Slashdot Mirror
Motivations for Corporate Blogging
ringfinger writes "Ross Mayfield just posted an interesting blog essay entitled Fear, Greed and Social Software that examines the motivations (Fear and Greed) for corporate blogging. How many slashdotters blog for their companies? Do their companies fear that they might say something embarrasing? Or are they filled with greed for the additional exposure it generates?"
Just a few thoughts...
As a corporate marketing tactic, in my (limited) experience, it only works only if the blog author has talent.
You need someone on your team who can write in a genuinely engaging voice, who can be intimate without telling you what he or she had for breakfast, and who knows the line between openness and damaging innuendo.
Also: blogging's strength is of course, ultimately, its biggest weakness when you view it from a corporation's point of view. You can budget and plan for it, but you can't forecast the results, which is enough to make the suits very nervous.
>How many Slashdotters blog for their companies?
(Uh, I would, but I'm too busy on Slashdot. )
Why is it bad ("greedy") for a company to have employees pretend to expound on their personal opinions in the form of a blog?
Asked and answered. Official personal corporate blogs are too much like astroturfing.
Raise your children as if you were teaching them to raise your grandchildren, because you are.
enjoy your website
And I have always thought that personal blogging is a result of extreme self-centeredness. Blogging is the ultimate vanity... a public diary about "me" that the rest of the worls is just *dying* to read. I mean, really... who wouldn't want to know what I had for breakfast this morning?
Interestingly, a brit pop star recently said that the real evil is 'shareholders'. That would be great, except that in non-socialist countries there's no good way to retire without being a shareholder at some point or another.
als companies want that their employee work dont chit-chat
when someone has to much freetime, its a good and serious time waster. But not during work hours
and a nice cardboard box to sleep in.
Do not try to read the dupe, thats impossible. Instead, only try to realize the truth
What truth?
There is no dupe
I'd say those aren't the only two scenarios for corporate blogging. But I maintain this is a bit of a fad, anuway. At least in publicly held companies in the US, this isn't going to fly for long, if at all. Sure, there will be some exceptions, but there are issues here. This requires a company willing to give up control of its corporate voice, and that just ain't going to happen without a lot of preconditions. Conditions such as censoring the blogs, "training" the bloggers in what can be disclosed and what can't, legal review, etc. I think both the bloggers and the companies allowing it are going to pull back on the reins before this ever really takes off, because corporate America is just not this democratic. The first time a company is held liable for the misstatements of a corporate blogger, or for the public's misunderstanding of a blogger's seemingly innocent remarks, the party's over.
No sig for now.
Hello. Today is stardate 26-05-2005
I work for a large company. We are greedy, we steal and we overprice our products.
Today I had meetings about how we can enter other markets by utilizing our evil techniques.
I also tried to get a gmail account, but my name was already taken.
Tomorrow I will think of a new way to charge customers for all the security holes in our software. An antivirus combined with spyware-removal tool updated daily by my company maybe? hmm. I like that. I hope nobody reads these blogs. That's all for today
William Gates.
PS: I hate this FSCKING "confirm your not a script"!
"I used to have that really cool,funny sig
There have been several new blog efforts at IBM recently.
1. They provide internal blogs to everyone. Anyone within the company can view any employees blog. Confidential material relating to specific works in development to you are not permitted though as the controls on the blogs are rather weak. But still, there are blogs from both personal and professional topics hosted internally.
2. Recently guidelines for public blogging were released. They were rather straightforward and obvious in the following tone:
- Post freely, be helpful, seek help
- Don't post trade secrets, use best judgement
- Don't engage in online arguments, once again, be helpful
It appears they would have us out there talking about anything and all things, including company products, helping others with our products, etc.
Of course, it's written with perspective of "help the greater good, don't make us look bad", but I still think it's a great step forward and a proactive approach to forwarding the community.
Here's my last required gem:
These are my opinions and not those of IBM.
One of the reasons that I pretty much never read corporate blogs like Schwartz's is that they are usually just launching pads. Some of the Microsoft employee ones are kinda interesting because you get to see a little bit of what goes on with the development of IE and stuff like that. Yet I don't know anyone who really takes Schwartz seriously at all except for a few entries I have seen on the copyright expansionist blog IPCentral.
I think it is only a matter of time before the bigger corporate bloggers screw up and get censored or fired for being too honest. What would happent to an IE developer that grudgingly admits that they're making CSS2.1 and 3.0 support top priority for 7.0 because Firefox's CSS support is better right now? They'd probably be fired. The same goes for a Sun developer who says that Apache's Harmony project may be what saves Java from being destroyed by .NET.
