Alternative blogging business models

Via Lindon, a coupla days back Dana Blankenhorn rounded up some interesting discussion from Blognashville by looking at blogging business models, in particular by comparing our current blogging experience to those of the gold fields:

“There’s a Clue there. Nearly all those 49′ers (and Alaska 98′ers) who went in with pick and shovel failed. It was those who went in with a business model, professional mining companies or merchants such as Levi Strauss, who succeeded.”

He goes on to introduce a few different models, namely (to name a few) the ‘getting people to blog’ Blogger or MSN Spaces models, the ‘goodies’ for subscribers model, the ’selling yourself’ mode and the attached / embedded blogger in corporation option.

What I’d say this doesn’t look at too well though, is how businesses can improve processes, communication & learning through blogging. That is, how you can make money through blogging without actually getting a direct click from the consumer on your paypal button. Whatabout, for example:

The Cluetrain in Action Model

Yup, Scoble is having a degree of communication on behalf of MS but he’s (as is Dana at ZDNet) but this is pretty much just “A Listers” getting people interested in their views… not reflective, in any way, of the general company. Now, compare this with the interest / buy-in / feedback and effect that the Macromedia blogs had just a bit back and you’ve got the real power of conversation. And that was in 2002… what are people missing?

The Open Door Policy

Blogging within a large organisation is hugely underrated. The impact of a CEO communicating, on a daily basis, with their staff through a medium other than ‘ram-it-down-your-throat-email’ is enormous and can shape the way a whole company feels about openness, innovation and expression.

Multiply this by the employees blogging right back (has anyone had this idea… he hits ‘post’ and starts a conversation) and management getting involved too and, while it’s not going to change an organisation on it’s own, this is one technology that might actually *really help* create that open, innovative, motivating workplace that you’ve been working on for so long.

Checkout my paper: Centred Communication: Weblogs and Aggregation in the Organisation for more.

The Real Learning Model

It’s a well researched and much quoted statistic that something less than 20% of all learning that occurs in an organisation does so through formal means (mentoring, training, courses etc.) Where it does happen is mostly on-the-job through conversation, experimentation and exploration.

What this often doesn’t provide for though is the power of reflection and consideration… and makes only limited use of the great conversations that asynchronous communication enables.

Just imagine that employees are able to reflect on their learning experiences, their great hacks and sales discoveries, their feelings about their tasks, projects and more… well, if you’ve got people doing that then you’ve got people learning to a far greater extent (and the research might argue far deeper too) than the ad hoc, personal experiences that accompany us as we do our jobs everyday.

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Granted, none of the above are going to get you direct $s but having happier consumers talking to you, engaged and motivated employees and fundamentally better knowledge management and learning processes is going to get you more than a few bucks spent trying to pedal product.