Josh Hallett Says Blogging Hot in the Enterprise

[Josh Hallett. Photo by Shel]

I always learn something interesting or useful when I listen to Josh Hallett of Hyku, Inc. speak. His recent appearance with Alex Kim from SolutionSet at Third Thursday, the marketing/communications networking event, hosted at VOCE Communications in Palo Alto was no exception.

As a web consultant, Josh's clients are overwhelmingly large and global.  As a social media company consultant my clients are small as mine are small but still global, thanks to the internet.

One of Josh's main points, confirmed as well by Alex Kim, is that the social media tool of choice in the enterprise these days is the blog.  This is in striking contrast to what I'm seeing from the corner of the field where I sit. From where I sit attention has moved on to online video and particularly online social networks.
A few attendees were disappointed in Josh's other comments, particularly those that made IT sound like a barrier.  Yet almost all the feedback I get says this is true. But I have always found that Josh's enterprise insights are accurate and if he says blogs are hot and online video is not, then I tend to assume he is accurate.

This confirms the argument that blogs are normalizing. I sit on the edge of technology, where early adopters are,well, adopting early. Enterprise is slower to adopt and slower to adapt and as they begin to immerse themselves in the blogosphere, the geeks in Silicon Valley are getting excited about new technologies.

What is most interesting to me is that the timeline has gotten so much shorter.It took about a dozen years for the enterprise to accept the PC.  It took about six years for them to see the value in wired networks.  It took about three years for IT to accept that notebooks were less of a threat to corporate security than was originally feared.

Now, less than 18 months after my world was euphoric with the excitement of blogging, they are being ingested into large corporate bellies. The world is moving faster and faster or so it seems to me.

Comments

[Yang-May]

Those who are announcing the death of the blog tend to be the first adopters, I feel. There are many business people and others in my corner of the field that are still struggling to understand what a blog is, let alone Twitter and Facebook etc.

I think that we - esp businesses - will always have websites in spite of their limitations eg static and not interactive as we will always need some static pages to tell the world about us/ the business. In the same way, blogs will be integrated as part of those websites for their useful functions eg easy updating, conceptually straightforward (I say to my clients: think of blogs like online newsletters). Social networks and other apps have their role as well but are more suitable to those who like to flit around interacting with their friends online.

[Kami Huyse]

Seeing how Josh and I just faced an IT/legal issue with one of our clients, I can say without fail that there are still barriers in the enterprise for blogs. But I also know that my corporate clients (mostly communicators) want to use the technology badly. They see it as a two-way communication tool that they currently don't have. Also, they see it as a way to be in control of the content again, wresting it away from IT.