Enterprise blogging at the crossroads

I looked around the room during Marc Benioff’s press conference at Dreamforce, and felt pride that bloggers were the ones asking the smartest questions. They are banded together at ZDNet, Constellation, Forbes and Diginomica or stay solo like Brian Vellmure and Denis Pombriant and are fairly respected in tech world.

Seven years ago, I was a founding member of the Enterprise Irregulars. The moniker was a tribute to the stray kids that only a few bright minds on Baker Street knew about. We have come a long, long way since.

And yet, in many ways, the world has not stayed steady. Industry analysts continue to thrive, magazines are rebounding, books are not dead and all kinds of new media are emerging guided by savvy technologists like Pierre Omidyar and Jeff Bezos

Here are some areas enterprise blogging could do better at

We are not in touch with corporate tech

A Forrester analyst tells me he does not spend much time on Twitter. “My corporate clients are not there.”. Bloggers in contrast seem to live on the social nets, merrily tweeting away from every event to the benefit of each other. Bloggers also seem to have little interest in all the innovation happening at GE and GM and Daimler. They seem primarily interested in vendors and tech investors.

We are narrowly focused

The iPad in particular with its awesome color saturation and platform for interactive content is giving magazines a chance to be reborn. And many of them are covering a wider range of technology. Fortune's latest issue, for example, covers global technology as China looks to build its own airliners, the technology at the San Francisco 49ers as they plan their new stadium, medical technology at Mayo Clinic and more. As I look for posts on New Florence, magazines are  becoming a major source of posts. Bloggers in contrast tend to pick a tech category – be it HR or CRM. Nothing wrong in specializing - but we should not be extarpolating to the rest of the world from just that POV.

We are not creating much long-form content

At Dreamforce it was good to spend time with Jeff Kaplan and talk about his cloud marketplace. It is good to see  recent books from Scoble/Shel and Leander. It is good to see videocasts from Jon Reed. Books or other distinctive IP require extensive research which fewer bloggers appear to be investing in. It is depressing to see many bloggers just tweet others' content.  

I could go on. Bloggers have come a long way. But we have lots more to do.