iUpload's got some big ideas I just met with the CEO of a company called iUpload which, despite its diminutive (25 people) size, has big ideas about applying blogs to customer relations.

iUpload is a content management company that has evolved its strategy into the blogosphere. The company is basically a blog hoster, but it has a rich administration system that enables customers to manage and consolidate blogs in creative ways.

For example, you can set up a branded blog under your own company's name and give publishing access to employees and business partners. Each blogger can maintain his or her own blog on your site with complete control over their own content. But then - and this is where it gets interesting - you can set up mechanisms to grab content from individual sites and aggregate it into portals, front pages or metablogs.

For example, you could aggregate blog entries from the HR and payroll departments into an employee portal that tells people about promotions or benefits changes. A partner portal could be aggregated from blog entries by your product management and channel marketing people. And a public website could be assembled from contributions from all over the company: marketing, product development, sales, executive, press, etc.

Here's what one iUpload customer, Northwest Voice, is doing. It's basically a newspaper composed of blog entries. Anyone in the community is eligible to have a blog at Northwest Voice. A person can blog about the school board meeting and the editors can then choose to take all or part of that entry and integrate it into the Northwest Voice site. Teachers can routinely post homework assignments as blogs. But maybe once in a while they want to tell the town about a class project. That's as simple as notifying the site editor of a new blog entry.

Multiple entries about the same event can be integrated. You could have a report on the city council meeting composed from entries by six bloggers who were there. Classrooms, town government offices and businesses can all have blogs and can all submit content for use on the Northwest Voice site. This is pure community journalism.

Advertisers can use the same mechanism to customize their ads. If you're discounting haircuts by 10% this Thursday, you just post a blog entry and link to it from your ad. This is really powerful stuff.

Canadian Idol uses iUpload to maintain 40,000 fan blogs for the popular TV show. McDonald's is a recent new customer. The restaurant chain is going to launch internal blogs worldwide and plans to recruit selected customers to blog about their McDonald's experiences - both good and bad - for public consumption. Essentially, McDonald's will recruit customers to be quality control watchdogs and give them a forum for rapidly sharing their experiences.

That's scary stuff if you don't have the corporate transparency gene. But if you're bold enough to listen to unfiltered customer feedback, it's very exciting. iUpload is on to something here. The concept of integrating customers and constituents into your internal and external communications is full of potential. We've barely even scratched the surface.  ¶ 2:27 PM