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The Blog as a Business Intelligence Platform

Keeping up with the flood of information from websites, blogs, podcasts, and news services is an overwhelming task for most business people. They must balance the need to stay on top of their industry with the needs of serving their customers, developing new products and services, and managing their businesses.

However, given global competition and the ever increasing speed of innovation, ignoring important news with potential impact on your business can be penny-wise and pound-foolish. By not taking steps to track, review, and follow business intelligence—the information that drives your business success—you run the risk of being blindsided by competitors and market activities.

With the development and acceptance of blogs as a tool for business intelligence, it’s easier than ever before to keep current with your industry while also staying on top of your priorities. By creating a blog that captures the important actions taken by your prospects, customers, partners, and competitors, you’ll be better informed when tackling critical business decisions.

You can use a blog for internal purposes too. Instead of relying on different locations for essential documents—network file servers, Wiki pages, eRooms, and the corporate intranet, you can use a blog as a single repository. In this way, you can quickly retrieve sales and marketing materials, the corporate PowerPoint template, or the user requirements specification template by going to just one location to find what you need.

Blogs are one of the fastest growing internet phenomena. According to Technorati, 70 million blogs have been created to date. Essentially, a blog is a website that is very easy to maintain. Instead of having multiple pages for different types of information, the standard format of a blog is one long series of entries, or posts, usually addressing different topics, listed in reverse chronological order. Comments to these posts can come from anyone, and they are displayed below the entry to which they relate.

Blogs are increasingly being used to serve business needs. Sometimes they express the point of view of management, effectively replacing the static “message from the president” pages with dynamic, frequently updated perspectives from the corner office. Many companies use blogs to provide beta testers with updates on a new product in development, or to post commentary on the changing industry landscape.

In particular, blogs make a great platform to provide business intelligence because:

• Their standard format makes them very easy to navigate; categories, search, and content calendars make it easy to find articles of interest.
  
  
• They require no knowledge of HTML or other web technologies, so they can and are easily updated (unlike many websites).
  
  
• Unlike most websites, which are in essence one-to-many broadcast media with no interactivity, blogs enable readers to comment on posts. And, of course, blog writers can read and respond to the comments of their readers too.
  
  
• For those who prefer to get their news via email, it is a simple matter to subscribe to a blog and receive new posts by email. This way, readers never have to visit the blog, unless they wish to comment.
  
  
• For more sophisticated users who employ newsreaders to aggregate important content from the web via RSS, or Real Simple Syndication, it is equally easy to subscribe to an RSS feed of the blog. (See the April 2006 of Focus Forward if “RSS” is new to you.)
  
  
• The “Trackback” feature of blogs is similar to the citations used in a journal article—it automatically keeps track of any blog that cites an article from your company’s blog. Using Trackback, relationships can be formed among people with common interests.
  
  
• Unlike email newsletters and other means of communications, blog posts are automatically archived and always available. Readers don’t have to worry about losing or deleting emails with important news.

At Tim Rosa Associates, we’ve helped a number of our clients develop external and internal communication programs that leverage the power of blogging. I’ve recently created my own blog—more on that later.

Like any website, you want your business blog to become a destination; a place on the web that is a reliable, content-rich resource for those who choose to visit. In our experience, there are a number of critical success factors for business blogs:

• Relevance: Articles must be highly relevant to the interests of the community you’re trying to reach; otherwise, they’re just wasting the reader’s time. Build a list of business intelligence keywords that represent your audience’s interest, and make sure you use them in the context of your business. Articles that include these points will be relevant to people who need to know more about these topics. Readers want to see posts about their competition, their markets, their vendors, or even themselves.
  
  
• Timeliness: News is unlike wine or cheese—it rarely improves with age. News—whether you create it or share it from other sources—should be up to date.
  
  
• Frequency: Blogs are basically publications, and as such should have a fairly regular publishing schedule. The 24x7 nature of the web enables more of a range of publishing frequency than a fixed format. A minimum of 3 posts per business week is recommended to sustain reader interest and a maximum of 5 to 7 to avoid information overload.
  
  
• Length: Frequency and length are linked. Business people are busy, so articles should be kept as short as possible. The shorter the articles, the higher the frequency of publication, and vice versa.
  
  
• Context: One of the key benefits of the blog as a business information service is context. Your format, subject matter, and audience contribute to the context in which you’re communicating. Part of the context may also be driven by references you make in the text and by links to other articles posted by others or by you.
  
  
• Accuracy: All links must be checked to make sure they work at the time of publication. All quotes from original sources must be properly credited.
  
  
• Format: A consistent format should be established to make it easy for the reader to distinguish between annotations and commentary and quoted materials.
  
  
• Dialogue: Perhaps the most intriguing benefit of the blog, unlike so many other promising media approaches (newsgroups and IM come to mind), is the ability to establish and promote an on-going dialogue with your customers, partners, or employees. After all, information consumption is seldom a one-way street. Blogs allow you to both post outbound content and actively solicit feedback. Also, having other people contribute to your blog enhances your frequency and timeliness and helps to keep your content that much more fresh and relevant.

Business Intelligence Self-Test

Now that you have seen how a blog can be used as a platform for collecting, storing, and disseminating business intelligence for your company, you may want to start asking yourself some of the following questions:

1. How are we tracking our competitors, their products, and their services?
   
   
2. How are we keeping up to date on the latest economic, technological, regulatory, political, social, and other trends that will have a significant impact on our business?
   
   
3. Are we tracking what people are saying about us in the Blogosphere and elsewhere on the web?
   
   
4. How do we collect, store, and retrieve business intelligence information that is relevant to us?
   
   
5. How do we make people in our organization aware of the business intelligence function?
   
   
6. How do we enable our staff to access business intelligence information that is relevant to their jobs?
   
   
7. How do users inside and outside the company provide feedback on the business intelligence information we collect?
   
   
8. If we have a business intelligence function, how are we measuring its usage and judging its value to the organization?
   
   
9. Who are we relying on to collect our business intelligence? What sort of training and expertise do they have in collecting, abstracting, annotating, and otherwise adding value to the information they collect?
   
   
10. What is the frequency of the collection and dissemination of new business intelligence information?

Better yet, why don’t you post your responses to our blog and share your answers and experiences in this area with our other readers. You can read posts from others at the same address.

Clearly, a blog can be a great way to capture disparate pieces of information about what’s going on at your company and in your industry. Easy to establish and easy to manage, a great blog can quickly become an information destination for the audience you hope to reach.