In short:

• Blogs are a better tool for the job for a lot of business communications.
• Using blogs at work will help people discover uses for blogs in the rest of their lives.
• Nobody else can do it, and we can’t afford to leave it up to companies that don’t care about blogging.

and:

Because while those of us who work on our own or for smaller companies can say “Well, I want to work on a Mac.” or “I’m only going to use Firefox.” or “I’m only going to use open source applications.” (and most of us at Six Apart fall into those camps), most non-technical people not only don’t have that option, they don’t care enough to find out how to do that stuff. You use what your boss tells you to, and even if you have other preferences, they’re not worth the fight when you’re just trying to get your job done.

So, instead of having to use some horrible “Groupware Knowledge Management Content Solution Server” thing, we think people should be able to use real blogs from a company that actually cares about blogging. And to do that, we have to make blogging tools feel “safe” to bosses and CIOs and CTOs and IT departments and other offices full of people whose job it is to say “no” to anything too new or unproven.

The only thing I would add is that we’ve got to go even further– way past the idea of “real blogs” and into a world that acknowledges that tools from Six Apart are “content management solutions”.

Last summer we implemented a large-scale TypePad system for the Catherine Cook School in Chicago. We spent some time training the teachers and staff at the school and they really took to the system. Here’s a rundown of how they used it:

• Nearly 2,000 posts spread over 40 separate websites, one for each classroom and major activity like library
• 11,318 visits and 32,872 page views for an average of about 3 page views per visit
• The visits were spread evenly among the sites, showing a large acceptance of the classroom websites from parents. The top two most popular sites (science and Kathleen Woolney’s junior kindergarten class) each had 7% of the total visitors, with the remaining visits spread very evenly. If you post, they will come.
• About 75% of the sites were updated on a regular basis, by far the largest percentage of any system I’ve ever implemented
• Parents loved the system and bought into it all the way, subscribing by RSS, downloading pictures, and relying on the sites for basic information

Some examples:

After School Adventures:  http://catherinecookschool.typepad.com/asa/
Kept parents informed about times, costs, and descriptions of dozens of programs throughout the year.

Andy Robinson - Humanities: http://catherinecookschool.typepad.com/arobinson/
85 posts, focused on the brass-tacks of homework assignments, study guides,  and other key information that eight-graders need to know at 10:00 when they start freaking about what’s due tomorrow

Parent Association: http://catherinecookschool.typepad.com/parent/
38 red-meat posts focusing on meeting minutes, fund raising programs, and  seminars put on by the group

Cindii Dirori - Middle School Matters:  http://catherinecookschool.typepad.com/cindi_diiorio/
Lots of communication from the head of the Middle School along with links to photos albums on Picassa for the web, great use of third-party services to get things done.

Holly Montalvo - Preshool: http://catherinecookschool.typepad.com/holly_montalvopreschool/
Great use of a classroom site for general reminders, photo posts, and out-of-the-classroom activities. Updated 83 times throughout the year.

Science: http://catherinecookschool.typepad.com/science
A whopping 325 posts. Chock-full of classroom notes, powerpoints about the nervous system, and other useful teaching and learning materials. This was the most-visited site, with 2,337 page views

Kathleen Woolney - JK: http://catherinecookschool.typepad.com/kathleen_wolney_jk/
Very popular among parents, especially for the large amount of photos.

Mrs. Lyon’s Third Grade: http://catherinecookschool.typepad.com/vlyon/newsletter/index.html
This is a great resource for parents considering the school, as it has nearly every newsletter from the classroom, showing the curriculum for each week.

Ms. Major’s Humanities Classes: http://catherinecookschool.typepad.com/jmajors/
Another very popular site with tons of pictures and resources

Often called “the read/write web“, Web 2.0 is the shift from a passive relationship— where publishers make HTML pages and users browse them— to one where everyone can publish and everyone can consume stuff on the internet.

