I came across three blogs recently which prompted me to think this question through.  A company blog might not be for every SME.  Not because they are waste of time, but because companies may waste the opportunity a blog gives them, inadvertently mess things up or alienate those who were following their blog.  The saying ‘better to do a job well, or not do it all’, springs to mind.

The value of blog to any company – large or small – lies in its execution.  Three blogs I know of here in Malta amply demonstrate the pros and pitfalls of SME blogging.  I’ve categorised them according to why the companies decided to have a blog in the first place.

Blog 1: A competitor has one, so I need one

A blog is almost a non-starter if it sees the light of day purely as a competitive tool.  That’s not to say a blog can’t gain you a competitive edge, but you’re a long way off achieving that at this point.

Your competitor’s blog is more likely born of a volition to form new relationships with their audiences, whether customers, prospects, staff or others.  Your company meanwhile is blogging to retaliate.  You probably haven’t gone over the basics before getting a design firm to add a blog button to your website.  Have you looked at:  who’s going to write your blog – and that means at least two posts a week; what you intend to say; and with whom you going to engage not talk  ‘to’ or ‘at’ on your blog?

First, think strategy.  Ask yourself if your competitor has got it right with their blog; have they used the medium to build relationships, not just do more old-style advertising?  Analyse what they’re up to.  Then see how your blog might steal a march.  In corporate blogging, you don’t need first mover advantage, but you do need to make the right move to have an advantage.

Blog 2: I set up a blog but haven’t posted much and don’t know what to say

This situation is the next stage of Blog 1 above.  It too implies a lack of strategy.  But having started blogging, you now find you don’t have the staying power to keep a blog going or don’t seem to have the staff to commit to it.  You may have set up your blog in haste, or on the back of one staff member who now has other duties.  Once you’ve dissected your company brochure and done a post on each service or product, you’ve run out of things to say.  If you had scoped out your blog early on, you’d know why you are blogging and from this would follow plenty of content ideas.

Brainstorm with a variety of people, from company insiders to trustworthy outsiders, about what your blog can do.  A blog gives you a leeway that corporate and sales brochures can’t.  It’s your informal voice; your personality.  It forces your company to ditch the mission statement and become personable.

Content rules, and that’s where you’ve come unstuck.  So onward to the third type of blog set-up I’ve come across in Malta recently which deals with this point…

Blog 3: I set up a blog that doesn’t talk about my company

So what’s the point?  That would be our first instinct.  But this SME is well on the way to being a successful blogger.   Let’s face it, most companies aren’t that interesting.  So your blog has to go beyond your regular corporate, service or product info.  It needs to give readers a reason to bother with it.

We might like to know some insider info from real people in your company who are authorities about your industry, who can tell us the best way to use your products, or give us news of what’s coming on stream.  It’s the ‘free-onomy’,  so if your blog is going to give me something useful for free – entertainment, advice, insights, and yes, details of your special offers from time to time – then I am all ears.

One hotel in Gozo is doing well in getting its blog found online and in building an online community.  Its blog isn’t about the hotel (the corporate entity) despite being written by hotel staff.  But the staff are valuable Gozo insiders who give advice to holidaymakers about the island.  Yes, the blog also chirps up about deals and specials at the hotel, but only when they are relevant.  We might need reminding of the hotel’s spa facilities in chill damp January, but we don’t need to know about them all the time.

This blog’s strategy is corporate glory by association. Thank you hotel X for giving me good value info on Gozo.  I am already thinking of you instead of your competitors.

There are some surprising results in the annual Edelman Trust Barometer, a survey of 4,875 interviews of people aged between 25 years to 64 years. You can read the executive summary here , access more data here or just watch the video below.

There are many different ways to skin the same cat. Some are quick to claim that the influence of our peers is waning and that the results spell the first death toll for citizen journalism and the social media networks that enable it.

I think the survey simply reflects the transient times we live in:  new sets of social media tools becoming increasingly mainstream and a global meltdown with inevitable knock-on effects on what and whom we trust.  I think the really pertinent trend is that in the uncertain times that we live in, it is becoming obligatory to build a ‘mosaic of trust’ by accessing ‘multiple information systems.’    Within that mosaic, social media networks continue to operate as trusted channels.  And as for corporates – to ‘advance reputation.. they need to be everywhere, engaging everyone’ if they wish to building their own mosaic of trust.

I wrote this piece for Wired Temples, the blog run by Malta Media.  But I guess it fits in here – because it’s pretty much where my work and research interests currently lie.

