Forrester Research finally announced the launch of its official analyst blog and social platform.

It has been about a month since Forrester sparked controversy with its decision to disallow their analysts to operate independent blogs (decision does not involve purely personal interest blogs).

There were many well known blogs affected by this decision, some examples being The Heretic by Tom Grant, Mobile Strategy by Julie Ask, and other Forrester employed individuals that maintained and cultivated their blogs outside of the official Forrester web property. While Forrester’s logic was well explained by Josh Bernoff, the issue at the center of the conflict seems to be personal exposure vs. benefit to the employer.

The new platform is being positioned as a customer focused improvement over the previous unregulated collection of blogs. From a customer perspective the consolidation does seem an improvement, but it remains to be seen if the analysts themselves have suffered any loss of motivation from this experience.

Although it is extremely worthwhile to read the entire article and draw your own conclusions, here are the points which resonated with me:

• Experiment with new content formats and user participation: Blog posts are not just columns and op-ed pieces. Stephen M. Walt of the Harvard’s Kennedy School of Government found that he could actually develop ongoing pieces based on live developments and included multiple perspectives. Instead of his own single perspective on a certain battle in Afghanistan, he actually began to interact with the battle participants and integrating their perspectives into the analysis. So don’t be limited to column format pieces and truly push the medium.
• Be ready to be challenged and let go of being a perfectionist: Pieces are developed with short lead times and that presents an additional challenge as bloggers: “have to have a much thicker skin because the response is so instantaneous you’re likely to be wrong more often than you would with something you spend months or years working on.” Again, a great piece of insight from Stephen M. Walt. The feedback will range from absurd, to supportive, to challenging so be flexible.
• Don’t be afraid of strong positions and perhaps a bit of sensationalism: Bloggers note that taking on controversial topics gained the most attention and feedback. While not necessarily surprising, it may make sense to create a balance between posts that take on controversial topics that would provide a boost in overall readership.
• Be ready for a real commitment and time investment: This seems to be the biggest challenge. David J. Rothkoff of the Carnegie Endowment found: “My main goal when I started was that it shouldn’t take more than 15 minutes a day. That was not successful.” Evgeny Morozov of the Open Society Institute also noted the key challenge of “feeding the beast.” “Sometimes I wake up and just think ‘I’ve got nothin’. I have to do a lot of prior planning. I have a notebook where I keep ideas, and sometimes I’ll incubate something for several weeks.” Being a frequent blogger is quite a time investment so make sure you’re ready for that type of commitment and idea generation is another key challenge.

Blogging is a great platform to take a thought leadership position within an online space and it makes sense to do it especially since most organizations have such a wealth brain power locked away behind the company walls. However, before opening up these points and challenges are worth addressing, otherwise failure is a very real option.

As the Wall Street Journal recently explored, this can be especially vexing for layoff announcements in a world of blogs, citing a Yahoo case where “its instructions to managers conducting layoffs — ’15 minutes maximum,’ ‘don’t engage in small talk’ — were published by the blog Valleywag.com.”

Sites like Overheard in the Office offer an anonymous outlet for harmless (usually) office gossip, but how should companies prepare for the eventuality of a leak that could lead to legal action?

It can be somewhat of a paradox. Building trust with employees and fostering open lines of communication are strong tools for developing a relationship where those with access to sensitive information will honor its sensitivity. Some employees just won’t have that capacity – particularly those who are on their way out or know they will be soon.

So, another approach might be to limit employee access to private information to reduce the possibility of leaks a priori. However, this disintigrates trust, and can lead to cumbersome bureaucracy, censorship, and spying.

Some advocate for companies to act completely openly, as if there is no filter between their email screen and the front page of Gawker. From the PR perspective, this translates as “there is no such thing as off-the-record.”

To complicate matters – in PR, sometimes we walk a fine line of “leaking” information by soft-sounding reporters. It can be appropriate to build a reporter’s interest in a story by sharing some enticing details of a story without providing client identifiers.

And sometimes PR pros purposely and openly “leak” information in the form of an embargoed press release. But as we’ve seen recently, the practice of ignoring embargoes has been catching on, as TechCrunch recently announced they will ignore embargoes and WSJ partially adopted a no embargoes policy.

Have you ever leaked sensitive information?

Maybe don’t answer that on this blog.

This conference call had all the classic elements: poor sound quality, audible  typing into the microphone, and long blocks of hard-to-follow dialogue.  However, overall the effect of galvanizing support and getting the message across to the influentials worked: it resulted in on-message coverage from all the bloggers.  Granted, this is the actual President of the United States speaking to bloggers so they are likely to pay attention; nevertheless, there are important lessons here.  This was a high level executive making time to actually speak to bloggers and make relationships.  Not many CEOs do that.  The element of research was also present as these were progressive/liberal leaning bloggers that would almost certainly be receptive to the President’s message.  This research element of understanding a blogger position before outreach cannot be underestimated.   Bloggers are the new journalists and need to be treated accordingly. It is nice to see these basic tactics being practiced by President Obama.

See sample coverage and listen to the call here

A Deal.com Tech Confidential video interview with Silicon Alley Insider CEO, Henry Blodget below. Scroll to 2:00 or so to get to his take on the future of business blogging.

The gist is that pajama bloggers and traditional media are converging. As hobby blogs become more professional, traditional media are learning how to use the Internet to overcome the obsolescence of their delivery mechanism with NYT and WSJ as shining examples (although with the Wall Street Journal‘s online redesign isn’t so "shining").

He also criticizes TV as being one-way, which is rough for business viewers, who prefer to interact (like on Mad Money?). Although, with CNN’s increasing use of Twitter, that might be changing.

What’s your favorite example of MSM gone digital?

My colleague Yan’s recent post on blog commenters got me to thinking about Lithuanian politics, corruption, and corporate blogging.

Allow me to explain…

Comments, to me, are like mini letters to the editor. They empower readers and can often be more beneficial than the content on which they reflect. They drive blogging, provide it with power, and foster online conversation. They’re democracy in action!

That was my impression, at least until I worked on a political campaign in Lithuania. Tracking news about my candidates on the popular Delfi news portal, stories often received thousands of comments. I quickly learned that those comments usually come from hired goons who lambaste their targets within seconds of a story’s posting.

This was frustrating (to say the least) for high-powered politicians who tracked stories about themselves. What would you do if your competition was out there destroying your image via an unbiased news source? Would you lock yourself in your office for the rest of the day trying vainly to respond to every vile word (like a politician I knew did)?

This is not a healthy or effective solution. There are several "-bilities" to consider when responding (or not) to trolls and cases of flaming online:

• Credibility – There are websites out there that allow voting/rating on comments to varying degrees, among them, NYT, YouTube, and Digg. Until this is a widespread means of filtering out irrelevant comments, remember that comments can come from anywhere.
• Ignorability – Is bad publicity is better than no publicity? Evaluate whether responding to an incendiary attack will really quell any disputes. Sometimes ignoring can be the best policy.
• Meet up (ability) – Other times, ignoring an issue will make it worse. Consider engaging legitimate commenters, as Andrew Revkin, author of NYT blog Dot Earth recently did.
• Googleability – Fight fire with content by increasing the amount of Googleable news about yourself. From a PR perspective, this is what you should be doing anyway.

Surely, there are many more avenues to consider.

What do you do when your CEO wants to pull a Rahodeb?