Category: Other

Managers at Norwegian companies don’t like their employees to blog, according to a survey by Dagens Næringsliv. The survey asked what managers considered to be the greatest threats to their business. The primary worry was to lose key personnel:

1. Lose key personnel
2. Breakdown of IT system
3. Hacking
4. Identity theft/Phishing
5. Loss of intellectual property rights

The paper writes that one of four key koncerns for Norwegian managers is blogging. “Norwegian leaders don’t want their employees to blog. They don’t wish that internal information will be made public through that kind of channels.”:

Blogging: Norske ledere ønsker ikke at egne ansatte skal skrive blogger. De ønsker ikke at intern informasjon skal komme ut via slike kanaler. I USA har flere teknologiselskaper åpnet for ansattes blogging, innen gitte rammer.

Of course there is a risk involved in having blogging employees, but the potential rewards may be even greater. If your greatest concern is to lose key people, then maybe the strategy should be the opposite – let key people blog within given policies. There is a chance it will make them more committed, more satisfied and better spokes persons for your company. There’s also a risk they become so visible that someone else wants to recruit them, but having the most attractive work force on board is a luxury problem.

Seth Godin is on tour to promote his book All Marketers are Liars. The concept of the book is that marketers are good at telling stories that customers want to believe, but not necessarily are true. Here’s a comment from Godin on the What’s Your Brand Mantra blog about storytelling in the car industry:

If I ran GM, I’d figure out how to make the cars MORE different. Why doesn’t the Saab have Swedish words on the non-essential controls? Why doesn’t the Cadillac come with a better version of Onstar? Dollar for dollar, consumers spend more money on ridiculous stories for cars than anything else we buy. GM needs to learn before it’s too late that they are NOT in the assembly line business. They are in the business of telling stories.

Johan Norberg in today’s Expressen about blogs. “You [read journalists] have reason to be afraid.”

Noticed that Per Gudmundson’s abandoned blog still has 52 subscribers on Bloglines (inlcuding me). What are we hoping for, a resurrection?

If I didn’t know better, I could almost imagine that news agency TT reads my blog. Spot the similarities in this article about Prime Minister Göran Persson’s raise, and my previous post. Same conclusions, same sources. Now I don’t really think that they got inspired by my post, so I will settle for beating most papers with several hours.

Spitting images – journalist Björn Hedensjö of Dagens Industri and actor Keanu Reeves. Or was it the other way around?