some technologists are skeptical, there are also a growing number of people that are wondering how such practices and technologies could be applied internally and whether such use could bring about some degree of business transformation – especially in terms of leveraging worker know-how and collective insight.

The tone and emotion levels however get quite passionate however, when the topic of blogs comes up. There does seem to be agreement that public-facing blogs can have real business value from the perspective of marketing, PR, customer intimacy and community-outreach. That perspective however does not seem to transfer broadly when the conversation shifts to possible internal adoption of blogs. In fact, it is not uncommon to hear a range of opinions that could be represented by the following statements:

• Risk-related: “We’re afraid of what people will say.”
• Productivity-related: “We don’t want people wasting their time.”

Performance-related: “We don’t see the business value.”

The conversation often swings back to the Internet and how blogs are used as a public soapbox to express personal opinions and how bloggers add fuel to emotionally-charged debates on topics many organizations view as a workplace distraction (e.g., politics, sports, entertainment, religion, breaking news, etc.). A good number of people I’ve talked to feel that blogs introduce risk (e.g., hostile workplace), negatively impacts productivity and hinders overall performance of business processes.

I think part of the problem is due to a lack of examples of how blogs can be applied to solve the types of business challenges organizations face on a daily basis.

Internal Communication

There are many situations where organizations need to broadcast information to its workforce without the need for that information to be pushed to its workers in an intrusive manner (e.g., e-mail).

• A Human Resources department can leverage blog technology to continually keep employees updates on various benefit plans, awareness of enrollment dates, etc.
• CXO-level management can leverage blogs to informally communicate company issues related to markets, economics and its competition.
• Organizations can use blogs to communicate information to employees on the various community-outreach and social programs in need of volunteers.

Program / Project Management

Program management offices (PMO) and project management teams often establish operating environments where information may not always be captured and disseminated in a timely manner. The structure of these organizing bodies may challenge its ability to quickly respond, making it difficult to communicate credible and relevant information.

• A PMO blog could provide a journal of activities, issues and future actions that could be valuable not only to workers within the PMO but to those monitoring and tracking the PMO elsewhere in the organization
• A group blog for developers and quality assurance teams could act as a clearinghouse to voice design concerns, for developers to record and report findings or to capture/disseminate software build and fix notifications discovered during development or testing cycles (e.g., shift notes)
• PMO and project teams create a variety of guidelines, procedures and other types of documentation. While wikis are good vehicles for the collaborative work on the content itself, blogs can provide a platform for individuals to provide deeper personal commentary.

Community-building

Organizations have struggled to find common off-the-shelf tools that allow for the capture, dissemination and augmentation of information while also enabling broad participation and community interaction. Facilitating open communication is a key aspect for organizations interested in sharing know-how and creating effective community-building environments (e.g., knowledge management).

• Research organizations have long valued the importance of personal journals and lab notebooks to catalog observations and record insight. Blogs within such an environment not only are of benefit to those within such communities but enable others to “look over the shoulders” of those engaged in such activities.
• Government organizations can use blog systems to enable first responders to share insight and lessons-learned from on-the-job experiences
• Specialists in many different professions (e.g., utilization management nurses, fraud investigators, security experts, underwriters, engineers) can use blogs to more easily communicate methods and practices relevant to their work activities

Business process

A multitude of business activities include capture of unstructured information as part of processing a particular task. Many applications do not naturally handle the type of free-form commentary and annotation users would like to add to a transaction or append to a case file. There are other situations where applications need to deal with conversational information that are not well-supported by traditional application models (e.g., issue tracking, exception handling, problem resolution).

• A competitive intelligence process is often dependent on capturing field observations, rumors and collating information detected from various news sources. Blog systems can provide the platform the collecting and vetting this type of market monitoring, analysis, and opportunity/threat assessment.
• Certain support processes require workers to capture notes as part of their remote activity (e.g., field repair). Offline authoring tools (e.g., Microsoft Windows Live Writer) could be used to compose analysis on a worker’s laptop and then upload to a group blog when network connectivity is available. In other situations, certain work activities might include capture of notes into operational logs. Blog technology can enable capture of task-related notes inline with performance of that operational process.

OK, I'm back.

We use the same tools and techniques internally.

• Our CEO as a blog to share the big picture with Attensa employees
• Our marketing and development teams use secure blogs to keep each group informed on project status, customer wins and the buzz surrounding Attensa
• Our sales and marketing people share competitive insights on a secure blog.
• We've set up a secure blog with our PR and SEO teams to share strategies, metrics and status reports.