This shift is touching everything

• News publishers such as the Washington Post encourage readers to submit links to their news articles at leading social bookmarking sites such as Digg and Facebook in order to expand the reach of their content and deepen relationships with readers
• Marketers such as Columbia Pictures create Myspace pages to promote movie soundtracks that mimic the look & feel of their official corporate sites. This way they can connect with fans and allow them to hear samples before buying right where they’re already hanging out
• New companies like Twitter allow a normal web user to publish real-time accounts of Cricket games for anyone to read

This site has a simple mission: to define Web 2.0 technology in plain terms and describe why they’re important to business. Contact us if you’re interested in putting these technologies to work for your business.

If you have some time, see this video for a plain-language explanation of the impact of Web 2.0

Here’s a great 4-1/2 minute video created by an Anthropology professor that gives you a great start on understanding the promise of Web 2.0.

• User gets an email triggered from your web publishing system. The email contains a post about a sale on shoes that starts this Friday. She forwards the email to a friend and makes plans to meet for dinner at the restaurant next door to you. Result: 2 sales come Friday
• User subscribes to your RSS feed and keeps up with all your posts on his My Yahoo page. He sees that you have an expertise in construction law, and he tells his father— a foreman for a concrete company— all about you. The father calls 411 to get your number and becomes a key client
• User does a search for “Chicago dentist Logan Square” at Google. They see your ad on the right-hand side of the screen, as well as in the #1 spot in the search results. They call the phone number from your listing, turn off their computer, and make an appointment for next Tuesday

In each of these instances, your website led to more business— but no one ever looked at it! Moreover, the evidence of the effectiveness of your site won’t show up in the traditional measures.

Upshot: Your website is a platform for influence— the essential start to any online sales & marketing strategy. But there are a multitude of ways that your website can influence positive buying decisions other than a simple visit to your site.

• Just because people are talking about your product on consumer-generated media (blogs, message boards, comment threads, Amazon reviews, etc.) doesn’t mean that they’re going to buy your product
• Blogging buzz can serve more sophisticated, nuanced public relations goals— generate television appearances, establish yourself as an expert, and so on
• Blogging and other social network platforms have to be considered a core media. Perhaps BookScan should include data on how much ad revenue was generated by advertising sales and other “influence factors” on blog posts and forum entries about particular books.

Snip on the failure of buzz to generate actual book sales:

Recent mommy books that have not lived up to the promise of their publicity include Sylvia Ann Hewlett, Creating a Life: Professional Women and the Quest for Children, which sold only 11,000 copies in hardcover and 2,000 in paperback, according to BookScan, despite the book’s appearance on a 60 Minutes, The Oprah Winfrey Show and the covers of Time and New York magazines.

And the alternative goals:

Some authors say that book sales are not the only goal. Ms. Hirshman, who wrote a shortened version of her book for the online site of American Prospect magazine six months before the book’s release, said the book was just a platform for getting her ideas into the ether.

I guess the media world has changed in such a way that a book is just a pretext for television appearances and blogging and writing for The New Republic, Ms. Hirshman said. If the world is divided into people who don’t need my message and women who don’t want to hear it, it’s a miracle I sold any books.

We still, however like TypePad in a number of instances, usually when a larger organization needs to set up a large set of sites that will fade in/ fade out through time.

One of the issues with TypePad is the way that its Advanced Templates work is that it makes you propagate the same code— for instance, the header and footer that is the same throughout your site— throughout the 5 basic templates (Main, Category, Individual, Database, and Archive). This can lead to a lot of maintenance if you do a site design or just want to change a simple link in your footer.

Luckily, the answer is built right in to TypePad. They allow for the creation of new “modules”, or code pieces, that can be “included” in each template with a simple line of code. The sidebars in the default TypePad templates already use this method, so that all you have to do is change your sidebar and it is changed on every page of your site.

All we have to do is create a “header.inc” and a “footer.inc.” module, put the code rendering each of these pieces in the proper module, call for them properly in each template, and we have a streamlined code base that is easier to maintain.