Click here to view the screencast in a separate window. You can also download (right-click, save) and watch it in your favorite video player, which gives the additional luxury of being able to pause.

The three blogs I look at in the clip are Marriott on the Move, JNJ BTW and Delta Air Lines. Here’s the link to the cited article and to the presentation with the example.

And apologies for my lapse of memory towards the end (which blogs am I comparing again?), but it was a long day and organizing a conference occupies a lot of brain cells. I hope it’s still informative.

Here are the four (randomly picked) candidates.

1. JNJ BTW

Posts: 52

Words: 17077

Sentences: 729

Average Word Length (AWL): 4.8

Average Sentence Length (ASL): 23.4

Average Words per Post (AWpP): 328.4

Word Cloud:

Word Tree:

2. Chrysler Blog

Posts: 59

Words: 13341

Sentences: 780

Average Word Length (AWL): 4.6

Average Sentence Length (ASL): 17.1

Average Words per Post (AWpP): 226.1

Word Cloud:

Word Tree:

3. The Official Palm Blog

Posts: 46

Words: 9262

Sentences: 446

Average Word Length (AWL): 4.5

Average Sentence Length (ASL): 20.8

Average Words per Post (AWpP): 201.3

Word Cloud:

Word Tree:

4. Marriott on the Move

Posts: 60

Words: 4937

Sentences: 305

Average Word Length (AWL): 4.5

Average Sentence Length (ASL): 16.2

Average Words per Post (AWpP): 82.3

Word Cloud:

Word Tree:

All four candidates have around 50 entries, with word counts ranging from roughly 5,000 (Marriot on the Move) to about 17,000 (JNJ BTW). I’ve picked different starting terms for the word trees, depending on the the respective company’s industry, but you can easily search inside a tree for any word that occurs in the blog.

- Over at oreilly.com, Nat Torkington has an interesting post up about the Lauren Turner/Google incident.

- BrandWeek’s Marc Monseau Jim Edwards compares Johnson & Johnson’s new blog to Pravda.

EDIT July 12th: Adriana points out that Marc Monseau is of course the blogger doing JNJBTW, not the author of the Brandweek piece about that blog (that’s Jim Edwards). Thanks for correcting me, Adriana!

- Finally, Allan Jenkins suggests that Debbie Weil is astroturfing for alliConnect, a new blog meant to promote a weight loss product sold by GlaxoSmithKline.

I’d comment more extensively, but I’m still a bit too jetlagged, plus a long day of conferencing lies behind me. Funny coincident though, all these health-related blogs appearing almost at once, and interesting that they all appear to have their issues. Is it an exaggeration to say that the health care sector has its problems with blog transparency? I’d be interested in your opinion, especially if you’ve worked in that area.

Everyone else is talking about our company, so why can’t we? There are more than 120,000 people who work for Johnson & Johnson and its operating companies. I’m one of them, and through JNJ BTW, I will try to find a voice that often gets lost in formal communications.

The “go where the conversation is”-argument is a powerful one, especially in an industry that has its share of image problems (though Sicko is about another branch of the healthcare industry, insurance). From what I can tell, big pharma has not been very open to blogging up to this point and there is clearly a degree of uncertainty about how to use the new platform:

I’ve been reading blogs for only a few months now, but already it’s clear to me how important it is not just to watch, but to join in productively. Doing that will take some unlearning of old habits and traditional approaches to communicating — and I will have to find my own voice

The similarities with other “first posts” are quite interesting. Hmm, I think I’m going to do a brief analysis of these opening entries some time.