10 rules for corporate blogs

Carole Matthews at Fresh Inc. points us to this story on 10 rules for Corporate Blogs and Wikis from Nick Wreden at Marketing Profs. If you have a corporate blog, or would like to have a corporate blog, the article offers some good counsel, examples of companies that are using weblogs effectively, and links to other resources.

Also of interest, and perhaps less familiar to many blog readers, the article also discusses wikis as a collaborative tool.

Wikis (based on the Hawaiian word for quick) use open-source principles to transform KM and even the centuries-old relationship between reader and author. Wikis have a link at the bottom of the page that allows anyone to add, change or delete the text. Authoring tools, passwords or permission are not required. (To prevent disasters, older versions of each page are easily restored.) Changes are flagged via RSS alerts.

As a result, wikis represent an ideal medium for collaborative brainstorming. Imagine putting a plan for a new product on a wiki, and have it be modified to precisely reflect the requirements of potential customers! Think wikis can’t work? One favorite resource is the Wikipedia. It has more than 237,000 informative articles on a wide variety of topics (ranging from Bush to dumpster diving), all with numerous links back to source material. All the articles can be changed by anyone at any time, which means that the great content results from survival of the fittest. The only downside of wikis is that they are text-based, but considering the way many abuse HTML, that is not always bad.