Analytics on the Attensa Feed Server gives insight into how this information flows through the organization and helps assess and identify the most effective channels for communicating specific information

Attensa tools make publishing to these internal blogs incredibly easy. I used one of the republishing tools in Attensa for Outlook to share Mike's post this morning. I scanned the headlines from his blog in the River of News. The title "Getting Over Fear of blogs" caught my eye. I hit the Attensa publish icon which launched Windows Live Writer and pre-populates a new  blog post with the all of the copy, links and images - all nicely formatted. I just select the blog I want to publish to from a list. I can easily edit and add context, categories, tags and then republish the post with a click. These tools make it incredibly easy to share these thoughts with everyone subscribing to the blog. 

"We've been waiting for this for awhile. InfoWorld just published Mike Heck's thorough review of RSS Servers. Mike tested "three hot products in this burgeoning area: Attensa Feed Server, NewsGator Enterprise Server, and KnowNow 3 Enterprise Syndication Solution."

Here's Mike's bottom line on the category:"Tough Choice"

"I can't knock any of these solutions. (On a scale of 1 to 10 - 0.4 rating points separate the three players - I added this) Their designers understand that enterprise RSS is poised to become the focal point employees turn to for information, eclipsing individual aggregators plus systems such as portals, intranets, and enterprise applications."

Here's his bottom line on Attensa:

"Attensa gives you multiple deployment options, from configuring Outlook users with or without a desktop client to a Web interface and mobile options. The Outlook plug-in is laudable for features and usability. And intelligent ranking of feeds is noteworthy.

Mike had great things to say about the Attensa Feed Server, Attensa for Outlook and the Attensa approach to managing feeds behind the firewall.  He also shared some of the insights he has gained researching the category and talking to enterprise customers.

"63% of RSS users subscribe to work-related feeds."

"That latter finding shouldn't surprise IT managers. After all, RSS readers are easy to install and use. This technology does a fine job helping workers cut through irrelevant information that floods portals, enterprise search results, and e-mail. But as RSS's popularity rises, so do risks. For example, precious network bandwidth is consumed when many employees update the same feed. Plus, there are security risks associated with accessing inappropriate feeds. To get around these issues and give more employees the benefit of RSS, organizations are adopting enterprise RSS solutions."

"Enterprises using these solutions report measurable time savings -- often achieving full ROI in a few months."

"Enterprise RSS is poised to become the focal point employees turn to for information, eclipsing individual aggregators plus systems such as portals, intranets, and enterprise applications."

Now on to Mike's experience with Attensa:

"Attensa's RSS solution includes an Outlook reader that works stand-alone or can pull feeds located on a central Attensa Feed Server sitting behind your firewall. Optionally, enterprises can install Attensa's Exchange service to bypass the Outlook plug-in and deliver feeds directly to Exchange mailboxes. An AJAX (Asynchronous JavaScript and XML) Web Reader and mobile clients -- Blackberry, Good Mobile Messaging for Exchange, and Windows Mobile 5 -- complete the picture

"I simply checked off options on forms to subscribe groups to individual feeds or multiple categories. Similarly, I set defaults for each group, such as whether feeds would be delivered to Outlook and which publishing features were enabled.

There's suitable reporting, including which users are reading what feeds, the number of feeds in the system, and related statistics.

For end-users, my testing indicated that Attensa for Outlook has minimal memory impact on Outlook. Feed Server works in the background gathering and processing RSS feeds, which were quickly pulled into Outlook using the standard MAPI protocol. As a result, when I signed into Outlook, the latest feeds were immediately available. Moreover, after I subscribed to a new feed, that information was sent to the appliance so the feed was kept current for everyone else who also had it on their personal subscription list.

"Attensa's Outlook plug-in provided the best user experience of the products reviewed. Its clean interface -- with resizable panes and multiple views -- was further adjustable to my working style. For example, subscriptions could be displayed as one large news feed or by categories. In both cases the text layout was easy to read. Additionally, organizations can apply custom style sheets to match corporate branding."

"You get several ways to arrange feeds in the order of importance: Predictive Ranking (feeds that would likely interest you based on the streams you read most frequently and consistently), personal favorites, or by date. I observed that Attensa's analytics techniques did indeed improve feed relevance the more I used the system."

"Of special interest, Attensa integrates with Salesforce.com. In this case, SFA changes are pushed directly to your mobile device via RSS -- eliminating the step of going to Salesforce.com to get updates on clients or prospects."

"What's more, Attensa's AttentionStream synchronizes desktop, mobile, and Web RSS readers -- meaning articles read, filed, and deleted are consistent across all platforms."

If you want to see for yourself how the Attensa can fit with your Enterprise RSS plans, we can easily set up a web demo.

