stefan

hlx a leading German low cost airline - comparable to Jet Blue - has launched a blogging community using the 21Publish solution. With every booking of a flight customers of hlx now get the chance to start blogging by either posting to group blogs or by posting private photos.

The group blog concept is a perfect fit for brands like hlx. Users can post to blogs on e.g. Spain or other destinations to share travel experiences. Only when an entry has been published it is re-published on the profile page of the author. This way the brand is able to set the agenda and develop topics closely related to their brand. The user has by default writing access to all of these blogs. Also each post can be moderated by the administrator to keep inappropriate content out.

As far as I know hlx is the not only the first Airline to launch an open blogging community but also the first brand apart from media companies to have launched such a community. I refer to my last post on marketing and user generated content and I still believe that we will see much more of this coming up in the future.

Thank you hlx for choosing 21Publish!

Steve has written a new whitepaper on  Corporate Group Blogging. The whitepaper espcially highlights the advantages of Corporate Group Blogs over single author blogs or even just corporate news blogs that do not mention any author in particular.

Personally I think that Corporate Group Blogs such as the one from Mercury Interactive or PackNation (although this is more of an industry group blog) are the future of Corporate Blogs. I recently have read (unfortunately I forgot where that was) a post about research findings saying that people tend to believe employees more than they believe the boss. I think that sounds very credible. Corporate Group Blogs are intended to include employees  in corporate communication. So if the aforesaid is true Corporate Group Blogs should be a lot more credible than just single corporate blogs.  That is why I believe that Group Blogs are not only far more lively but also better to build tighter trust and ties with constituents.

Fredrik has written a post about it with some of the pros & cons he sees in Corporate Group Blogs. One of the cons is that a reader might dislike one of the bloggers. But even if that might be true in a Group Blog environment such a reader would have other blogs to read too. While if there was just one single corporate blogger a reader has no one else to turn to if for some reason he dislikes this persons. So in my view Corporate Group Blogs even reduce the risk of somebody disliking the personality that blogs for the company.

via micropersuasion

I guess this is good news to Torsten and Creative Weblogging. And if it is, it is also good news for me as an investor in Torsten's company :)

The protestant Church of Northern Germany called Nordelbien has launched a Church Blogging Community based on 21Publish today. As said before I strongly believe that blogging communities and group blogging will become more and more important for non-profit-orgs. They are a perfect means to tie bloggers together and to enforce the message of the organization.

A very valuable source of information on church blogging is bloggingchurch. It is there where I have also found a link to a Church Blogging Policies  put together by Brian Bailey.

Thanks for choosing 21Publish!

Elections in Germany = Chaos in Germany.

At least in makes "Merkel" #6 in the most popular searches on Technorati. Why do people search for Merkel instead of Schröder? Instead of dominating the ranking on Technorati she presumably much rather would have liked to dominate yesterday's elections....