In December 2007, I wrote a piece about how the Maltese were embracing Facebook, using comments from my online friends as the primer for the article. Fast forward two years and those twelve thousand subscribers have grown more than ten-fold, to around 120,000. Malta is right up there with the top 20 countries in terms of proportionate take up of the leading social media network.

In the past 12 months, what’s been perhaps more significant than the number of local social media users is the way people have started to use the new Web 2.0 tools to go beyond just interacting with friends. There has been an exponential growth in the number of local Facebook groups and pages promoting events, businesses and a raft of social issues and causes. In many instances, it has been a set of new voices rising above the parapet – not just on Facebook, but also on blogs, YouTube and Twitter.

We enter 2010 on the crest of an increasingly mainstream social web. In many countries, the recession has spurred consumers to adopt social technologies to become more market-savvy, improve their overall education and brand themselves better to find new jobs to replace the ones they have lost. Many corporate brands waded into social media marketing as core budgets got slashed, seeking innovation and better return on their investments in new media campaigns.

Results have been mixed, as businesses continue to struggle with two-way, interactive communication media that challenge the traditional one-way broadcasting model. The larger social networks like Facebook and LinkedIn have started to share data, raising concerns about online privacy and data ownership – but also helping consumers social experience spread from site to site, enabling them to access their friends’ opinions, and recommendations in real time. We are living in a new era of disintermediation and user-generated content, where citizen journalists are more trusted and influential than traditional broadcasters. In many US cities, newspapers have folded and people increasingly rely on the ‘read-write web’ for the most basic of information. Real-time data is now searchable by the major search engines. People produce content, connect and share with each other at an increased pace, increasingly relying on mobile devices and getting closer to the smart mobs envisaged by Howard Rheingold.

What does this mean to the way we live our lives on these islands? Particularly to the way we interact with individuals and institutions? How deep are the changes that social media appears to be triggering? Are the local rumblings online about censorship laws, politics, religion, murtali, customer service and bad restaurants the tip of the iceberg, the shape of things to come? Or will the Maltese simply end up using social media in the way Neil Postman postulated about TV all those years ago, to ‘amuse ourselves to death’on Farmville or some other online application? To what extent can social media enable an alternative model of living, working and networking for people in Malta, and contribute towards a change in power structures on the islands?

These questions are at the heart of my research. We unconsciously think of Malta as a ’special case’. We’re islanders, a law unto our own, deeply stubborn, conservative, seemingly entrenched in bi-polar, traditional, enduring power systems. You can attribute this to our size. Or to our success story – we’re survivors with an enviable ‘quality of life’ that continues to attract new tribes. We now have access to new tools that can enable the opinions of those we trust to potentially matter more than those of our traditional intermediaries – print media, TV, radio, the Church, people in traditional positions of power with corresponding real life networks and social capital.

Will the social web lead to an eventual flow of power from a small band of people in Malta to a much larger number of individuals who are web literate? Or will we just subsume what is now alternative into the mainstream or the mundane?

It’s going to be an interesting couple of years.

One thing you find in the rollercoaster of early research, as you start to plough through the seminal works on your reading list, are strong, entrenched positions.  Particularly in my area of interest – alternative models for social media networks.  And of course, it’s all part of  ’the process’, the 360 degree view you’re encouraged to undertake to raise your awareness of the ‘knowledge’ in your field before you start to focus on, hopefully, one day, adding your own grain of contribution over what has been assembled by others.

And early on, you become aware that the struggle for ‘open’ and ‘free’ in technology and the social web is still very much ongoing and unresolved.   Particularly the debate about content, who owns it, and whether it can be monetised.   From Google starting to limit free news access, to doubts about Google’s own role as the catalyst of openness versus the ‘evil’ Microsofts of this world.  In one corner we have content providers resigned to giving their content away in the hope that freemium model can be wrapped by advertising or paid for by a tiny fraction of readership; and in the other, content-providers trying to find some other way out.  Despite the fact that we have now already had years of benefiting from a ‘free web’ and point to point, uninterrupted communications, that have further exploded with the emergence of the social web.

I’m still sitting on the fence on this one.  Like most people, I fell in love with the Internet because it freed me from location and real-life networks and enabled me to learn from open content and connect with my various tribes, wherever they were, for the price of my ISP connection.  On the other side, as a content provider with my side-project, Malta Inside Out, I know that quality, hyper-local content does not grow on trees, costs real money and brings value to others.

At times like this, I turn to Kevin Kelly.  Described as an Internet utopian, by the self-proclaimed ‘anti-christ of Silicon Valley, Andrew Keen, Kelly is still gently trying to read the tea leaves.