Letting the reader decide
Ah, if only I had more time.
I’m pretty sure I’m not the only person who wishes the day had more than 24 hours, but reading a recent meta-post on GM’s FastLane blog makes me especially conscious of the limitations I’m under. Because man, it’s great material for a paper.
Last week I finished two academic articles, one on the eLanguage project and another one analyzing Wal-Mart’s PR blog Life at Wal-Mart in great detail. As you probably know by now, I’m very interested in how blogs are conceptualized as a new form of publishing and communicating by companies. Who will write our blog? What will it be about? Who is the target audience? How do we interact with readers? Is commenting allowed? Do we put the competition on our blog roll? And do we even have the right to make these decisions alone, or is our blog a democratic forum for the general public?
Each organization needs to figure out the answers to these questions by itself, and the answers both shape how the organization is perceived and reflect how it perceives itself.
The piece on FastLane is especially interesting in that regard because it contains the reasoning behind GM’s decision to maintain two separate blogs. From the post:
When FastLane started in early 2005, the concept was a natural fit: putting our car guy (Bob) with other car people to talk about cars. I still think it’s a great idea. But as this blog has evolved, there have been a number of other subjects that time and circumstances have also made important: fuel efficiency, alternative propulsion issues, corporate social involvement, the state of the American automotive industry, and any number of others.
Calling GM vice chairman Bob Lutz our car guy is a notable understatement, considering what his job is. The other interesting thing is the separation of car talk from fuel efficiency and alternative propulsion issues. Why don’t these things go together? Let’s look further.
It’s fantastic to have a well-known blog that people come to. But the danger in using FastLane as the catch-all for all of our conversations is that we end up being too broad and risk alienating our readers — or worse yet, that people perceive that we’re using the blog as a marketing tool rather than as a place we try to share thoughts and engage in dialogue about our vehicles.
Two things here are noteworthy. Firstly, the blog is interpreted as a publication, not as a technology, meaning it is assumed that one specific target audience reads it and that it should be tailored to the interests of that focus group. The focus group consists of auto enthusiasts - people who want to know about the newest models, see pictures, watch videos and hear stories about the history of certain vehicles. In other words, it consists of fans who visit the blog to share an experience, the experience of the GM brand (or brands). The blog is the digital hearth that they gather around and emotion, not information, is what they are interested in. The focus is unambiguously on the brand, not on GM as a company.
There are a few issues with this. I think it’s questionable whether a company blog is really perceived as a single publication and whether a single focus group with a single topical interest is realistic. In other words, I wonder why those GM fans shouldn’t be interested in fuel efficiency and the state of the American auto industry. People tend to have fairly diverse interests and it’s easy to argue that all these things are connected. Another question is whether people will (or should) read every post in the blog. The main argument for making your publication topically homogenic is that readers are only interested in that single, clearly defined thing (e.g. cars) and will read everything relevant that’s published about it. Is that really true? How do we know?
The key questions are: a) who should order and sort what’s published where and b) does “broadness” really “alienate readers”? In other words, do readers get to sort out topics for themselves (the platform approach) or does GM decide what goes where (the publication approach)? To me, the latter approach suggests that people can’t make the choice for themselves, which I seriously doubt.
The post’s many commentators seem to have a similar impression:
I still don’t understand why you need two blogs. What’s wrong with using one blog for everything you’ve mentioned above?
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You are concerned with the material you are putting out there for readers will be too broad on here, I would take the exact opposite stance. I think if there was a group of writers, with well defined categories, you could really show some momentum with this effort. Yet, instead, we see posts very rarely and sporadically. I think this bores your readers more than having too much content would overwhelm them.
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Speaking for myself, I like seeing a variety of topics on the Fastlane blog, and haven’t seen much of use on the FYI page, so I’d recommend just having more content on a variety of topics on the Fastlane blog.
They don’t seem overly confused by the topical diversity to me. And then, how is a place [where] we try to share thoughts and engage in dialogue about our vehicles not a marketing tool? Again and again I am taken by surprise by the reluctance of corporate bloggers to openly use the words marketing and public relations (for another example, read my exchange with McDonald’s Bob Langert about the status of Open for Discussion as a CSR blog). Apparently the taint associated with these terms is strong enough to justify going to bizarre lengths to avoid their use. Why would GM want dialogue about their vehicles if not - among other things - to promote their sale?
In contrast to the points mentioned above, GM’s global communications director Chris Barger is convinced that having two blogs makes sense.