There is one thing that all of the elitists who post here saying how worthless blogging is ultimately fail to comprehend. Blogging gives the average citizen a stake in online free speech. It makes censorship actually hit home and does anyone honestly think that the average blogger is going to vote for a candidate that supported a measure that directly censored them? A lot are already jumping ship from the GOP because of Bush's uncritical support for McCain-Feingold. Sadly, blogging may be the last, best hope for restoring a drive for liberty in this country post-9/11 and the elitist nerds here and elsewhere should accept that and embrace it. So what if someone's blog is asinine, don't read it. Problem solved. Ironically I have seen few blog posts as utterly asinine as 90% of what gets posted by Anonymous Cowards here.
Click here or a puppy gets stomped!
If you search on google, it is pretty easy to see that someone has been fired over blogging already. Its actually a fairly serious issue, one we spent time discussing in my ethics class. Granted the firing may have been over the content he posted, but he was fired because of the blog.
I read Macromedia's blogs religiously because I find 'em very interesting. It helps me build a personal, emotional connection to software. The guys behind the software are real people with ideas and struggles just like me, and that gives me warm and fuzzy feelings.
Why would any company not want to establish personal, emotional connections to their software?
Yeah, sure, there's risks involved if your employees reveal corporate secrets or turbulence, but if you trust them enough with your source code, why would you think they wouldn't be smart enough to walk the line with blogs as well? If you don't trust your employees enough to blog, it doesn't say anything about your employees - it says something about your paranoia and your inability to hire reliable staff.
(And yes, I have a personal blog, and no, I'm not allowed to talk about company stuff in it, and yes, I've been disciplined for even coming close to the line.)
What's your damage, Heather?
BusinessWeek ran an article on blogging called "Blogs Will Change Your Business" in the May 2 issue. The article is written in the form of a blog, and the main idea is that no business can afford to ignore blogs. My opinion when I read it was that the article was a little heavy on hype, but for a businessman who knows nothing about blogs it's probably a good introduction. In any case, the article also announced that BusinessWeek was starting its own blog, called Blogspotting, to continue to follow blogs as they relate to business.
I know I just scroll down to the blog. I never take the time to look at the advertisements. I know the whole point is the mere suposition, but hell, I don't really even remember the slashdot articles 15 minutes after I read them.
Thats all that corporate bloging is good business practice. It promotes interest in the company while allowing for transparency and the chance to get to know one of the employees of the company. Of corse its motivated by greed. When does a corporation, whose only goal is to make money, do something that is not motivated by the the want for more money?
a dog travelling with good men becomes a rational being" Arabic Proverb.
Emotions on blogs! who woulda thunk it?! Emotions are also at play on /.. In the book Emotional contagion
the authors talk about how emotions are spread as contagions through mimicry. Similar to memes. Basically states that people mimic each other and that emotions cross over in that mimicry.
He talks about how some people are more potent at infecting others with their emotions than are their peers. THese powerful communicators possess three traits:
1. They feel strong emotions.
2. The express those strong emotions.
3. When others are experiencing emotions incompatible with their own, they must be relatively insensitive to and unresponsive to the feelings of others.
On the other hand, people who are susceptible to emotional contagion, or carriers, are likely to catch emotions if they:
1. rivet their attention on the others.
2. construe themselves in terms of their interrelatedness to the others;
3. are able to read others emotions.
4. tend to mimic emotions.
5. are aware of their emotional responses.
6. are emotionally reactive.
People are also most likely to catch others' emotions in two kinds of relationships - those involving love or power. Interestingly enough, introverts are more likely to be strong carriers of emotional contagion.
So next time an article comes up, remember, it only takes a handful of guys to spread FUD or excitement about the topic. THen the rest of the nerdy introverts will jump in on the emotional bandwagon. I have other thoughts on this related to /. sub-culture but I'll leave it at that lest I get modded down for pointing out the emperor has no clothes.
Many companies seem apprehensive of allowing publicly accessible employee blogs. This follows from the fact that most company PR is regulated and "meant" to be positive for the company. It takes only one rogue employee to tarnish reputation in an "unmoderated" blog. When it gets moderated it almost becomes another launching pad (which most people don't want to read.)
Those companies that have managed to do this see no harm in trying out publicly accessible Wikis too. However such companies usually are small sized and in most likelihood populated by code monkeys. I don't see many medium and large companies successfully launching unmoderated blogs and/or publicly accessible Wikis. If you've ever tried managing a company you'll know the "risks."
No Greater Friend, No Greater Enemy! (Lucius Cornelius Sulla)
Can always be read and cause tres amusement though :-
Hi,
I'm bobDrone from NoNewsHereCorp, blogging for all you funsters today.
Today I'd like to tell you about why its great that we own everything but the radio stations in this city.
Fantastic news though, PoliticoBot approved our purchase of all the radio station, so everything you see, hear and read will now be produced by NoNewsHereCorp.
I of course, will be having cheese at my lunchbreak (which is now) so blog to you later happy joy NNHC readers!
