Wigley and Associates

I’m paying close attention to the role of weblogs and “conversational journalism/citizen-driven journalism” — citizens being more than passive consumers of media.

Here’s an exerpt from a comment by Jay Rosen, NYU journalism professor who’s turning into one of the premier bloggers re: democracy and the press/media. The comment is attached to this posting on his weblog, Press Think, titled: What’s Radical About the Weblog Form in Journalism?

“… Another view says that what’s radical is not the technology, which of course has a million uses, many of them mundane. It’s the community setting in which the experiment is taking place, which is live discussion. But not only that. It’s a voluntary thing for the most part. The expectation is not economic reward; it’s to become a speaker in the public square. This is drawing people toward a kind of journalism, but not as professionals in news.

You cannot isolate “a” weblog and its users from the larger web of talking blogs and the people who are devoting a lot of time to this. Miss the conversation going on among them, and you have missed the point. It’s the dialogue among separate sources of information that’s radically new. We haven’t had a very “conversational” journalism from big providers– and people are finding out it’s excitingly different.”

Key phrase: “It’s the dialogue among separate sources of information that’s radically new.”

I’m starting an effort to get it going in Northfield. See my initial post to the Northfield.org weblog and then a parallel post to my new Citizen Wig weblog, with a follow-up comment from Jay Rosen.

So what does this have to do with Wigley and Associates, you might ask?

It would be interesting to add “creating a civic blogosphere” to a local unit of government’s bag of strategic tools — a city or a county especially. The idea would be to get key players, relevant institutions, and interested citizens to crank up their own civic-oriented weblogs and then agree to read each other’s blogs and link to posts as they see fit.

The goal would be to raise the level of civic discourse. The more people who engage in civic conversations, the more engaged they’ll be in the civic life of the area, the better for everyone who lives nearby.

If you represent a local unit of government and would like to explore this idea further, let me know.

Ray Cox has posted a note to his Northfield Construction weblog today, one that falls into the category I label Voicing an opinion on a public policy or issue that affects one’s organization. (See the blog post examples page for categories of posts.) His posting is titled Commercial Tax Base and details his frustration with the city of Northfield’s process on a proposed new building downtown. He knows that more and more people in town are reading his weblog and so I’ve encouraged him to use it as a platform for voicing his opinions about public policy issues that affect his company.

See BL Ochman’s blog post on our ad panel. ‘Tis true… no Internet connection. Argh. My comments were limited to Northfield Construction Company and the “authentic voice” of its owner, Ray Cox. My comments seemed to reasonate with at least four (count ‘em – FOUR!) people in the audience. Henry Copeland, CEO of Blogads, noticed that my emphasis on authentic voice was congruent with the principles espoused in The Cluetrain Manifesto. Others who graciously took the time to give me a little F2F thumbs-up: BL Ochman (What’s Next Online), David Wertheimer (User Savvy) and Ad-Tech Adisory Board member and conference chair Susan Bratton. For more, see panel moderator Rick Bruner’s Would-Be Speaking Notes on Blogs for Business Blogging Panel.

I got a small preview of this new report, Business Blogs: How Successful Companies Get Real Results With Weblogs, at the Ad-Tech conference in NYC on Monday when co-author Rick Bruner showed some screenshots during our panel.

11/7 Update: A few of my Wigley and Associates‘ clients are in it: The Contented Cow, Chapati, City of Eden Prairie, and Northfield Construction Company.

I’ve tended to agree with the premise in this article that appeared in the Guardian about a month ago titled, Why blogs could be bad for business. “The notion that more than a few companies might relax their external relations strategies enough to allow weblog communication, willy-nilly, between staff members and the outside world, is absurd, no matter how many consultants insist such communication might actually have a beneficial effect on a company’s image.” But in the November issue of Business 2.0 is a piece that makes me wonder: The Naked Corporation: Fueled by the Internet’s glare, the age of transparency will transform the way business is done. – It’s based on the new book, The Naked Corporation: How the Age of Transparency Will Revolutionize Business by Don Tapscott and David Ticoll. “We are entering an extraordinary age of openness, where businesses must, for the first time, make themselves clearly visible to shareholders, customers, employees, partners and society. Financial data, grievances, internal memos, environmental disasters, product weaknesses, protests, scandals, and policies; good news and bad; all can be seen by anyone who knows where to look. The new world of transparency revolutionizes every aspect of our economy and forces firms to rethink their fundamental values. Few understand how far the revolution will take us, or what do do about it.”

I’m heading to NYC today for the Ad-Tech conference (back on Tuesday eve), where I’m on a panel titled Blogging for Business: Using Weblogs for Marketing and Nano-Publishing. I hope to be able to post occasionally from there, though since it’s about blogging, I plan to post on my Small Business Blogging site’s weblog.