Whoa- I Won the Perfect Weblog Pitch Competition!

By leelefever on April 26, 2004 - 10:16am.

• Categories:
• Weblogs and Business
• Comments: 0

Man this is exciting! I won! I won! I won! I won! This should help my nose heal much faster.

From the moment I heard about the Perfect Corporate Weblog Pitch Competition, I thought, " Oh man, I'm all over this!"

Many thanks to Judith Meskill and the folks at WeblogsInc. and Spoke Software for the prize. Also, many thanks to the judges, many of whom I've grown to admire over the past couple of years. So very cool to have a chance to participate. Woo hoo!!!

I'm excited to see what everyone else posted too- I'm sure this subject brought out a lot of great and varied perspectives.

Funny to see that picture of me on the Social Software Weblog- It's from a rotating banner image on my personal weblog: www.leelefever.com. It was taken last summer in rural Montana.

So, below is the pitch that did it. I must have rewritten it about 50 times, trying to get to it to that "place". I was really trying to think about executives and how they look at the world- and the Wall Street Journal is a big part of that view.

Overall, the message was that weblogs give everyone in a company the ability to see more context in the company around them.

THE PITCH

First, think about the value of the Wall Street Journal to business leaders. The value it provides is context — the Journal allows readers to see themselves in the context of the financial world each day, which enables more informed decision making.

With this in mind, think about your company as a microcosm of the financial world. Can your employees see themselves in the context of the whole company? Would more informed decisions be made if employees and leaders had access to internal news sources?

Weblogs serve this need. By making internal websites simple to update, weblogs allow individuals and teams to maintain online journals that chronicle projects inside the company. These professional journals make it easy to produce and access internal news, providing context to the company — context that can profoundly affect decision making. In this way, weblogs allow employees and leaders to make more informed decisions through increasing their awareness of internal news and events.

Updated:
Without the worthy panel judges, this would not have been possible. They were:

Dave Pollard, Dina Mehta, Don Park, Flemming Funch, Jim McGee, Lilia Efimova, Martin Dugage, Phil Wolff, Ross Mayfield, Scott Allen, and Ton Zijlstra

And the other winners were:

Second Place: Randal Moss

Third Place (tied): Michael Angeles and Jack Vinson