What's in a blog?

Taken at face value, entering posts on the blog is very easy. It looks like an online word processor which enables you to publish your articles and make them available online as well as manage a few options and features. However, this is a lot more complex than you think. Not necessarily from a technical point of view, but certainly from an Internet writing skills point of view.

If you'd like someone to simplify the complexities of company blogs, there's probably no better overview of corporate blogging than an article on Marketing & Innovation that is divided into three blog posts on the golden rules for corporate blogging.

The first post in the series is a general introduction to blogging for companies.

The second post raises some preliminary questions: "What is the objective of this blog?  Is it about awareness?  Is it intended for you to share knowledge with the community?  Is it there to show that your corporation and its experts are particularly good at something?"

The third posts lists some of the "do's and don'ts" of writing on a corporate blog.

How are we doing?

When we started this blog at IP.com Inc., CEO Tom Colson wrote here:

What we're doing at IP.com might not change the world (or maybe it will) and we certainly don't position our company at the center of the universe, but it's probably not an exaggeration to say we're changing the world of intellectual property.

In our little corner of the online world, there's a lot happening with patents, trademarks, and trade secrets, and a lot of relevant stuff is being said on interesting blogs by people who really know what they're talking about. So we're joining the conversation, and blogging about how innovation is managed by corporations with a vested interest in their Intellectual Property.

Is there something in particular you'd like to discuss here? We'll keep an eye on the comments below this post where readers can give us some feedback on how we can make our company blog more interesting and helpful. Ask questions. Let us know what you think. Tell us how we can improve. We won't publish every rant and rave (we do read all of them) but if you've got some constructive criticism or helpful advice for our blog, we'd really love to hear from you.

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One of our favorite patent law bloggers, Stephen Albainy-Jenei at Patent Baristas, points out that today is blogger appreciation day.

On this day, we'd be remiss if we didn't show our appreciation for all the new readers directed to our company blog from Duncan Bucknell's IP Thinktank and David Lat's Above the Law.

Our greatest appreciation, always, is for the intellectual property law bloggers who continuously recommend our blog to their readers by adding a permanent link to Securing Innovation in their blogrolls:

• Patent Baristas
• Likelihood of Confusion
• Patent Docs
• The Invent Blog
• The Patent Prospector
• Anticipate This!
• BlawgIT
• The Legal Thing

Editor's Note: From time to time, we'll update this list to show our appreciation for bloggers who have added this blog to their blogrolls, as we become aware of links.

We'd like to take this opportunity, on blogger appreciation day, to thank patent attorney Brett Trout for including Securing Innovation in his patent meme, an excellent list of patent blogs. We really appreciate all the attention that regularly comes from that special recognition.

Finally, we'd like to thank Kevin O'Keefe and the team of weblog professionals at LexBlog for helping us develop this corporate blog for our company, IP.com. We really appreciate the extraordinary service.

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This blog is open to invited readers only.

Joe Mullin, a reporter at IP Law & Business magazine, discusses here on his personal blog, The Prior Art, recent reports in The Daily Journal's Tuesday edition that Troll Tracker author Rick Frenkel, and his employer Cisco, has been sued for defamation by two East Texas attorneys who are players in that district's patent litigation scene.

Update: Peter Zura has this Patent Troll Tracker Litigation Update. And Joe Mullin at The Prior Art blog is following up on the recent demise of the "popular and controversial" Troll Tracker blog here.

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One of the challenges we faced at IP.com Inc., as we thought about how best to get into blogging at work about business matters of interest to our clients and colleagues managing  intellectual property, was how we'd be able to design a blog  that matched the quality of of our corporate website at www.ip.com. A lot of time and attention had gone into the redesign of our company website, and we wanted a weblog that would be an effective corporate communications channel to open up new business opportunities with good clients like these.