Meanwhile, we have the FYI blog, which is important but has sometimes been underutilized or under-contributed to. And as the name suggests, we originally envisioned it as the place to discuss issues and provide our perspectives. I’d like to get back to this model for both of our blogs — return FastLane to being our blog about vehicles, and have FYI serve as our more “corporate” blog where we discuss other issues.
Okay, wait - one blog is about cars and the other one about issues and perspectives? I’m not terribly surprised they can’t figure out what to post about in FYI, considering the vagueness of that description. Apparently, FYI is meant to focus on GM the company, as opposed to the brand (see above) and be more informational and less emotional (that would be FastLane), but the obvious problem is that these things hardly ever neatly align with the topics of actual posts. Who is the target audience of this piece about climate change, or this one about how GM is perceived by the American public? Why can’t I be passionate about the Chevy Volt and still read a post about the environment?
Posts like this one demonstrate that the overly simple categorization “cars” and “everything else” doesn’t work too well, not even for Lutz himself. Read carefully:
I have taken the opportunity to shoot a brief video addressing some of the issues that have been cropping up here on the blog in recent weeks. This video will be posted in chapters, in the coming days, and will touch on such issues as the future of Buick, the Chevy Triplets, GM concept cars and diesel engines, among other things. And we’ll try to do more of these videos in the future as time permits and circumstances dictate.
-> Meta-blogging (videos we’ll post soon) and cars.
In the meantime, I have a few other notes of interest regarding the Volt development program, to follow up on Denise Gray’s post of a few weeks ago.
First, the Volt (and all other vehicles that will use E-Flex) now has its very own vehicle line executive, just like all of our other vehicle development teams. The VLE for E-Flex vehicles is Frank Weber, who has a lot of pertinent experience under his belt, including a stint leading advanced concept development for Opel.
-> Technical info about the Volt.
Also, we have opened a brand-new studio dedicated to the design of vehicles using E-Flex. As I’ve said time and again, GM is once more a design driven company, so it’s only natural that design keep pace with the engineering development of the E-flex system. The studio will be led by Bob Boniface, director of advanced design. Bob led advanced design work of the Chevy Camaro Concept, Sequel Concept, and Volt. He previously led DaimlerChrysler’s Advanced Product Design Studio and directed architectural design of the minivan stow-and-go seat.
-> More Volt-related “insider” information (who is working on it). The text clearly communicates “this is where we are, that is where we’re going”.
Finally, we have allocated even more engineering resources to this program, and to our fuel cell program. We have assigned over 150 engineers to E-Flex development, and transitioned more than 500 fuel cell engineers from our Research and Development group to our core engineering functions. That’s a step toward accelerating the production engineering of hydrogen fuel cell and electric drive vehicles.
-> When talking about a fuel-efficient car, talking about fuel efficiency makes sense.
All these moves, and everything going on behind the scenes, are strong indicators that we’re serious about Volt, despite the “PR stunt” dismissals I still hear in some circles, and that we’re serious about other advanced technologies intended to move the future of the automobile away from petroleum. And we’ll continue to develop these technologies with as many resources as we can allocate to them, even if our attention and resources get diverted by proposed legislation that will only serve to keep America hooked on petroleum even longer.
-> And -wham- a juicy political and public-relations-relevant statement.
Now imagine all that in three separate posts, one about the Volt, one about fuel efficiency and a third one about GM’s strategy for the future. It doesn’t work nearly as well, both because one thing serves as the argument for another and because everything is equally related to GM.
While I agree that having a clearly defined topic (or set of topics) for your corporate blog is a good thing, I’d give readers a little more credit when it comes to picking out what they want to read. Lutz’ post demonstrates that it isn’t as easy to keep topics separated from one another as it may superficially seem. The flexibility of blogs are part of their appeal. It’s a bad idea to overregulate, especially when your categories are as vague as in this example (”cars” and “everything else”).
Give a team of talented bloggers the freedom to write interesting pieces - pieces that are relevant to what you do in some way - and your audience will materialize. Having one blog that covers a wide array of topics is in my view better than having several which are not updated on a regular basis. In GM’s case, the particular topical split smells like a departmental issue (here PR and marketing, there corporate information) that has much to do with how communication at the company is organized but very little with what readers want.
But above all other things, writing for focus groups suggests that you’re saying different things to different constituents based on what they want to hear. This in turn suggests that you have a covert goal that is central to what you are communicating - why else would you be so tediously obsessed with what goes where? Ultimately this is a control issue and the lesson to learn is that blog readers, by and large, can take care of themselves.
