Mike Prosceno, vice president of Communications at SAP, says the main reason for inviting bloggers, and giving them the same credentials as the press, is that they present a new way to reach out to people.

“The articles journalists write normally have a short lifespan,” he says. “Bloggers’ entries remain online for longer and they invite people to comment. This provides for a bidirectional conversation as opposed to a one-way broadcast of information, giving us a unique insight into what interests and concerns them.”

To remain in close contact with the blogger community, SAP has set up “Bloggers’ Corner,” a site for technical questions and other queries to be answered. “We cannot prevent people from writing negative things about us but we can make sure they have the right information,” Prosceno says, adding that SAP has engaged with bloggers because it believes they will be an even bigger force in the future. “We want to learn how to cooperate with them now, rather than having to figure it out later,” he says.

Among the bloggers attending the SAPPHIRE conference was Niel Robertson, who is also the founder of Newmerix, a US technology company. He says the opportunity to question the management team in front of a group of journalists and analysts was a “watershed moment” and that the event was “the first time the blogging communication form has been taken seriously.”

Since the conference, Robertson has attended several events arranged by SAP and other software companies. He has also established a website, Enterprise Irregulars, with 35 other software bloggers. The website’s bloggers range from entrepreneurs to financial investors, and it is to be officially launched on March 15.

Robertson believes companies see the value of the bloggers’ combined communication because it fills a gap between what journalists and analysts publish.

“The press just reports the facts and the analysts tend to present one point of view, but our group gives a wide range of opinions on the subject, providing a complete picture of the issue,” he says. “What we do is‘360-degree reporting’ and that is what is unique about bloggers.”

Robertson says he expects Enterprise Irregulars to become a significant media source soon after launch. “If you look at the combined readership of our individual blogs, we represent millions of page views and hundreds of thousands of readers a month,” he says. “If you compare that with major media companies, it becomes a significant presence.”

Robertson says the aim is eventually to build a media and publishing company. “Our first goal is to put an infrastructure in place to turn our conversations and podcasts into a strong media presence. As soon as we have done that, we want to extend our group to include other areas, such as telecom.”

A big step towards this goal has been the hiring of a full-time editor whose task is to select what to publish. “Many of the consolidated sites that exist today publish the collected content from a group of bloggers,” Robertson says. “The problem with that is that a blogger might write about a lot of different things and, as a reader, you have to go through everything to find what’s interesting to you. By having an editor who selects content based on an editorial agenda, it makes it a lot easier for people to find the information they are looking for.”

Robertson is excited about the future of Enterprise Irregulars and feels fortunate to be involved in what he says is “the cutting edge of organizing bloggers.”

“In about five years from now, we will start writing the history of how bloggers challenged the media and the way people consume information,” he says. “And hopefully, there will be a little footnote about what we did at Enterprise Irregulars.”

Torunn Hansen-Tangen