What are the advantages and disadvantages of implementing internal versus external employee blogs in a corporate setting? Are there certain industries where one of these strategies makes more sense?

Some of the benefits that external blogs can bring to a firm are the following:
• Blogs represent the lowest cost and effective communications channel with costumers.
• If companies are properly able to leverage benefits of this technology, they can create communities of products ambassadors that will improve sales and firm’s recognition.
• Blogs can show honesty and transparency within a firm to people outside the organization.
• They can help firms to get more knowledge from their external environment.
• They can also improve external communication and feedback with consumers, firm’s marketing and branding activities, and search engine position.

Internal blogging also offer the following benefits:
• They represent very strong communication and information sharing tools within the organization since any employee can participate at any time.
• Blogs can be used at every level of the organization; they can improve participation, collaboration, and learning. They also make easy to run projects with heterogeneous teams.
• They become the written memory of the organization, and speed up the transference of knowledge to make ideas flow easily.

Internal blogging is very useful in almost any industry because of the multiple benefits. External blogging also makes sense in most industries but might be very difficult to implement in some highly regulated and supervised industries such as investment banking, health care and pharmaceutics. Although many firms in these industries have already implemented some initiatives of social technologies, they usually require too much effort, time, and energy. It is true because regulatory entities are constantly watching companies within these industries, and posting content to blogs require many control mechanisms and corporate policies within firms to ensure compliance with regulations and avoid legal implications. In these regulated industries, firms should outweigh the benefits of using blogs against its costs before making a decision to implement this technology.

As a follow-up to Apple and the Mobile Industry subject, here is an article , from CNN Money that talks about the new iPhone OS coming up this summer. After reading about the many new cool features of this OS and how it seems to address the tastes of the pickiest users, I can not avoid to point innovation and creativity as some of the reasons why Apple is a very strong player that is increasing dominance in the mobile industry.

Has the digital music market irreversibly tipped in Apple’s favor?
Nowadays, it seems that more than ever consumers are looking for multi-functionality in a single device. Phones now include cameras, video cameras, recorders, web browsing, of course, media player functionality, among other capabilities. As of today, Apple has made the right strategic moves, especially, when it introduced Apple iPhone. The iPhone seems to have captured the best of the mobile capabilities and the iPod. These types of moves have helped Apple to stay ahead of the competition and keep its position as a leader of the digital music market. However, there are still ahead many battles to win for Apple. Mobile Network operators, record labels, handset maker are forming strategic alliances to try to defeat Apple’s dominance. In addition, other strong players from other industries are also trying to leverage their position in complementary industries to capture some value in the digital market. Moreover, the industry is still evolving, and there are many important technological and legal changes to come such as the rules that govern the DRM technology, which might change the rules and positions of this industry. Consequently, the digital music market has not irreversibly tipped in Apple’s favor yet, and if Apple wants to remain competitive on this growing market, it would need to keep being innovative, creative, flexible, and pro-active.

Here is an article from CNET, "Why video game developer acquisitions scare me" , that makes a parallel comparison of the major movie studios in Hollywood and the biggest game publishers. It also explains how game publishers such as Activision and EA with acquisitions of small developers could take control of the industry and diminish innovation on this game industry.

What are the strengths and weaknesses of Brightcove’s business model?
The Strengths of the Brightcove’s business model are the following:
• A comprehensive designed business model that covers different players such as Publishers, Consumer,Advertisers, and Affiliates and places Brightcove on the center of all the players.
• A sophisticated pricing model that enables Brightcove to get revenues from all the different sides of this system.
• It requires a strong technical infrastructure that allows Brightcove to take advantage of its in-house talent in technology.
• This concept, on of its sides, targets the long tail of video content, which has proved to be a key success factor to other companies such a Netflix and Amazon.
• This business model allows providing advertiser with specific target audiences, which are considered premium audiences and drive top revenues.

The Weaknesses of the Brightcove’s business model are the following:
• This concept is not difficult to imitate. In fact, with $750k investment and 10 month of development could be replicated. Thus, this model is not a source of sustainable advantage for Brightcove.
• Many premium content publishers are not willing to trade control for 50% share of advertising revenue. They want to have full control of their content and benefit from any profit generated by their content.
• Brightcove is not able to define clearly who the targeted market should be among publishers.
• It has many strong competitors that are running part of this model successfully and have the first mover advantage.
• It might have “the penguin problem”. For instance, advertisers will not make their first move if consumers have not moved, and, on the same way, publishers will not be attracted to this platform if advertisers are not in. Consumers will likely be attracted once they have variety on video content.