For us, and the people we do business with, our company website is an important part of our corporate communications media, and we knew that blogging would bring even more attention to what we do for our clients. So our blog would have to be professional. Getting a blog started using Blogger, Movable Type, or WordPress is so easy anyone can be blogging in minutes using one of those familiar templates. We wanted something more professional, something designed just for us. Our own corporate blog.

We looked at a lot of blogs that focus on intellectual property, our business, and really liked the professional blogs developed by LexBlog for these lawyers:

• Chicago IP Litigation Blog
• Contemporary Intellectual Property, Licensing & Information Law
• Maryland Intelllectual Property Law Blog
• Patent Trademark Blog
• IP Law Chat
• The IP Law Blog
• Australian Trade Marks Law Blog
• Intellectual Property Law Blog
• IP Litigation Blog
• The IP ADR Blog

When we were asked which of LexBlog's designs was, perhaps, the best example of what we were looking for in style and presentation, we thought their own company blog was about as good as it gets. We love what Kevin O'Keefe at LexBlog has done with his own company blog, Real Lawyers Have Blogs. We think his blog is an excellent example of corporate branding, using the company blog to show how effective blogging can be for lawyers and companies. LexBlog Has Corporate Blogs might be the new mantra, if Securing Innovation and the other company weblogs in the growing LexBlog portfolio are a good indication of more to come.

• Write for Clients by business writer and communications consultant Lori Herz
• Corvette Blog by George Matick Chevrolet
• Blog Crystal for the Crystal Mountain Ski Area
• eDiscovery Source by RenewData
• True Gotham by The Heddings Property Group
• The Retirement Plan Blog by National Benefit Services
• The Farm at Tralee Journal about Tennessee Equestrian Real Estate
• Pension Risk Matters published by Pension Governance
• The Adventure of Strategy by Rob Millard
• Business Memory Blog

Did we forget anyone? ;-) We think that the folks at LexBlog have really outdone themselves lately with innovative corporate blogs, not to mention all the professional law blogs in the LexBlog portfolio.

On our Securing Innovation blog, here, in particular, we love using the Quick Links feature to share with our readers, and our employees at IP.com, lots of links to other blogs and articles of interest to those in our business, which we find when reading their blogs in our feed reader. Speaking of which, if you want to pick up our Quick Links selections in your feed reader, there's a separate RSS feed for that column, in addition to our regular blog feed. How cool is that?

We hope you like what we're doing here on our new corporate blog, with the help of the team of professional weblog developers at LexBlog. We really owe them one. Did we mention they're fun to work with? Ask anyone who has.

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We've been following with some interest the inception of the Blog Council, "a community for official corporate blogs and bloggers that represent major global corporations" that was recently formed by some very large corporations, including AccuQuote, Cisco, The Coca-Cola Company, Dell, Gemstar-TV Guide, General Motors, Kaiser Permanente, Microsoft, Nokia, SAP, Starwood Hotels and Resorts, and Wells Fargo.

Conspicuously absent from that blog cabal are Sun and IBM, each with thousands of  employees who blog, and strong corporate commitments to blogging evident from notes on their respective company websites here:

Many of us at Sun are doing work that could change the world. We need to do a better job of telling the world. As of now, you are encouraged to tell the world about your work, without asking permission first (but please do read and follow the advice in this note). Blogging is a good way to do this.

and here:

As they'll tell you themselves, the opinions and interests expressed on IBMers' blogs are their own and don't necessarily represent this company's positions, strategies or views. But that doesn't mean we don't want you to read them! Because they do represent lots of business and technology expertise you can't get from anyone else.

IBMer Mike Moran adds on his Biznology Blog:

Many other companies use blogs to connect better with their customers through blogs. Blogs that are written by living breathing employees, not the PR department.

Our new corporate blog, Securing Innovation, was conceived by us as a group blog, with posts by all our employees who want to write articles and blog about their work for the company. As well, some of our executives have their own personal blogs about their special interests and expertise. Tom Petrocelli,  our Senior Vice President for Enterprise Software, has his own blog, Tom's Technology Take, where he shares his thoughts about a wide range of technology issues beyond those he writes about here on the company blog.

