We mourn the passing of these corporate blogs
… they were young and full of hopes and dreams, but their owners abandoned them in their infancy. Maybe the eulogy for some of the blogs on my list could read like that. As a number of smart people (e.g. Easton Ellsworth, Debbie Weil) have pointed out, it is immensely important to keep blogging and to not underestimate the time and energy that goes into it. Just quietly ducking out makes a company look bad; it makes the whole endeavor appear a bit like a failed experiment.
Anyway, here’s my list of deceased corporate blogs, ordered by degree of their putrefaction (last post in brackets):
#1 Ray Ozzie, Microsoft (1 April 2006)
I’m sure MS’s chief technologist is hella busy, but so is Jonathan Schwartz and he has been posting steadily for years. Ray went into the corner after just 6 rounds (or posts) and he’s been catching his breath since April. Methinks the introduction of Vista should have given him plenty to blog about. Was blogging just a plug for Live Spaces? What does Scoble think (I’m just curious, honest)?
#2 QuickBooks Online Edition - The Team Blog, Intuit (9 May 2006)
Silent since May, though the record was good before that. After about a year, maybe all questions on QuickBooks Online had been answered? We’ll never know - they didn’t even say goodbye.
#3 Things That Make You Go Wireless, Sprint (9 Jul 2006)
Sprint replaced their blog with with a podcast (the link points there now). Probably not a bad choice for them.
#4 The Bocada Blog, Bocada (28 Jul 2006)
A prototypical example for an abandoned blog: 181 words, 17 sentences, 4 posts in total in 2 months - then nothing. What went wrong?
#5 TiVo Blog, TiVO (18 Aug 2006)
There should be plenty for these guys to blog about, if you consider what is happening with television at the moment. But they’ve been MIA for four months, after only 11 posts. Maybe allowing comments would have made things more lively.
#6 Mena Trott, Six Apart (30 Aug 2006)
Considering what Six Apart does, Mena’s prolonged silence might seem a bit ironic. Is she too busy enabling other people’s blogging to blog herself? No, she isn’t, she just likes it better over on Vox. She does seem to have given up on strictly corporate blogging though. Any reason, Ms. Trott?
I’m jealous of you, by the way. You’re just two months older than me and you have both been to Tokyo and live in the Bay Area, two things I’m still working on. Watch out, I’m on your heels.
#7 Dan Socci, HP (12 Sep 2006)
The only one on the list that has not just been abandoned, but deleted. See archive.org for proof of its passing. No worries Dan, your five posts are safe for posterity in my indestructible linguistic database. Your blog on “HP’s industry leading support services which provide innovative support of HP products and also help customers manage their IT environment operations more efficiently across all vendor platforms” may be gone, but it is not forgotten. And believe me, in my statistics all those juicy adjectives make a nice dent under “suasive language”.
#8 Tom Bishop, BMC Software (3 Sep 2006)
The CTO of business software maker BMC apparently has business elsewhere.
#9 Kate Purmal, U3 (20 Sep 2006)
Maybe Kate ran out of reasons why U3 Smart Drives are great? Sorry, I just couldn’t resist. It’s simply astonishing how she managed to mention the company product in virtually every single post.
#10 Nokia N90 Blog, Nokia (26 September 2006)
The blurb on the site states: “Here you will find blogger and media information that you can repurpose and utilize in your blog postings about the N90“. It may have enough for a catalogue, but not enough for a blog. Perhaps to keep a marketing blog running, you need something with more contextual longevity than just the product? She’s still blogging…
Comments?
(On Dec 15th, 2006 at 7:00 pm)
Genius post, Cornelius. Sadly, a lot of corporate blogs are either dead, dying or never became fully alive in the first place. Goes to show that just *having* a corporate blog isn’t enough. We’re still at the point where a lot of people don’t seem to mind if a business starts a blog and then inexplicably drops it. I doubt that will continue for much longer. Our collective patience with business blogs will probably wane somewhat.
(On Dec 15th, 2006 at 7:36 pm)
I think companies will plan the development of public blogs with more care in the future. Corporate blogging is still in its infancy and that won’t change too soon, thus “experiments” will still sometimes fail.
Maybe I’m generalizing, but I’d say a lack of direction plays an important part when blogs die. Several of these seem not to have had a clear idea of what they wanted to talk about.
What are the things that just don’t cut it for a blog? I mean what things just aren’t interesting enough to be the central topic of a blog? I’d say products, but that vastly depends on what you’re talking about…
(On Dec 15th, 2006 at 5:53 pm)
Don’t forget the Maytag blog, and that three out of the original stonyfield farm blogs were dropped.
Blogging is still an experiment for most people and companies, some will work and some will not. I think it really depends upon the audience, and if you can develop the right content for them. Stonyfield Farm is again a good example of this, the farmer blog continues stronger than ever.
I agree with you Cornelius, the issue is a lack of direction, maybe not enough blogging, or may too many ideas are the reasons for the silence.
I disagree about the products idea, I think Macromedia, now adobe is a great example of a company that does use its blogs for product discussion. I just think it depends on the type of products. If you have complex products that involve a lot of complexity, then you will probably have a lot of customers with questions. A product blog about a simple product would not work as well. That’s why Stonyfield does not have one. You can only write so much about yogurt.
(On Dec 15th, 2006 at 12:38 am)
Very true, John. Yogurt doesn’t work too well as the main theme for a product blog. I think those products blogs that work despite being built around something simple are those that actually focus on something closely related, instead of just the product itself.
For example, Real Baking With Rose (realbakingwithrose.com) works because its about baking and because Rose Levy Beranbaum writes well.
I think other areas of business blogging (PR/image blogging, CEO blogging, customer support via blog etc) might be more promising in the long run than marketing via blog, unless you have the right product or a talented blogger on your payroll.
(On Dec 15th, 2006 at 10:34 am)
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(On Dec 15th, 2006 at 5:33 am)
Cornelius,
I think you are completely right about focusing a blog on customer support and feedback. Though I’d disagree with you that those subjects are not marketing.
Marketing is after all the process of understanding the needs and wants of a customer, and satisfying them efficiently and profitably. There’s a lot of room for listening in that definition. I think many people associate marketing with sales, or adverting. When it is so much more.
This was the whole thesis of the corporate blogging survey 2005. Basically product managers at Macromedia were using blogging to gather feedback from customers, and in the process customers became evanglists for Macromedia. Which resulted in more links, traffic and sales. Blogging was not advertising, but in this context it was marketing.