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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.
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?
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.
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.
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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.
I'm having trouble finding that in my post. In fact, I think I said just the opposite. That corporate officers will generally try to avoid that sort of thing, becaus it's bad for profits. Of course, we all have different views on what long-term damage is or how bad it is. But companies generally don't do things that are contra societies desires. If they did, no one would buy from them, and they wouldn't make money. I'm not saying that there aren't exceptions, but it's important to remember that they are, in fact, exceptions.
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