Will "Blogs" Become Obsolete?
Friday, February 9, 2007 at 08:28AM 
The new blog is being designed to support the work of the market research group and to demonstrate the various ways the parent organization can employ social media and social networking tools. Initially the focus of the blog will be on internal users. Eventually the new blog’s reach could extend beyond the organization's staff members. Currently anticipated applications include:
- Use of the blog as a basic tool for making the market research group's research findings more accessible to the parent organization's management and staff.
- Engage staff members in dialog about the research and its application to the organization's mission.
- Help respond to frequently received requests such as, “Do you keep a list or file folder of all the research recently conducted?"
- Help remind people to use and action the research.
Some of the staff members of the parent organization are familiar with blogging and blogging related tools and services; many are not. This will be the first time many of them are exposed to these tools within the context of their own organization.
My question to readers of All Kind Food is, should this effort be referred to as a "blog?" Or is there some other term we should be using?
The blog initially will support posts, commenting, file access, feeds -- the usual suspects. What we take for granted today as standard "blog" features may soon become standard features of software applications that support a variety of business processes (e.g., ERP's, customer relationship management, sales support, field service, equipment maintenance, network support, corporate publishing, etc.). Some company-internal blogs could disappear as functions we now take for granted migrate from blogs to other business applications.
If that's the case, perhaps my client should start now to get away from referring to this initial effort as a "blog."
What do you think? Please leave a comment below or send me an email at ddmcd@yahoo.com. Thank you!
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Reader Comments (4)
I would call it a blog. If you try to predict what the features will be called if/when they disappear into enterprise software, you could guess wrong. That would leave the client's employees with their own unique jargon for no reason. If, on the other hand, you call it a blog, the effort that goes into learning about this blog will be useful for finding, using, and interacting with other blogs. Same for tags and feeds. Since they need to get up the learning curve for this blog project, use the opportunity to get them up to speed on social media in general.
Currently, they would have the TechCo CIA Blog. Then, when it migrates to other forms or platforms, it would still be the TechCo CIA (something) - but the internal users would at least understand what it's all about.
A blog is just one tool that they'll end up using in this effort. The "thing" (in this case, the organization collecting a reflecting marketing data) is what is important.
Dan
Good points. A blog by any other name is still a blog. I just want to make sure we're ready for the next thing -- which will probably arrive sooner than expected!
DAN:
Yes, the "branding" idea is a good one. That's true whether we're talking about an internally-focused or an extrenally-focused resource.
Unfortunalely,at this point in time, just about any sort of private posting is automatically dubbed a "blog", no matter how serious the article is.
I'm hoping that the word 'blog' will gradually fade away, and be replaced by a variety of other terms that indicate what the contents of the posting are about.
Three years ago I hadn't even heard the term "blog", so I guess it's going to take some time before change comes about.
I suppose if enough people started posting 'articles' denigrating the word "blog", that would surely speed things up a bit.