Why you’re interesting but your company just isn’t

Alright, alright - I know I’ve been a bad, bad blogger these past few weeks, as the abhorrent lack of posts aptly demonstrates. Other activities (more precisely reading, reading and reading) have kept me busy. But I’ll make up for the neglect now and I promise not to let things slide again, even if that means having to tear myself away from fascinating stuff such as this.

Northeastern University and Backbone Media recently conducted a study on corporate blogging where they asked 21 company bloggers for their experiences and opinions. I think the study is interesting not only because of the responses it cites, but because the responses say something about the bloggers who were interviewed and their take on how corporate blogging works. I’ve argued before that corporate blogs - as much, perhaps even more than private blogs - serve a social function, that is, that they seek to establish a relationship between the blogger (acting as a representative of the company) and his readers. Obviously a blog benefits from being informative, but before it can inform it has to achieve the status of a trusted source. However, the only way it can become a trusted source is by making the blogger a familiar, tangible person to his readers - someone with a personality, humor, interests, quirks, etc. The trouble with brochures, CEO interviews, mission statements and normal company websites isn’t that they aren’t informative, it’s that they lack what the cluetrainers have dubbed “a human voice”*.

Let’s look at some of the findings:

After careful review, the research team identified five factors for success. The majority of the twenty participant bloggers pointed to these factors as important to the success of their blog. We focus in on these factors in Section Three.

The five factors identified by the participants were:

1. Culture
2. Transparency
3. Time
4. Dialogue
5. Entertaining Writing Style and Personalization

A company should carefully consider all of these factors before making a decision to blog:

Culture: If a company has particular cultural traits worth revealing, or conversely, a bad reputation they want to repudiate, blogging could be an attractive option. A great example of the latter is Microsoft. Microsoft had a distinct problem—distrust on the part of many customers. The company was seen as being very big and unresponsive to customers. Microsoft used blogs to reveal that individual employees do care about customers, and they are willing to provide a lot of value by way of product and developer information. Blogging at Microsoft has worked well because Microsoft and Microsoft bloggers were able to show the public what Microsoft’s culture was really like behind the big company image.

I find the internal factors culture and cultural traits somewhat strange in this context, especially since they appear entangled with external factors, specifically reputation and image. Somehow culture seems to be understood as an amalgam of positive communicative, interactional and organizational traits. Revealing these traits to the public via blogging is presented as a strategy to counter-point a negative reputation or image, to show what the the company is “really like” - but only if it is “worth revealing”, i.e. if it is likely to be perceived as positive. But doesn’t the second factor, transparency, imply that what your organization is like should be, well, transparent, even if not all of what is revealed is positive? In other words: if blogging is a strategy for replacing the big company image with another - friendlier - image, isn’t that different from showing people what things are “really like”?

A bit further down, the authors provide a list of personal characteristics which they consider important for blogging:

In preparing to blog, it is important to pick the right people to begin blogging for your company. Several of the corporate bloggers gave their insights into what characteristics to look for in a good corporate blogger. These characteristics include:

* The ability to listen to your audience
* Passion for the topics
* The ability to communicate a personality online
* Perseverance and commitment
* Expertise in a field or variety of topics
* A warm and friendly approach
* Good writing ability
* The necessary amount of time for blogging
* Openness to criticism

A company can use these insights as a yardstick when identifying the right corporate blogger.

I’ve highlighted those qualities that I think of as associated with social or communicative competence. Several of these qualities are closely related to (good) writing ability, in the sense that communicating a personality via a blog is achieved through text. I can be warm and friendly in person, but if I decide to write like a lawyer people may infer that I’m distant, aloof, etc, because their impression of me is created by subconsciously analyzing my language and inferring from that what kind of person I am. The ability to listen and openness to criticism alone aren’t enough - I have to actively prove that I “got the message” by saying so, otherwise nobody will know about it.

To summarize, the assumptions supported by the study are that:

a) bloggers can use their personal credibility to make their company appear more credible

b) bloggers can interact with their readers directly and demonstrate communicative competence, which is also assumed to benefit their employer

c) bloggers achieve this by being competent communicative actors, i.e.:

- by what they say

- by how they say it

- by if and how they interact with others rhetorically

d) general social competence is decisive to the success of a blogger, especially whether or not this competence is visible on the screen

Right now you might be thinking that none of this is really new. But I have the nagging feeling that there is a hidden caveat blogger in there. How can we be sure that the relationship between the blogger and his readers actually has any positive effect on how the company is perceived?

As the study describes:

Many bloggers described how it was often personal posts unrelated to the main topic of the blog that generated a lot of comments and traffic. A post that is about unrelated subject matter demonstrates the connections between an audience member and a blogger, and so builds a closer connection between blogger and their readership, precisely because the post is less about business and more about living life.

Wonderful, but isn’t it problematic that readers tend to find those topics most interesting which are least connected to the company? Doesn’t that imply that blogs have a tendency to be personal and that the relationship between the reader and the blogger has little effect on the relationship between customers and the company? I’m not sure, but I’d be careful to dismiss these questions.

* I’ll ramble about Cluetrain another time. Let’s just say there’s a lot of interesting stuff there that needs to be scrutinized.