Blog for Companies

Newsgator recently published a free download called A Roadmap for Successful Adoption of Social Computing in the Enterprise. I'd recommend the download. The root of the whitepaper is that companies must adopt a cultural transformation - and when they do - they benefit enormously.

Here are 5 obstacles the study speaks to. We hit these obstacles in our sales process as well. Specific to blog software and search marketing, here are my reactions:

Employees already use other systems and don't want to be bothered with another alternative.

What is the strategy and measures of success for using your other system? What are the costs (maintenance, uptime, administration). When confronted with this, our prospects don't typically have a strategy in place that proves results. If you can't measure it, how do you know it's working? If you think it's working, how do you know how well it's working?
Employees are concerned about having their contributions public and uncensored.

This is why we've built approval and feedback loops into our application. It's important that employees be allowed the freedom to blog but with moderate oversight that provides them feedback if a post isn't approved for publishing.
Management is entrenched in the "old school" way of thinking - institution over community, hierarchy over collaboration.

This is a difficult obstacle to overcome. In short, I like to talk to companies about where their clients and prospects are rather than talk about how the company needs to change. Consumer and B2B behavior has changed and they are researching solutions and products via the web and search engines before ever calling you. You need to be where they are looking, reading and discussing.
Management desires more control over the actions of contributors, e.g. tagging, discussions, group creation, etc. The open nature of social computing is concerning.

This is why a Software as a Service is a fantastic solution. We continue to modify and enhance our system based on industry trends, search trends, online marketing trends and the needs of our clients. Investing in a SaaS blog software comes with a year of feature upgrades - all providing the right balance of control over openness.
Management is worried about decreased productivity as they still perceive social computing as fun.

I often ask people how much time they spend on email each day and there is always a groan. Some answer 20 emails, others over 100 emails daily - just to keep up. What's the ROI on email? What if you could prevent calls to customer service by having the content out there and the questions already answered in a means that prospects and clients can find it? What if you could write a blog post that 2,000 people read instead of the 1 person you're writing an email to? Blogging is an incredibly effective and efficient means of communicating.

According to the Whitepaper:

By 2012, more than 30% of large organizations will have deployments of social software suites available to all their employees (The Gartner Collaboration and Social Software Vendor Guide, 2009, Carol Rozwell, Nikos Drakos, David Mario Smith, Jeffrey Mann, Matthew W. Cain, James Lundy, and Tom Eid, February 19, 2009, Gartner.).

We've got a long way to go! Begin breaking down these objections within your company today to reap the benefits.