Category Archives: Social software-Blogs

Blogging the competitive difference

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The competitive difference that blogging allows isn’t so much the content on its own but also the context in which it’s being said. A conversation on a blog simply allows for a greater degree of freedom, which in turn changes the quality of the information communicated. The nature of the exchange is thus different. For example if I talk to a colleague at work about England’s performance in the World Cup, it is set in a different than such discussion on my blog.

Similarly business blogging in stimulating exchanges with customers needs to recognise that the limitations on the interaction. The corporate inclination is to set the parameters of what is allowed much narrower than a customer or set of customers might want to. The point being simply that it pays to think in advance how wide an acceptable discussion parameter is set from the outset; as the wider the better – the greater the latitude the greater the chance to find out what the customer is really thinking about. Though of course it has to be balanced with internal company cultural constraints. But there also lies the catalytic power of blogging. If applied properly it can help change the business to make it more customer-centric and stimulate the destruction of old knowledge; it is a two-way dialogue which is closer to the customer’s reality, moving it on from a fancy marketing tool, to a means of being able to benefit from ‘uncertainty’.

Shiftlogs

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At today’s GC 2006 Expo I went straight to the 10 o’clock presentation from Adriana Cronin-Lukas from the Big Blog Company who had some excellent things to say about ‘social media’ in her seminar on ‘revolutionising the way that you and your team work’. Interestingly, while most had heard of blogs few had used newsreaders or heard of tagging. Some educational work to be done there with the public sector. (Perhaps a marketing idea with a product on social media for beginners?). Personally I was intrigued by Adriana’s mentioned of the way Disney has very successfully used Six Apart weblog’s for global cable operator shift work, termed ‘shiftlogs‘ (“They didn’t call it blogging, they just called it a ‘Shiftlog‘, which is what they’d always called it.”). This links back to my interest in shift handover applications for hospitals.

Anyhow by way of coincidence I’m off to the British Computer Society this evening to hear a talk from Surgeon Captain Peter Buxton, OBE, and Lieutenant Commander Mark Trasler on telemedicine in the armed forces, which may again touch on this subject. Particularly as Lt Cm Mark Trasler is reportedly down to look at the possible use of transferring the experience of the Defence Medical Information Capability Programme to the NHS.

Their fascinating talk on how the Navy is setting up a new health care reporting held some useful lessons for the NHS, for example in making sure (following the system problems thrown up by Gulf War Syndrome) that battlefield injuries are properly recorded. However, when I asked it they didn’t seem to have any plans for an electronic shift handover system within military hospitals. Lt Cm Mark Trasler instead suggested the Americans might be leading in that respect.