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?"

Comments

a few thoughts...

[professorhojo]

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.

Re:a few thoughts...

[Eric Giguere]

but you can't forecast the results

But that's true about most marketing initiatives. What makes them nervous is that the posters aren't having their material vetted (like press releases and so on) through the usual corporate processes.

Eric
My new AdSense book will be out mid-June

Re:a few thoughts...

[ajdavis]

First of all, I resent the vaguely cultural-studies post-structuralist jargon of the article: "Here the heterarchy transcends the firewall and pressure can be applied from without." What's a heterarchy? Is that firewall a metaphorical one? I, for one, do NOT welcome our Foucault-reading post-modern academic overlords.

As for corporate blogging, the most useful blogs I've come across are from important developers in Microsoft (in particular) & also Google, Netscape, Python, etc. A number of times I've been investigating a fairly obscure question about some Microsoft API (shut up, it's my job), & found an excellent answer in a Microsoftie's blog. E.g., some feature seems blatantly missing, I'm searching for it, & the developer mentions in his blog that the feature IS indeed missing but he hopes to implement it in version 3.

This has nothing to do with marketing. I'm not sure what you'd call it in suitspeak, but it's sort of a conversational style of customer support & community-building.

corporate 'greed'

[mark_jabroni]

Corporate officers try to make profits for their companies because that's what corporate officers are supposed to do. Shareholders (usually including employees) have invested large sums of money into the company, in return for which they expect profits.

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.

It's not an "either/or" question

[MichPOSDude]

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.

My blog

[mrselfdestrukt]

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"!

IBM encourages company blogging

[Anonymous Coward]

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.

I say it's another crass form of marketting

[ShatteredDream]

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.

Forget why they DO - tell me why they DON'T

[Brento]

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.)