IP.com is not a large corporation with hundreds and thousands of employees, but more than a few great ones, and we count among our clients many of these large companies that are developing best practices in corporate blogging. Like them, we're pretty much learning as we blog, and hoping to get better with experience in this engaging new medium for corporate communications.

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Securing Innovation is today's Blawg of the Day on Inter Alia, an internet legal research weblog by veteran law blogger Tom Mighell.

Tom Mighell is Senior Counsel and Litigation Technology Support Coordinator at  Cowles & Thompson in Dallas.  In addition to his busy law practice, Tom publishes the Internet legal research and technology weblog  Inter Alia and is the current Chair of ABA TECHSHOW 2008, among other things.

Speaking of IP.com's new corporate weblog, Tom says, "Great blog -- give it a look."

w00t!

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We're pleased that our blog is on the roster of future hosts of Blawg Review, even if we have to wait until next September 29th to host that presentation with a theme for our corporate blog on managing intellectual property, patents, trademarks and trade secrets. Before our turn, patent attorney Stephen Nipper will be hosting Blawg Review on The Invent Blog on February 11th, which is National Inventors' Day in the USA in honor of Edison's birthday. It seems you have to be on top of your blogging game to get the best dates to host Blawg Review. Anyway, we're just thankful to be included in such good company and we'll do our best to put together an interesting presentation of  Blawg Review on September 29, 2008, which is Inventors' Day in Argentina in recognition of the birthday of the inventor of the ballpoint pen, László Bíró.

Even though we have to wait the full gestation period of a human for our due date to arrive, we are pleased to learn that being scheduled to host an upcoming issue of Blawg Review gives us an opportunity now to participate in the nomination of some of the previous presentations for Blawg Review of the Year 2007.

For our part, we'd like to nominate #137 by Colin Samuels at Infamy or Praise, #93 by Kevin Thompson at Cyberlaw Central,  #102 by George Wallace at Declarations and Exclusions, #106 by Brett Trout at Blawg IT, and #134 by Eric Turkewitz at the New York Personal Injury Law Blog, who have all set very high standards for innovative presentations of Blawg Review to follow. That said, we're really looking forward to the challenge of hosting Blawg Review.

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Bill Manning, the founder and chairman of IP.com is very tech-savvy and, not surprisingly, a big believer in the power of technology and the Internet. And we, like him, are keenly interested in how business blogs are changing the way corporate executives communicate with their clients, customers, and other stakeholders.

Take, for example, all the people who blog at Sun Microsystems, including CEO Jonathan Schwartz, who has his own blog. We think they've got it right.

Many of us at Sun are doing work that could change the world. We need to do a better job of telling the world. As of now, you are encouraged to tell the world about your work, without asking permission first (but please do read and follow the advice in this note). Blogging is a good way to do this.

Advice By speaking directly to the world, without benefit of management approval, we are accepting higher risks in the interest of higher rewards. We don't want to micro-manage, but here is some advice.

It's a Two-Way Street The real goal isn't to get everyone at Sun blogging, it's to become part of the industry conversation. So, whether or not you're going to write, and especially if you are, look around and do some reading, so you learn where the conversation is and what people are saying.

If you start writing, remember the Web is all about links; when you see something interesting and relevant, link to it; you'll be doing your readers a service, and you'll also generate links back to you; a win-win.

What we're doing at IP.com might not change the world (or maybe it will) and we certainly don't position our company at the center of the universe, but it's probably not an exaggeration to say we're changing the world of intellectual property.

In our little corner of the online world, there's a lot happening with patents, trademarks, and trade secrets, and a lot of relevant stuff is being said on interesting blogs by people who really know what they're talking about. So we're joining the conversation, and blogging about how innovation is managed by corporations with a vested interest in their Intellectual Property.