Not Free SF Reader
... they encourage you to blog (Disney Internet Group). The only thing is, the blog is on an intranet...
"The need to build the internet comes from something inside us, something programmed... something we can't resist."
Blogging (truthfully) about something your company is doing might go completely against what a lot of people in the company are hired to hide.
Accountants, marketing and HR are all responsible for bending the truth in such a way to put a positive spin on something that might not be so rosey.
A prime example is Paul Otellini's (Intels CEO) interal blog which has been leaked at least once. I can't find the link to the original article where I read about it (help appreciated) which stated that he quite openly admitted that they had a lot of work to do to catch up with AMDs Opteron architecture.
If you are to take a step back and think about it, he's openness makes perfect sense to anyone who's been following processor trends for more than a year or so. The only problem is the accountants and marketing folks are trying to tell the opposite story - "AMD, no, ours is better".
I personally would prefer to hear my leader tell the truth and not simply try to keep the stock market happy. The only reason why the stock market gets upset by comments like this is because they aren't said often enough.
[ Monday is a terrible way to spend one seventh of your life. ]
The key to success in business is social magic. Guanxi as it's called in China, it's a form of office politics. Social software and blogging simply adds a new dimension to it all. If the world was flat, now its round. If the world was 2d, now its a 3d world. The internet and advanced communication plays a role in everything, and for most people in a good way.
Many pawns with increased communication simply means the suits need to actually work just as hard as everyone else now. Why? Because now the social mobility is increased. What stops you from influencing the corporation from the grassroots?
Blogging is a strength, so is the internet, but all of this power existed before in other forms so its not really new. The difference now is the fact that the power is distributed to anyone when before it was kept within certain circles of networks of peers.
If a network of peers form an alliance then it doesnt matter who your boss is, that alliance gives power to the peers in the long term. Short term the boss maintains power, so basically any group of workers who are treated badly enough can decide to use influence either from within the company or outside the company. Corporate politics are extremely complex, and a lot of it is based on favors, who knows who, and knowledge of who is in certain circles and how much influence they have.
If you are a smart suit then you have nothing to fear because you'll use your position to make yourself a likeable boss, you'll also understand the office politics, otherwise if you arent able to keep your position then who else is to blame?
Working within Digital advertising, we see blogs as more than simply gaining exposure. Corporate blogs should be about providing more information to people who are already interested in your company. In order to gain from this, the company needs to be doing something interesting enough for people to want to read it. Shell (a british oil company) interestingly started a message board on their site so that they could respond directly to people's accusations. A good corporate blog should encourage dialogue and allow the company to respond accurately to people's concerns. The comments feature will allow people who genuinely care about the products to give their feedback.
The way to be successful is to be flexible. You have to create your own job and your own situation and the blogs can either be something which help you do this or help someone else depending on how good you are at using the tool.
Blogs are marketing, but not always positive marketing. Annonymous blogs also make it impossible to track where it comes from, so how is this useful? For the worker it allows you to know which places you don't want to work for and which bosses you don't want to be under. It's a good thing for the worker, and its a good thing for the CEO if the CEO treats its workers right. These tools simply enhance workplace freedom and democracy for everyone. This is good or bad depending on the side of the coin you are.
Nothing stops employees from actually posting blogs under annonymous names and putting it on the internet to tell the truth about companies. This was already done by word of mouth but now word of mouth is increased. I don't think blogs are bad, I think its good.
Stop working for the company and start your own, otherwise have fun fighting to save social security and fighting for wages.
It's better to use motion against itself than to fight the current.
Instead of being a socialist, start your own business, make as much money as you can, and buy a bunch of companies like George Soros and Warren Buffet. Then you can promote socialism through capitalism, but you arent going to get anywhere if you are going to just yell and scream at people to pay higher taxes, and you arent going to get anywhere if you ask your boss to give you retirement or pay for your health expenses. Your boss does not care about you, so take advantage of the ownership society and become an owner like your boss.
I run Technical Video Rental, a small firm that rents out specialized instructional videos (welding, bowl turning, case mods, etc.) and we have a corporate blog.
The reason is two-fold:
1) community for greed's sake.
2) community for its own sake.
To expand on the first: I get lots of email from customers who are anxious to share the details of their metalworking and electronics projects with someone; hardware hacking can be a bit of a lonely hobby. By helping customers share their stories with each other, it gives customers an outlet, and a sense of shared community...which gives them positive associations with the website/service/brand...which keeps them coming back (or at least, adds a very very minor reason to check out the corporate website with some regularity).
To expand on the second: running a small corporation can be a lonely activity as well. One spends a lot of time coding, dealing with customer support issues, dealing with vendors, etc...and not nearly as much time hanging around the water cooler or throwing nerf footballs as one might have done as an engineer. So, putting my
own projects in the blog lets me interact with my customers, which is a nice break from regular work.
