Strategy.manage.ent

Phil Wolff categorizing the skills needed to start and maintain a klog effort. His last point, klogging/blogging can improve your marketability, may be the most important in this time of economic stress. Those who put what they know front and center, in a way that is valuable and helpful to the audience, have taken a good first step to positively differentiating themselves from the crowd.

But this changes the nature of the blog -- certainly between personal and professional blogs. I'm not sure yet just how personal is enough, how much is too much, how little is too terse. Something to watch as both the medium and the users mature.

Klogging Roles.. I forsee several klogging roles.

Catalyst. Alpha blogger. Someone who klogs well, leads by example, provokes and inspires others to join a klogging community. If you've used Blogtree, naming your inspirations, you know what I mean.

Coach. The person who helps newbies, builds internal FAQs, nurtures laggards, acknowledges great posts. Soft skills, communication and social skills, are not evenly distributed. The coach helps everyone join and get better. Chief metablogger.

Armorer. Works with IT to develop configs, scripts, integration with enterprise apps and messaging services. Power macros. Engaging templates. Technologist and architect.

Practice leader. Informal leaders of subcultures in larger organizations. The one in legal who drives the whole department to start klogging. The rep in the Cincinatti sales office who gets her colleagues to start customer-specific blogs. Watch for lists of like-minded colleagues. They may also connect to like-minded communities at suppliers, customers, and the wild blogosphere.

Mix and match.

Recruit for excellence in one or more.

Hire ringers if your community is large enough.
One other point: I beleive (without hard numbers) that blogging and klogging can improve your personal marketability. I'm exploring this at Bloggers for Hire. Suggestions welcome. [a klog apart]

Entrepreneurs Need to Know the New PR

8:32:25 PM

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If you're starting, growing, or running a business you need to read Udell's comments on PR in the age of blogs. If you're a PR firm you definitely shoould read them. Clearly, not all (even most) journalists are as blog savvy as Udell, but most in the tech industry soon will be, or they'll be writing about something else.

Contacting me: High-tech PR in the age of blogs. In June I met Mark O'Neill, CTO of Vordel, at the Web Services Edge conference. Today Mark sent me a pointer to his new blog. As you can see by glancing at my channelroll, I've subscribed to Mark's blog. [...]

Udell describes several interesting scenarios, but one of the most compelling is how simple the company/journalist contact becomes once the blog is introduced.

[...]
It happens that I've met Mark, and what Vordel does (web services security) is of interest to me, and although I won't be in SF on Sept 5 for the event Mark mentions in his blog, we'll undoubtedly be in touch. But quite often, I won't know the principal, or the company. What I hoped would start to happen, and am now certain will happen, is something like this:
Hi, I'm XXX, [CTO|Architect|Product Manager] for YYY which does ZZZ. I have started a weblog that describes what we do, how we do it, and why it matters. If this information is useful and relevant, our RSS feed can be found here. Thanks!
... [Jon's Radio]