I have been blogging since i made made my trek across the country when i moved to the Bay Area in February 2005- it started out as a way to keep in touch with family and friends and then i found myself blogging to keep in touch with my former East coast clients to share with them the things i was seeing on the West coast. Quickly my blog turned into a good way to communicate with my new clients on the West coast, the tech community, my company co-workers around the world and a way to completely bore the hell out of my friends and family who were expecting pictures of me surfing and living the San Francisco lifestyle but instead have to read about Web 2.0, social media and general grumblings about information delivery in the enterprise.There are certainly other work colleagues of mine that are 'business' bloggers but none of us are currently under a Dow Jones domain- they are personal blogs that address business issues and trends that we are all interested in. When i started blogging, i was part of Factiva which at the time was a Dow Jones & Reuters company and had a blogging policy and even a CEO blogger.
At the end of last year, we became fully owned by Dow Jones and one of the first things i asked our PR department was about the DJ blogging policy. I am still waiting for an official Dow Jones blogging policy but was told to follow the employee code of conduct as a rule (honestly i think that all companies should have an official blogging policy and have been ancy about not having one over the last 8 months). If you are a regular reader of my blog, then you know that i try not to talk much about the Dow Jones corporate business or try to be overtly pushing products that we sell- for example i have hardly touched this News Corp situation on this blog (i have however Twittered about it but that is a closed network of those i consider my trusted friends some which are also clients).
The other day i was talking to my friend Jeremiah Owyang as we were coming out of a Social Media club event in which he had just been on a panel on business blogging in the enterprise. I told Jeremiah that our Client Solutions marketing group was producing a new quarterly newsletter and they had informed me that they wanted to highlight my blog. It has also been featured on the InfoPro Alliance newsletter that Factiva produces mostly for their information professional audience. Jeremiah thought it was great that Dow Jones trusted me enough to publish my site to their customers, but since he has been following my blog he can understand why the content i produce is valuable to the organization- i think it is pretty cool as well that they trust me.
Just today at the New Tech Meetup in San Francisco- where the topic was Women in Tech- Lorna Li asked me what i blog about- my standard response is that i blog about information delivery in the enterprise and it is a way for me to be part of the community that discusses issues important to that market segment while connecting with customers.
i don't get paid extra to blog about things that might bring revenue to the company or induce engagement with communities of importance to us, i do it because i truly enjoy it and it brings me immense pleasure when a customer or colleagues say to me- yeah i want to talk to you about that post about bla bla bla or i have been looking forward to meeting you- your blog is very interesting especially that post about bla bla bla.
I like think of myself as a corporate blogger that is trying to fit the Community/Evangelist Role that Jeremiah commonly speaks about- but i certainly feel that i could be doing much more. Part of it is time constraints and being overworked- i can't tell you how many times i come home with a great idea post that i start to write and then get wrapped up with some work project or simply run out of steam to continue thinking about work- so i try to pay myself and tell myself that i am blogging here for daniela not for Dow Jones- they are just one of the beneficiaries.
But the bottom line is that i am proud that my blog gets highlighted in a corporate newsletters from Dow Jones- it is through Social Media (my blog) that as an employee that is not at the executive levels that typically gets the public ear through mainstream media- I am able to communicate with the marketplace- i just wish i had more time to do it because it seems that almost everyday i say to myself 'if only i had the time to blog about this...'.
Oh yeah and something else to worry about-let's see if News Corp has a corporate blogging policy....if not maybe i will just convert this blog to focus on delivering information to enterprising cats.
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