So - who really cares about corporate blogging?

That’s essentially the brave question that Phil Hall asks over at Strumpette (found via Blog Campaigning) in a very interesting post. He summarizes his own attitude as follows.

I would like to make a statement that many PR people will view as apostasy: I think corporate blogs are, on the whole, a waste of time.

Well, he isn’t the first to make such an outrageous claim, though it could be that he’s the first person in PR. He continues by arguing that even those company blogs that perpetrate it aren’t really written for consumers but target the media crowd.

People like me are looking for quality goods at reasonable prices. Reading the blog posting of some CEO ruminating on this-and-that is of no value to folks like me.

[Just a quick stylistic observation: it's genuinely cute (and clever) to start a sentence with the phrase people like me and then end the next one with folks like me if you're the former president of Open City Communications, a New York PR agency, and former editor of PR News. I imagine that PR executives with book deals are not entirely en par with the majority of people shopping at Wal-Mart in terms of income. But perhaps that's just my dirty mind. It doesn't hurt his argument either - I just assume that somewhere in PR school you learn that it's always better to phrase personal opinions in the "folks-like-me-plural".]

Hall then raises several familiar points: consumers don’t care about company blogs, blogging is risky because of litigation, a comment-enabled blog gives trolls and haters a platform, etc. He closes asking for examples of interesting corporate blogs.

But beyond those examples – sorry, but I am not aware of corporate blogs being used as anything more than a poorly-disguised sales vehicle. If you know of some genuinely clever examples of the format, please share them here – I would love to learn about them and have a reason to change my negative opinion.

I think there are quite a few counter-examples, though his criticism that many company blogs are boring and manipulative is certainly legitimate. My impression is that many smart implementations of blogging exist to improve company-internal communication. I’ve commented on the MSDN and Oracle blog hubs before - they represent knowledge management resources which enable tech experts to exchange ideas and improve products. I’m pretty sure Joe User doesn’t care about ASP.NET errors, but to people writing code for a living it’s clearly a relevant issue. Internal blogs have become a fixture in the tech sector and it seems they have potential in other areas as well. For a rare and valuable piece of empirical research on internal corporate blogging at IBM see Kolari et al (thanks to Pranam for pointing me to it).

Let’s look at other applications of corporate blogging as well. Apart from marketing there’s PR, customer relations management, recruiting, communication, lobbying and strategy blogging, plus countless hybrids. All of these functions target different groups of people (look here for a -certainly incomplete- list and more thoughts on the issue). Thus it is quite possible, nay, likely that Joe Consumer is not the target audience for XYZ Corp’s CEO blog. The target audience are partners, investors, competitors and of course journalists, who can be counted on to follow such a blog quite closely.

In that context it is interesting that Hall brings up the SEC.

And what about the investment community? Yeah, can you imagine the SEC giving the thumbs up for publicly-traded companies using blogs to communicate with investors?

Yes, I can. While no decision has been made yet (to my knowledge), I think Cox’s comment serves as an indicator that blogs may soon be used for exactly that purpose.

With such an audience, the idea that posts are edited and reviewed carefully before publication is perfectly plausible - and then again, why not? The idea that blogs must be unedited and highly personal confuses the historical origin of blogs as web-based diaries with their status today. In other words: you can use blogs purely as a means of publishing content on-line, or you can adopt a “bloggy” style of writing. There are no rules when it comes to how you write - you can rehash ad copy or explain your corporate strategy, write about annoying business trips or how to make cranberry walnut bread. All that is corporate blogging and all of it, presumably, somehow serves a purpose for the companies that sponsor it.

So corporate blogs can potentially serve a number of purposes, many of which are outside the scope of marketing or PR. Huge global players such as IBM need sophisticated tools to communicate and coordinate their efforts internally - most people will agree that email is no longer the appropriate tool for that. Beyond internal communication corporate blogs are relevant where they address specific people with some kind of stake in the company’s actions: disgruntled consumers, activists, potential employees, competitors, shareholders, journalists, bloggers. The only thing that won’t work is starting a blog about toilet paper because that’s what you happen to sell. If you can’t make it relevant to anyone, don’t start a corporate blog. The chic of blogging alone won’t do.

But in the end this is less about how companies (or institutions in general) can use blogging as an effective tool and more about how employee blogging will change companies in the long run. Corporate hierarchies partly exist to manage the flow of information inside an organization. Executives are supposed to know and understand internal processes and manage them effectively. But once everyone in an organization is more or less connected with everyone else the overall need for a strict hierarchy is at least somewhat diminished.

Now, I’m no utopian suggesting that organizations will somehow be crowd-governed in the future, but it seems plausible to assume that the monopoly of a few (management, PR, communications dept) to exclusively represent a company to “the outside world” and to control the flow of information internally is fading. Of course nobody is going to care about anything you have to say just because they buy your products. But that doesn’t mean that there aren’t a lot of people listening quite closely - for other reasons. My impression is that “the long tail of corporate blogging” - i.e. employee blogging - will matter more than glitzy PR texts or marketing copy in the long run. I believe this because our conception of public vs. personal communication is in the process of changing radically and in that light it seems illogical to assume that institutions will somehow be spared from the effects.

Perhaps the whole question of who drives the changes vs. who is driven by them follows the inverted logic of the classic Slashdot meme: in Soviet Russia, corporate blog writes you.