Infosys Think Flat Blog Review

Corporate Blogging

Have you seen the blog of Jonathan Schwartz? (He is the President & CEO of Sun Microsystems.) The blog shows his drive towards transparency and openness, and to be consistent both inside and outside the organization. This gets him credibility.

Corporate blogs are mostly written by top management – Chairman, President, CEO and Directors. Such blogs spread good news about the company and the company’s views and values to the public and its clients. More importantly, it is a channel for interaction and receiving feedback. This works only if an organization is open enough to listen to the external world rather than pushing their ideas only.

Blogs are written by one or a few bloggers. Blogging is entirely different from just publishing articles or news items. Blogs has a personal touch. Blogs has to interact with its readers. Occassionally you can invite other eminent guests to write about a particular topic under discussion.

Infosys Blog Review

Recently I posted a quick review of Infosys website. Now that Infosys also is in the corporate blogosphere with the Think Flat Blog, I thought of spending an hour for its review too. I hope that Infosys’s eletronic or web marketing team will take these critique positive and think flat over it.

1. It seems the Think Flat Blog uses Movable Type blogging software from Six Apart, and hosted by Yahoo Small Business. So Infosys has a new domain name infosysblogs.com for the blogs. It is suggested to host the blog in Infosys’s own web server which helps in configuring and customizing. Also use blogs.infosys.com sub domain for the blog, this gives more credibility and page ranking to the pages. Infosysblogs.com is not yet page ranked and and will have to wait for sometime to get popularity. Basically Infosys is not resusing its domain popularity! BTW, blog.gartner.com is a good example.

   Google for Think Flat, you will not find the blog (infosysblogs.com/thinkflat) listed first. You will find thinkflat.infosys.com sub domain coming up first, followed by my own blog post Think Flat – Does It Sound Negative?

   
   
   Click to enlarge the image, screen captured on 30-Aug-2006.

   The blog would have appeared first in the list if the blog was hosted in blogs.infosys.com sub domain, because the infosys.com domain already has a Google page ranking of 7, where as my blog at ananthapuri.com (moved to teck.in in July 2007) has a page rank of only 4.

2. The first post in the blog was made by Nandan Nilekani (CEO, Infosys Technologies) and the second one by Stephen Pratt (CEO of Infosys Consulting). After those two posts, I do not see any new posts by top management or board members. Rest of the blog posts are by someone else (whose profile is not published in the blog) and do not seem to align with the objective of the blog. The posts seem more for marketing than a corporate blog. Infosys can have the top management write about corporate governance, the flattening world, strategies to win in the flat world, values in the flat world, operational priorities, etc. – the topics the external world would listen to.
3. It would be nice to have a webpage introducing the blog authors. This will bring in more credibility to the posts.
4. Include a Blog Calendar to browse through the posts.
5. Provide standard blogging tools like RSS/XML, digg it, del.icio.us, Google Reader, Technorati tags, etc.. This helps the readers subscribe to the feed and tag in social bookmark sites.
6. Add blog search functionatity.
7. You can also add recent comments and recent trackbacks sections to the sidebar.
8. Provide blog comments as RSS feed.
9. Provide Email Notification service for new posts.
10. Add poll functionality if interested.
11. Add Email the post functionality for each blog entry
12. List the categories each post belongs to under the post, clicking on it should list all posts in that category.
13. Blogger/author needs to engage in discussions with the readers using the comment option. In Think Flat blog, the bloggers/authors are not participaitng in discussion with the commenters. The blog becomes a blog only with participative discussions and a personal touch.