On Friday I gave the breakfast pitch at the Blog Business Summit in Seattle. Here's a quick summary from Jason Preston on the Blog Business Summit site and here are the slides: Download file

"Scott Niesen, of Attensa, starts off the day with a presentation on the practical business applications of RSS, and RSS enterprise solutions. I've dropped my usual bullet-list of running thoughts below:

• The holy grail of marketing is getting the right information to the right people at the right time.
• The feed tools at Attensa, says Scott, are designed to use RSS feeds to get the right information to the right people instantaneously, without overloading them.
• There are stages of RSS in Business:

1. Blog posts and news headlines come in.
2. They start using them for business intelligence alerts.
3. Then they get circulated around with internal blogs and wikis.

• Then businesses get RSS-enabled enterprise systems to really harness RSS as a business tool. RSS readers allow you to access what is essentially an indispensable research tool, for example, monitoring RSS feeds from the blogosphere lets you do pretty intense brand monitoring, just by running a constant keyword search.
• Persistence & Subscription: RSS is an indispensable collaboration tool in its ability, in an internal blog for example, to make new developments available instantaneously of changes or updates. In short, a great way to track team projects.
• CEO blogging is a great way to build a shared vision - Attensa CEO keeps a private and a public blog, both of which help keep the company headed in the same direction.
• RSS connects to a ton of different data types that go beyond traditional blogs and wikis - they use RSS to deliver podcasts within the company.
• Sales force leads can be delivered to blackberries very conveniently with feeds. Good idea.
• RSS is a double-edged sword - old methods of getting information are not going away - so RSS is convenient, but it's also another possible way to get to information overload.
• The difficulty is creating a system whereby you get the news you want (or need) without getting overloaded with millions of feeds (anyone who uses an RSS reader knows how difficult this is).
• This is kind of cool: in the new Attensa reader, the feeds you look at most automatically rise to the top of your list. Kind of like the "most played" list in iTunes.
• When you're looking at enterprise RSS options, Scott has a list of 7 things to check, some of them:
  1. Is it easy to install & deploy?
  2. Access it anywhere? Offline, web & mobile?
  3. Synchronization - critical!
  4. LDAP integration and Exchange support (I don't know what that means...let me see if Wikipedia does...I'm guessing this one)
• Question: What's the smallest size company that this enterprise type solution is practical for? Scott says: well, a company of one can download the Attensa reader and get a lot of benefit about it. But for the more complex systems, they recommend you start around 100 employees."

Charlie Wood interviewed Matthew Bookspan, Attensa's Director of Product Management and KnowNow's CTO Ron Rasmussen for his first podcast. It's solid overview on the state of the enterprise RSS market, how companies are using RSS and the road ahead.

The audio makes everyone sound like they are in a Warner Brother's cartoon but stick with it.

 You can listen here.

Brian Keairnes at the StartupSpot has compiled a very practical list of business wiki applications covering sales, marketing, research, customer service, product planning and more.

Sales professionals can now track Salesforce.com leads, opportunities, activities, contacts, documents, and support cases in Outlook using Attensa for Outlook and Spanning Salesforce from Charlie Wood's Spanning Partners.

With Spanning Salesforce you can subscribe to personalized, secure RSS feeds to stay on top of their most important CRM information without logging into Salesforce.

Spanning Salesforce is available on the Salesforce.com AppExchange.

With Charlie Wood's Spanning Salesforce sales professionals can subscribe to personalized, secure RSS feeds and keep on top of theri most important information-including leads, opportunities, contacts, activities, and documents-on your PC, Mac, or mobile device.

Here's the Salesforce.com AppExchange listing and Charlie gives a great introduction to how it all works here.

You need an RSS reader that supports secure feeds. For Outlook users Spanning Partners recommends Attensa for Outlook 1.1 (thanks Charlie) Spanning Salesforce lets you track your new and updated information in Salesforce.com using RSS using RSS. And since Spanning Salesforce doesn't require adminsistrative privleges, any individual can sign up.

When information is added or changed in your Salesforce.com account, you'll see it reflected in your Spanning Salesforce feeds. If a new lead is assigned to you, you'll see it in the My Unread Leads feed. As leads become opportunities, you'll be able to track changes in your pipeline. If you're responsible for customer support, you'll be notified of case and escalation assignments.

Plus, as new documents are uploaded you'll get not only a notification but also the ability to download any new document with one click. In fact, with your RSS reader properly configured, new documents will be automatically downloaded as they become available.

I like this quote from Paul Greenberg, CRM guru and author of CRM at the speed of light..."any Salesforce user...would be stupid to be without."