Find the conversation. Join it. Contribute to it. "Conversing is how we learn. It's how we network. It's how we grow as professionals," says Kevin O'Keefe, CEO of LexBlog, whose team of experts guided us in the development of our corporate blog, "Blogging is a conversation. Not only do you learn and grow your reputation by joining in, you will not be conspicuous by your absence."

Blog well, and own the conversation.

If you're interested in learning more about IP.com, Inc. and why we blog, you may want to read our first post here.

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IP.com, Inc. is a global leader in providing strategic and reliable intellectual property solutions. Some of the world's largest and most innovative companies trust IP.com for their enterprise-wide intellectual property asset management, defensive publishing, and patent search services.

The company was founded to fill a growing void in the tools available to the intellectual property community. Our initial product, the IP.com Prior Art Database, was created to provide companies with a fast and effective, centralized outlet for publishing and searching technical disclosures. Since its inception, the IP.com Prior Art Database has continued to grow, attracting high profile clients such as IBM, General Electric, Motorola, Abbott Laboratories, and Eastman Kodak (to name a few).

In our process of developing the Intellectual Property Prior Art Database, we have built a rock-solid, easy-to-use, legally-defensible method for providing verifiable date-stamps and ensuring the integrity (proving they haven't been altered) of electronic files. This technology has become the cornerstone of IP.com's service offerings. We have extended our product line to allow corporations to utilize our innovative file protection (safeguarding) methods on their own private (internal) data using the IP.com InnovationQ or the online IP.com Creative Registry.

The IP.com InnovationQ product combines the legal safeguarding processes along with secured-access search and retrieval to provide a complete solution for safeguarding, searching, and archiving your sensitive data (such as R&D lab notebooks).

Companies can effectively manage and strengthen their intellectual property portfolio with IP.com's comprehensive suite of products and services.

InnovationQ

InnovationQ is an enterprise software solution for intellectual property and innovation management. InnovationQ solves complex document and process management problems associated with managing intellectual property assets. With InnovationQ, companies can routinely safeguard their intellectual property while deriving the maximum value from their portfolios.

Prior Art Database

The IP.com Prior Art Database is a unique repository of defensive publications.  Each day, hundreds of the world’s most innovative companies publish their technical disclosures with IP.com.  The database serves as a critical source of prior art in the technical community.  The unique and rare content covers a wide variety of technology areas and is searched and cited by patent examiners worldwide.  Additionally, the IP.com Journal is published twice each month and distributed to libraries and patent offices around the world.

Patent Search Services

IP.com has a proven track record in delivering the highest quality patent searches. Our multilingual and multidisciplinary search team ensures that we have specialized agents covering all technical domains. Unlike other search and law firms, IP.com employs a proven process for managing each search project which delivers timely, accurate, and concise results. Whether you need in depth invalidity research, freedom to operate, or simply a routine novelty search, IP.com delivers reports which save you time and money.

IP.com, Inc. is a Manning & Napier Information Services (MNIS) company, based in Buffalo, NY.  With global Fortune 500 customers and international resellers, IP.com has been a trusted name for intellectual property services since 1994.

We hope you'll read our corporate blog, Securing Innovation, and join with us discussing patents, trademarks, trade secrets, law and policy, and the latest and greatest tools to strengthen your intellectual property assets and manage your IP portfolios more effectively. Before reading this blog, and joining in the discussions here, it's a good idea to read this.

This publication and the articles and opinions on this blog are not legal advice, even if the author of any article published on this blog may have a legal education or be qualified to practice law in some jurisdictions. Writing articles in this publication is expressly not practicing law, and a legal relationship between attorney and client is not established by reading or commenting on this blog, or by sending an email to the author of anything posted on this blog.

If you need legal advice, you should hire a lawyer, not read books, magazines, or heaven forfend, browse the Internet looking at blogs.

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