Marketing Profs published an article last week titled Storytelling for Leaders by Evelyn Clark.

In the current issue of Newsweek: Blogging

With The Boss’s Blessing.
Until recently, the thought of employees blabbing freely to the masses about their work on company time — without the suits from PR hovering over them to stay “on message” — would have created panic in the executive suite. But in the past year, employee blogs have begun to multiply across Corporate America — and a growing number of companies approve. It started mostly as a techie thing when engineers and product developers at places such as Macromedia, Sun Microsystems, and Dell began posting first-draft free-for-alls of their own volition as a way of communicating with customers, each other, and the outside world. Though employees represent just a fraction of the 2.7 million bloggers today, experts predict they will grow robustly as consumers demand information in a more unvarnished way.

In the online edition of Business Week from earlier this month: Wikis’ Winning Ways

You may have heard of Weblogs, but chances are wikis haven’t hit your radar yet. Both are rapidly evolving examples of what some call social software — programs that foster a connection to other people and, if they work well, a thriving community. Whereas blogs enable individuals to post a regular chronicle of their thoughts and interests online, wikis are fairly focused Web sites compiled and constantly edited by a dedicated group of people — all of whom can not only post material to the site but edit it at will.

Lately, wikis have caught on with teams inside corporations. They’re using wikis as a speedy way to collaborate without having to endure endless back-and-forth e-mail exchanges or dealing with complex and expensive groupware, such as IBM’s (IBM ) Lotus Notes. Before long, wikis may come to a computer screen near you.

This week I drafted a chapter with the working title, Showing community involvement in which I profile two blog posts: Youth baseball sponsorship by Ray Cox at Northfield Construction Company, posted in July, 2003. Tree donation by Deb Knecht at Knecht’s Nurseries and Landscaping, posted in April, 2004. I’ll likely add more and I welcome suggestions.

Dan Carlson, the chief of police for the City of Eden Prairie, MN now has a weblog he’s calling Chief Blogger. His boss, City Manager Scott Neal, has been a weblog client for two years now with his popular Blog from City Hall.

I don’t know of any other municipality in the country (continent? hemisphere? world?) that has both a city manager and police chief with weblogs.

I expect to have two new weblog/website clients to announce in the next week or so. A printing company and a coffeehouse.

New non-profit client: the Northfield Downtown Development Corporation (NDDC). Executive Director Ross Currier and board chair Dan Bergeson have had one or more blogs on their site for a while but now want to make more effective use of them.

I’m not sure where the term “Hyperlocal Journalism” originated but it’s starting to be used to describe the kind of local blogging we’re doing on Northfield.org. Last week, I used the weblog to cover the rising waters of the Cannon River over the course of three days and it drew the attention of Len Witt and his Public Journalism weblog. Scroll through the blog and you’ll see terms like “hyper-local news” to describe the “every-citizen’s-a-journalist movement.”

Yesterday I met with Randolph Jennings (aka Randy Jennings), a friend and colleague here in Northfield who has book publishing experience. He gave me lots of feedback and several good ideas and we now plan to meet weekly to review the previous week’s writing. My goal is to write at least one hour per weekday. I’m targeting 7-8 am but will find other time slots during the day if I can’t or don’t get it done then. We’ll see if this weekly meeting and a public statement here is enough of a hammer over my head to get the book done by the end of the summer. Randy knows Don Leeper, owner of Pagewing which has Digital Publishing System: “…a web-based software application allowing publishers to create a book as a master XML file that can be stored, edited, and used to generate multiple output options on the fly, including high-quality typeset pages for offset printing, print-on-demand files, and various ebook formats.” Could be what I’ll need. Unbeknownst to me, Leeper got seed financing from a colleague, Gary Smaby of the Quatris Fund. And the guy who put the two of them together was another colleague, Mike O’Connor, formerly one of my bosses at gofast.net. Cool.

Last week I initiated an online discussion (via Northfield.org’s ISSUES list that I’m moderating) about getting public wi-fi access for all of downtown Northfield. The city of Chaska, MN was in the news last week for this. A colleague, Bob Courchaine of Northfield Internetworking, is now in a position (literally) to do this as he’s relocated his office to the SMSQ building just across the river from downtown.

I’d like to see the Northfield Chamber of Commerce, the City of Northfield’s EDA, and the Northfield Downtown Development Corporation (NDDC – a new client) collaborate to make all of downtown a wi-fi hotspot. If it’s common knowledge that “Hey, we can get together/have our meeting anywhere downtown Northfield because wi-fi is everywhere there” then that’s likely to be good for the overall economic vitality of downtown.

I’m in Duluth for the US round of the World Trials Championship, taking photos and blogging for the organizers and the US Montesa importer, Martin Belair (a website/weblog client). I helped World Round USA set up a high-speed wireless connection at the Spirit Mountain lodge last weekend and that’s turned out to be a big hit with many of the motorcycle factory staff and journalists from Europe and Japan. One of the sections is right outside the lodge and I’m going to try posting near-real-time updates on the competition tomorrow and Sunday from the bleachers.

I’ve suggested to the Spirit Mountain staff that they provide wi-fi on an ongoing basis, since they have a series of events coming up this summer like the Greenman Festival & Mountain Bike Race and the MS 150 Bike Tour. The advantages of a wi-fi hotspot for an event:

- It allows more people to attend an event if they know that they can combine work and pleasure because they have online access.

- It facilitates media coverage of the event because it makes journalists’ job easier.

- The more that people are blogging and photoblogging from the event, the more the event’s website gets linked to which helps to promote the event long-term.

Let me know if you can think of other advantages to providing a wi-fi hotspot for an event.

Washington Post: Microsoft’s Gates Touts Blogging as Business Tool

Gates described to his audience, which included Warren Buffett, Jeff Bezos, Michael Dell, Carly Fiorina, Barry Diller and other top business executives, how blogs worked and suggested that they could be used as a tool for businesses to communicate with customers. “It’s getting away from the drawbacks of e-mail and the drawbacks of a Web site,’ Gates said.

See the full transcript on the Microsoft site.