But really, why not?

I’ve just finished listening to an interview with Debbie Weil posted on podtech.net. Needless to say, she talks about her book and provides her views on corporate blogging as part of a marketing strategy, but as has been noted elsewhere, the piece remains rather general and somewhat blurry around the edges. However, I wasn’t interested solely in the topic itself, but also in how interviewer Jennifer Jones and Weil characterize blogging and what their perspective is.

Here’s a summary, with a few comments sprinkled in here and there.

Jones names three categories of corporate blogs (from Weil’s book, I assume) which can be integrated into a corporate marketing strategy:

- thought leadership blogs
- community building blogs
- CRM blogs

She then asks Weil to name examples for each categories and interjects a questions about the ROI of blogging at one point. Weil begins by describing blogs from a technical point of view, as “a kind of web site”. The characterization is interesting because it bypasses the usually cited aspects of content and style, i.e. “like a personal diary” or “written in an informal tone“. Weil’s definition is much more accurate: blogs are similar to personal diaries (or ship’s logs, for that matter) only in terms of post structure. The other reason for the generalization that blogs are diaries stems from the fact that most people seem to use them in that fashion. But whereas e.g. the novel is a form of text (or genre), the blog remains as of yet a publishing technology. Of course it’s possible - probable even - that the format eventually becomes a genre, as people establish a generally accepted notion of what a blog should “sound like” and these concepts become conventions, but I think it’s safe to assume that this hasn’t happened yet.
Weil goes on to name search engine attraction as a prime reason to maintain a blog. I feel that this partly undermines what she later says about “thought leadership” etc, because it implies that exposure is more important than what is actually blogged. Then again, SEO remains the sole advantage of corporate blogging that is measurable, so citing visibility as a relevant incentive makes sense. Either that, or I interpret “thought leadership” a bit too literally.
She goes on to describe a (good) thought leadership blog as telling “the back story”, “what the executive is thinking”, and that it should be “real”, and provides Jonathan Schwartz’ blog as an example. Her counter-example is Randy Baseler of Boeing, whose style she refers to somewhat “bland”.

Interesting tidbit: while I’m not quite ready to tout it as evidence, my metrics on both blogs correlate with her observation in an interesting way. Schwartz uses personal and possessive plural pronouns (”we”, “our”) more frequently than Baseler. His style could be characterized as somewhat more involved than Baseler’s, which could in turn have an effect on reception. Note that I’m careful about drawing any conclusions. Even if I had more data (which I don’t, at least not yet), how interesting one writes is not quantifiable through language analysis. Interestingly enough though, Weil goes into a similar direction when she calls material written by PR people “vetted”, “reviewed”, and “corporate speak”, which is in opposition to the maxim of “telling the back story”.
After discussing community building blogs (which are similar to what I’ve labelled industry blogs), Jones brings up the question of return on investment for blogging. Weil can, of course, provide no answer to the question of “whether blogs work”, but suggests that the influence exerted by blogs is beneficial and thus profitable. This is at least somewhat problematic. A catchy phrase such as “return on influence” actually underlines the problem of not knowing anything about the effects of blogging. When talking about “return on investment”, the investment part of the equation is known, it’s the return that we’re interested in. “Return on influence”, by contrast, is an equation with two unknown variables - we neither know the return, nor whether there is influence, nor how closely the two are related. I wouldn’t deny that blogs may have an influence on consumer perception, only that this relationship can be easily characterized as “return on anything” (ROA).

The third type of blog that Weil discusses is the CRM blog. She cites Google as an example and asserts that the company blog is used partly to “side-step the press”, i.e. to provide customers with an account that provides “the back story” in addition to the “official story” of the press release. “What goes on behind the doors” is what is really interesting to people, etc. Does this suggest that the #1 PR strategy associated with blogging is to proclaim that PR is dead - to then cheerfully resurrect it in a new outfit, speaking a new lingo? Are blogs marketing tools which should not be used by marketers, because that would invalidate their claim of authenticity? Death to PR and marketing, long live PR and marketing 2.0?

Finally, she gives GM’s product blog as an example for how a blog’s goal can be “misunderstood on the part of the customer”. The Fastlane blog is conceived as a means of showcasing GM’s products to potential customers and to the public at large, not to provide customer assistance or publicly debate corporate strategy. Of course, one could object that the “misunderstanding” lies elsewhere, namely in the company’s assumption that it is possible to tout a blog as proof of a commitment to openness and community and then “close the door” when the response is deemed inappropriate or off-topic. The schema of blogging invites comments and feedback - readers are unlikely to care that your company’s blog is devised purely to advertise products if they’ve learned elsewhere that blogs are all about interactivity and people connecting. If enough energy is devoted to making a speaker appear authentic, his authentic speech will produce authentic responses.