Opinions & questions please: Are blogs enterprise ready content?

I want to know what you think about blogs in the enterprise and what questions you have on this often controversial topic. This Monday April 10 I am moderating a panel at the Buying & Selling econtent Executive Conference in Scottsdale. This year’s conference theme is The Shifting Dynamics of the Content Market.

The panel is focusing on blogs and the impact of user generated content on the enterprise. I'm going to try something new. I'd like to get some questions submitted by you and your opinions via this post. Please comment or blog and send a trackback and I'll review the opinions and questions you post and probe the panel based on what's here.

When Everyone's a Publisher: The Impact of User-Generated Content


Moderator: David Meerman Scott 

Speakers: 
Cyndi Schoenbrun, Senior Research Analyst, Consumer Reports

Larry Schwartz, President, Newstex, LLC

Rusty Williams, Co-Founder, Prospero

To kick off the panel, Cyndi will share how she uses blogs every day in her job, Rusty will outline how publishers and other companies are blogging, and Larry will show us how distributors are facilitating blogs in the enterprise. Then I will ask your questions.

Here's the panel abstract: User-generated content, new rules of the road about who owns original content, and easy Web publishing technologies like blogs have made everyone a publisher. Trillions of bytes later, we remain fascinated with the process, but the impact of user-generated content as an information resource has yet to be examined. What does this wealth of unfettered content mean for premium content owners and corporate content specialists? Are user-created resources important sources of information, and if so, why? If you buy, own, or distribute content, how do you position your products or adjust your strategies? What new opportunities arise and how can you come out on the upside of this groundswell of content proliferation?

What do YOU think? Do you have any questions for the panel?

Comments

[John Blossom, President, Shore Communications Inc.]

David,

Per my recent post on ContentBlogger, I see the inclusion of weblogs on the LexisNexis service via Newstex as a key indicator of the value of weblog content produced by key insightful sources.

One key question might be:

With insight and opinion from leading webloggers being aggregated by enterprises via subscription database services and their own portal infrastructure, business media companies are more pressed to come up with content that can provide value-add on top of straight news that can differentiate their offerings. Some such as ALM address this by building their own stable of weblogs that are popular with their readers. How do business media companies make best use of user-generated media sources to cater to audiences in the enterprise space? Are they better off adding weblogs and user-enriched content to their own Web sites or are they going to find more value in packaging their content for other portals and venues that appeal to source-agnostic enterprise users?

[Dee Rambeau]

David,
as content producers, we're often myopically thinking about it from our own perspective. One of the key elements to the current environment that will only get better/worse depending on your view is this: Quality and authenticity will be entirely self-regulated by the end consumer of the information. Whether or not the content has value will increasingly depend less upon the source. CGM is indeed an information resource and will continue to be. Whether it is a "trusted" or "valued" resource will ultimately be determined on a user by user basis.

[Ken Doctor]

David: Great panel idea. My basic question is:
---How are enterprise users seeing, taking in, appraising, using blog content? Are blogs just another kind of story to most people, or are they viewed as a separate species? We've all hypothesized about the many differences between traditional brand-supervised publishing and individual-driven blogs, but the question here is what do the people doing the reading think?
Patterns of different use; patterns of different passalong; patterns of different kinds of comments/interacting with the material, etc?

Second question: Has introducing blog content in the enterprise expanded usage overall, or is blog reading taking a bite out of news reading?

Third question: Is the intro of blogs in the enterprise fueling an interest within the enterprise to produce company-oriented blogs, fueled enterprises to provide tools to employees to enable employee blogging -- with what kinds of co. reaction.

Report back!

Ken

[Marydee]

From the information professional perspective, are we getting too far ahead of our user base when add blogs to search engines such as LexisNexis and Yahoo? Are end-users comfortable with the inclusion of blogs with more traditional content? I would think that some companies (Microsoft comes to mind) are ahead of the curve while others (commercial banks?) would probably not be able to differentiate value based on the various quality and authenticity measures already mentioned in some of the other comments about this post.

[Michelle Manafy]

First off, thanks for such a lively session to get this show going, David!
In listening to this panel, and following up on some comments Dyson made in the opening chat, there's a lot of talk about the authority of blogs. I wonder if an organization like NewsTex should/would/could employ "meta-bloggers" who vet blogs? A blog about blogs, if you will, from a blog aggregator. Job openings for us passé journalists perhaps?