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Let’s go orienteering!

Last week I spent three fascinating days in Zaragoza, Spain at Guidewire’s Innovate!Europe 2005, where I learned a ton about what works and what doesn’t for tech start-ups across the European markets. Mårten Mickos’ talk was a terrific distillation of the cultural drivers that help and hurt innovation in embryo. The event was a fiesta of opportunities to observe cultural drivers - a big part of orienteering.

To crib from thesaurus.com, to “orient” means to:
· Familiarize, adapt, locate
· Inform, advise, edify, enlighten, initiate, instruct, prepare
· Affect, apply, connect, refer, unite
· Or, if one is of a sinister mind: distort, angle, bias, influence, point, twist, warp

In my first Guidewire post I talked about how important it is for companies to understand their blogosphere (in my opinion everybody’s blogosphere is a bit different). While I was in Europe, I stopped by Burson’s offices in Paris and Madrid to share what I’ve distilled about corporations and blogging over the last year or so.

My standard advice these days is for companies to take the blogosphere in three steps – evaluate, participate, and create. Some companies should never do more than simply evaluate and monitor their blogosphere. Some may choose to participate via existing blogs, and still fewer may choose to create their own blogs. Many corporations have it backwards though - they want to jump in to creating first. This can backfire; some prominent companies have jumped into the deep end headfirst and suffered for it.

Evaluation – the essential step every corporation must take - is all about orienteering. Companies need to familiarize themselves with their blogosphere. They need to adapt themselves to using an RSS reader and checking it as often as they check their other news sources. They need to locate the key bloggers. They need to map their blogosphere or hire a company, like us or one of several others, to do it for them!

Once they establish the basic lay of the land, companies can be informed, edified, enlightened and instructed by what they find, and in turn they can instruct their peers inside the organization about what they find and where they find it. A great example of this is Andrew Carton, creator of treonauts.com, who I met at Innovate! last week. His site is an invaluable resource not just for Palm, but for anyone who makes or wants to make handhelds.

If the company is shrewd, they will then apply what they learn and see. What they learn from their blogosphere can affect every aspect of their interactions with the public – customer service, sales, public relations, etc. If they’re really shrewd, they’ll establish valuable connections with bloggers as well.

Corporations who have been foolish enough to try to bias, influence or twist have – at least so far - failed, thank heavens.

While there aren’t well-defined maps that companies can easily pick up and apply to the blogosphere, the time and effort to truly orienteer within it is vital. Those who make the effort will find resources for their own businesses that will be truly enlightening.

Posted by Lisa Poulson at June 23, 2005 08:41 AM

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