Eamonn Fitzgerald's Rainy Day

One of the most impressive presentations at last month's Blog Talk conference in Vienna was titled "Business Weblogs— A pragmatic approach" and was made by Martin Röll. The young native of Luxembourg now lives in Dresden where he runs an E-business consultancy. Here, Rainy Day presents a blogview (blog+interview) with him about blogging in the enterprise.

Rainy Day: Why should a company invest time and money in setting up a blog?

Röll: Because they can be paid back! Weblogs can have very useful applications in marketing, content management or internal documentation and communication that can save a company money (by reducing training times in projects, for example), or create value (think of marketing effects or knowledge management). If a company has a plan for what it wants to achieve with blogs, it will be well worth the investment.

Rainy Day: Successful blogs need regular posting and commenting and are often the products of opinionated, extrovert, literate individuals. How can "ordinary" people who don't normally write very much be encouraged to blog in a business setting?

Röll: First of all, companies should avoid everything that demotivates people to blog. People should not be criticised for blogging or put under pressure ("You can blog, but do it fast! Don't waste time! Write only interesting stuff!")

Bloggers should be able to receive feedback — It's very important to see that what you write interests people. Readers should be encouraged to comment or engage the blogger in discussions. It should be possible for a blogger to see the statistics.

For people that are afraid that they won't be able to write regularly enough, collaborative weblogs might be a solution. For example I started a collaborative weblog on advertising together with two other bloggers. On our own we would not be able to keep up a specialised blog. But together we can create an interesting publication. (You can see it at Ad.ville)

Rainy Day: How might a blog be used in, for example, a marketing campaign?

Röll: A company could give information about new product developments and tell stories that will usually not be in the official press releases. They can get in touch with interested potential customers earlier and more intensively.

Rainy Day: What is the difference between a blog and a k-log?

Röll: Sometimes people use the term "k-log" to distinguish weblogs that are more "professional" and focus on one or more themes from more personal weblogs and diaries. I don't think there is (or should be!) a strict difference between the two. Most good k-logs are also personal blogs and many blogs are k-logs even if they don't call themselves so.

Rainy Day: You are on the ClickZ Weblogs Business Strategies Conference panel "Using Weblogs in Large IT Organizations". What's your particular experience in this field?

Röll: None! I have not worked with large IT Organisations in the context of weblogs before. (And I wonder why the conference organisers put me on this panel.) To prepare for the conference I will meet with several managers of large German IT companies during the next week to learn about their views on business weblogs.

Rainy Day: Do you see differences between Euro and US blogging styles?

Röll: I see that many non-English bloggers link to blogs that are in English while people that blog in English usually also only point to English blogs. But I don't really see other differences in style.

Rainy Day: The State of Utah has started a program to get employees blogging? Can you imagine the states of Germany or the shires of England doing something similar?

Röll: Why not? E-Government is an important issue in Germany. I am sure that governmental organisations will soon pick up weblogs and use them to communicate internally and externally to the public. There are already some politicians that have experimented with them to publish diaries of their work. Inside of governmental bodies it will probably take longer.

Rainy Day: Blogging in Europe means blogging in many different languages, but the English-speaking world is driving much of the content and many of the tools. Your thoughts on which language to use for which message and audience?

Röll:Use the language that you are most confident with. Sometimes it's good if you can translate an important post into English to discuss with people that you would otherwise not be able to reach, but generally I think it's more important to be expressive and interesting in style and that's usually easiest in your mother tongue. Of course if you want to reach an audience in a particular country you will also have to speak and blog in that language!

Rainy Day: What, in your opinion, makes a good blog — general, business? An example of each?

Röll: Interesting content, relevant links, voice, clear layout, working features (permalinks, comments, rss). One of my favourites is Stefan Smalla's Infofeed, a weblog on business. A more personal Weblog, while still talking about business themes is that of Heiko Hebig.

Rainy Day: Where is blogging heading?

Röll: In three years, Six Apart will buy Google and go public. ;-) But seriously: We will surely see many more companies started around weblog software, also for special business applications. That will probably not change blogging on the web as we know it but we will see that blogging will be much more commonplace and not so much a niche application as it is today.

We're grateful to Martin for taking the time to answer these questions. The conversation continues.

Diarist of the day: H.L. Mencken, 3 June 1940

"My guess is that in the long run the newspapers will lose their more moronic customers to the radio?The function of a newspaper in a democracy is to stand as a sort of chronic opposition to the reigning quacks. The minute it begins to out-whoop them it forfeits its character and becomes ridiculous. I believe that many people already notice this deterioration, and that it is responsible to some extent for the movement towards the radio."