Telstra Shuts Down Corporate Blogging Experiment

September 8, 2009 By

 nwat490

Telstra, Australia’s still-dominant telco, yesterday shut down its corporate blogging site nowwearetalking.com.au

CEO David Thodey’s letter announcing the shutdown promised “Telstra will launch a new corporate blogging website later this year”.

In keeping with the expressions of opinion from the opinionati when nowwearetalking launched back in 2005, from congratulatory/welcoming through curious/cautious to dismissive, blogosphere commentary on the shutdown, for example the comment stream on the mUmBRELLA post on the story, covers a spectrum of views from the “maybe it was a good thing” school to the unapologetically “good riddancers”. My impression is that there are significantly fewer voices saying it was or might have been a good thing than there are those of people glad, indeed very glad, to see the site gone.

Long time commentator on telecoms, the always well-informed and, in my observation over a number of years, always straight-talking Stuart Corner is in the good riddance camp.

Liam Tung at ZDNet provides a fairly non-judgemental synopsis of the nowwearetalking story and quotes mUmBRELLA’s Tim Burrows as being disappointed that the site is gone.

I believe it was a good thing that the experiment was tried. If nothing else, it showed up what can happen with a corporate blogging site when a corporation is battling not only its competitors but the nation’s government.

The general impression I have from zipping through the headlines on this topic in my online searching is that Tim Burrows was probably on the money when he opined yesterday to ZDNet that the site was just too much associated with former Telstra mouthpiece, the larger than life Phil Burgess and the Trujillo headed regime, and had to go.

No doubt the bones of this experiment in corporate blogging will be picked over, with lessons drawn and theories propounded, for some time to come. 

Media students, start your keyboards! I’m betting your lecturer will be setting nowwearetalking as an assignment before the week is out.

Image info: screenshot of nowwearetalking.com from Dec 2005, from The Wayback Machine at Archive.org

Filed Under: Blogging, Enterprise 2.0 Tagged With: , , , , , , ,

Government 2.0: Policy & Practice

June 21, 2009 By

I’m off to the national capital, Canberra, tonight for the all day event at Parliament House, Government 2.0: Policy and Practice. As indicated in a previous post, I’m speaking on the subject: Why parliamentarians and public sector managers need to participate in social media. The sub-head is: briefings and slide shows won’t cut it.

I plan to live blog the event with the help of Coveritlive and am embedding the code for that here. I’ll switch it on in the morning. In the meantime you can register to be reminded when it goes live.

Planning to have some other colleagues teaming up so as to make it as informative a feed as we can.

Update: My slides for the event are at Slideshare.

Filed Under: Enterprise 2.0, Government, Social Media, Social networking, Web 2.0 Tagged With: , , , ,

Ross Dawson, Future Exploration Network: Interview

March 21, 2009 By

To wrap up from the various interviews with speakers and workshop facilitators I’ve been posting here from the recent Enterprise 2.0 Executive Forum, I’m pleased to be able to post this interview with the event’s instigator, impresario, convenor and chairman of proceedings, Ross Dawson, CEO of Future Exploration Network.

This interview was done just after the formalities concluded for the day.

At the event blog, Ross has reported in detail on coverage of the event. A few key posts are:

Presentations at Enterprise 2.0 Executive Forum – part 1

Presentations at Enterprise 2.0 Executive Forum – part 2

Presentations at Enterprise 2.0 Executive Forum – part 3

Several slide presentations from the day are embedded on the site and there are links to others.

There is also a post summarizing the Future Exploration Network report released on the day, Implementing Enterprise 2.0. I hope to get around to doing a review of the report here soon. My immediate reaction on a first, admittedly quick read was that this report will be a boon for many executives, consultants and others working in the Enterprise 2.0 space. I certainly intend to put my copy to good use!

Filed Under: Business, Enterprise 2.0, Social Media, Web 2.0 Tagged With: , , , , ,

Stephen Collins, acidlabs.org: Interview

March 20, 2009 By

This interview with Stephen Collins, CEO of acidlabs.org, at the end of the day’s proceedings at Enterprise 2.0 Executive Forum in Sydney on Feb 24 is like a good espresso – strong and short. It’s strong because of the clarity and focus of Steve’s observations. It’s short because the batteries on the Flip camera ran out! :(

I had thought of not posting it because it finishes rather abruptly. Then I decided that would be a waste of the valuable comments Steve provides on the state of the Enterprise 2.0 nation in Australia right now, drawing on the day’s presentations.

And it is a positive picture, for example in that, as Steve mentions, we now have some real case studies, with real stories of execution, from Australia. I concur: so good not to have to rely solely on overseas case studies to tell the story and help make the business case.

Steve comments approvingly that one of the key messages through the day was that getting Web 2.0 adopted effectively is “all about people’s problems long before it is about technology problems”.

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Filed Under: Enterprise 2.0, Social Media, Web 2.0 Tagged With: , , , , , ,

Steven Noble, Forrester Research: Interview

March 19, 2009 By

One of the best things to happen last year for research on social media in my part of the world – i.e. Australasia and more broadly the Asia-Pacific – was the Forrester Research appointment of Steven Noble as a Senior Analyst. As well as being a very clear and disciplined thinker, Steve is a blogger – both as one of the worldwide group of bloggers, authoring his Elbow Grease blog at his former place of employ, Hill & Knowlton, and on a personal level where he blogged and blogs about his neighbourhood in Sydney’s once seriously tough and now rather more upmarket inner western suburb of Chippendale.

In this short interview at the end of the day’s formal phase at Enterprise 2.0 Executive Forum Steve opens by commenting that he thinks he is talking to HAL (so now my Flip camera has a new name).

In more serious vein he observes that a must-view item from the day’s proceedings is the slide deck from the presentation, Creating Business Value from Emerging Technologies, by David Backley, General Manager Applications Development and Maintenance at Westpac, one of Australia’s “Big Four” banks – the presentation was titled .

Steve says social media will “continue to boom across Asia”, but for different reasons in different markets, mentioning specifically India, Australia and China.

Some Web 2.0 related points Steve makes on China:

  • rapid urbanisation of the population
  • more people online in China than in the US (not new information, but worth the reminder)
  • 40% of online adults in metropolitan China are content creators, publishing regularly
  • marketers are responding to that!
Filed Under: Business, China, Enterprise 2.0, Social Media, Social networking, Web 2.0 Tagged With: , , , , , ,
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