I read a lot of "corporate" blogs, and I think it's pretty easy to spot the ones that understand blogging, those that are chasing the bandwagon. Blogs are a really effective tool for sharing business expertise in a way that builds relationships with potential customers and partners. They work well because they're different from the tired old approaches to sales/marketing communications. The key is to talk about your industry using an authentic voice rather than marketing-speak. Some enlightened companies are figuring that out and making effective use of blogs. Other posts are sharing some fine examples of this. I'll offer one that doesn't get talked about much: Go Daddy's use of a CEO blog accompanying its Super Bowl ads. But for every clueful effort there's plenty of other companies who see blogs as a way to deliver the same old sales and marketing message, only via a blog. It doesn't work, and is painful to read. Those companies will claim blogs are a fad, and blame the format. Doh!
RichM
Data Center Knowledge
This is also a somewhat flaky definition.
I'm might be considered a passive shareholder through my 401(k) holdings, but I can assure you that JP Morgan is probably pretty active on my behalf.
And of course i expect to see decent returns on my 401(k), which puts pressure on them to have companies run profitably.
Blogs are just another way of communicating, like static web pages are, except blogs are 'faster' and more interactive.
Blogs are quite new, and it will take a while before they are popularly understood as well as say a telephone is understood as a communication mechanism.
However, by the time effective use of blogs is on its way to being commonly understood, the Next Big Thing in Internet based communication will be on the way in, and people will be grappling with the same questions.
BTW, the Next Big Thing will FINALLY be the 'semantic web', but will hopefully be named something OTHER THAN 'the semantic web' cuz that term sucks. It will be a melding of P2P, something similar to del.icio.us, instant messaging, etc. And it will be harder for people to advertize and spam, I hope.
And the domestication of the dog will continue unabated.
Corporate blogging. Why? Read the Cluetrain manifesto and it will make an awful lot of sense. Corporate blogs are ways to create communities.
Earth Satellite (the same folks who deliver the global imagery in Google Maps) recently deployed a weather blog with posts from the weather forecast editor. Subscribers to the company's line of weather forecast products can use the forum to discuss the products and asks questions of the weather scientists.
As for actual corporate blogging, we're not doing it. We talked about it, but decided we didn't really have that many pressing things to say, and couldn't imagine that people would actually want to read a company blog.
But if you want a positive example of a corporate blog, look no further than Google Blog.
6. Audible Alarm (not shown)
-from a Cuisinart product owner's manual.
I blog about my company, not "for" my company. (Important distinction) Because I work for a small company in a small industry, it'd be too obvious to blog with real names. Some of what I blog about is technical and some is inter-personal. I've told a few coworkers about it, and they read it regularly, but other people just don't know.
Whether it stays that way or not, I don't know. But I and my readers are assured that the blog isn't motivated by the fear or greed of my company.
Way back when, I used to represent a company on CompuServe. As a corporate representitive I took heat from customers and from bosses. I had to hold the company line at all costs and frequently caught heat from one boss because of something another boss told me to say. It was nerve-racking and carried a great deal of exposure. I loved it.
I used the flames that the customers sent me as a sort of moral guidepost. If I had enough complaints, I'd print off pages of them and use them to show the bosses how loud the customers were yelling about some practice that they found unfair. Not that it did a lot of good. I did occasionally win a battle though.
All too frequently customers asked for way too much. My computer went out of warranty just six months ago and then the video card fried so I want a replacement computer. Ahhh, no. If you had asked nicely, I may have been able to arrange a replacement video card for you to install but since you are a jerk, go to hell...
Sometimes people would go into our forum and outright lie about the company. I had the power to delete the posts and get them banned from the forum. I didn't use this power much, but when I did they had it comming.
Does anyone know of a list of business blogs in Canada? I haven't been able to find many Canadian companies that blog. All I can find is a Toronto Star article that glosses over the subject and some Globe and Mail pieces about how US firms are blogging. I'm interested in corporate blogs, as opposed to the one-person consultancy. There are tons of blogs run by freelancers and consultants, even in Canada.
-- SYS 64738 --
The year-round Christmas letter.
[says quiet prayer of thanksgiving for not being on your list...]
It's about blogging for a company; implication: on company time, with company support.
What you're talking about isn't even in the same universe of discourse.
I dont believe you can call a company greedy because it wants more profit or exposure. You can only judge a company based on its buisness practices and what it does with its profit. i.e. does it expand/innovate, or lay off half it's workforce.
For my own part, I prefer to keep my work separate from my blog, but I can see where others might take a different view. Here's one fairly reasonable viewpoint on the subject, from someone who has more blogging experience than I do :)
Where is the wisdom we have lost in knowledge?
Where is the knowledge we have lost in information?