Mar 18th, 2007 | Blogging Legal Issues, CEO Blogging, Corporate Blogging, IBM, Jonathan Schwartz, PR | 2 Comments
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.
Feb 9th, 2007 | Corporate Blogging, IBM, Jonathan Schwartz, Microsoft, Robert Scoble, Style, Thesis, Visualization | 13 Comments
I’ve been playing around with this great little tool for several days now and thought I’d share some of the results with you.
But first, here’s a brief recap of what I’ve been doing before I start throwing statistics at you.
I am in the process of building a textual database (or corpus, as linguists call it) of corporate and enterprise web logs. The purpose of this corpus is to investigate corporate blogs as a text type. In the current phase of my research, I am especially interested in the following questions
- how do corporate blogs compare stylistically with non-corporate blogs, news texts and other types?
- is there a typical ‘corporate blogging style’ in terms of how people write?
- are there recognizable differences in style that correspond with differences in purpose or authorship (in other words, do CEOs, marketers, software developers, etc have distinct styles?)
- how much variation is there stylistically between different blogs, different bloggers in the same hub (e.g. MSDN) and between different posts by the same blogger?
- are there patterns of change in style over time?
You might wonder what such a description is good for (well, apart from furthering the pursuit of knowledge and all that). I think that, on the practical level, it will enable us to better understand what people are trying to achieve with blogs and how they do it. Ultimately blogging is about good writing. The trouble is, neither is ‘good’ easily defined, nor is it always the same to everyone on any occasion. Blogging styles are highly dynamic and situation-dependent and I think the most successful bloggers very consciously adapt different styles to address different people and issues.
Right, so what do I have so far?
One of the first measures I’ve implemented into my database is a relatively simple formula for calculating how formal/informational or (on the other end of the scale) involved/context-dependent a text is. This is done by adding the frequencies of certain types of words together and subtracting others, under the assumption that (for example) nouns are more numerous in texts which are primarily informational, while a high frequency of pronouns indicates involvement. The formula looks like this:
(see Heylighen and Dewaele 2002)
As you can guess, the results are potentially ambiguous - in other words, texts can have a very high or low score for a variety of reasons - and should be used with care. That being said, the measure produces some pretty interesting results.
This is a chart of f-scores from Robert Scoble’s blog
Each data point in the graph is the f-score for a single post, or the average for several posts made on a single day. As the graph shows, Scoble’s posts are fairly consistently in the 50s in August and September. They surge to over 100 in mid-October and make overall gains in November and December, though these gains aren’t really as significant as they might look at first. The more notable change is the high degree of variation in these months compared to the time span before that.
You might wonder which posts exactly get a high or low f-score. Here are the entries with the highest score, by date.
Comparing new TailRank/DiggTech/TechMeme to Google Reader, 16 October 2006 (f-score 102)
Grapes on a Plane, 29 October 2006 (f-score 97)
The highs and lows of CES, 15 January 2007 (f-score 93)
Photo “training”, 21 January 2007 (f-score 106)
If you have a look at those posts, you’ll probably notice that they aren’t really in any way more formal than Scoble’s other writing. The difference is that they tend to be more informational, i.e. have more and more condensed information crammed into to them than most entries. Lists and enumerations will immediately lead to a high score (because they usually translate into a high noun count) and for Scoble those entries which are written in a sort of telegraph style to convey information about a photowalk or CES thus have a high score. This doesn’t really demerit the f-score as a metric - it simply means that it’s context-sensitive. What’s important is that, with an overall mean score of 60, Scobelizer ranks on the extreme low end of the formal/informational vs involved/contextual scale. To Scoble, blogs really are conversations, not just metaphorically but in a quite literal stylistic way.
That’s the score for one source over time. Let’s compare a bunch of sources.
If you have trouble seeing anything on the chart, look for a little dropdown menu on the lower right hand side labeled dot size. Change it from ‘posts’ to ‘no selection’ and all the dots will be changed to have the same size, which should make the whole thing a lot easier to read.
The chart is a representation of scores for 137 different blogs, computed from data collected during the last five months. Each dot represents a single blog and its average f-score on the x axis. The position of a dot on the y axis indicates the standard deviation of values inside of that blog, i.e. the degree of internal variation
The vast majority of the sources I’ve used are corporate blogs - after all that’s what my research is about. But in addition I’ve also thrown in a few non-corporate sources, simply to be able to compare one type of blog with another one. Thus the list contains 17 personal blogs randomly found via blogger.com, 1 a-list professional blogger (Scoble), 1 political blog hub (huffingtonpost.com) and 3 non-blog sources, namely editorials from the New York Times, the Washington Post and the LA Times collected in the course of this week (see below for a full list of sources).
The first thing likely to catch you eyes are the outliers. On the far right hand side, there is one source simply tagged “Blog” (informative, I know) with a record f-score of 195 and and a standard deviation of 92. That’s Ray Ozzie, Chief Software Architect of Microsoft. Now, if you have a look at his blog you might find that the best description for his writing is not so much formal, but rather “technical” or maybe “information-oriented”. The reasons for the high scores are the many compound nouns (things like development ecosystem, application components, clipboard data formats, etc) coupled with the overall significant length of entries. Like the other outlier, Irving Wladawsky-Berger of IBM, Ozzie also produces very long posts. Ozzie’s longest has 1,700 words, while Wladawsky-Berger is a close second with 1,500. Length tends to coincide with somewhat higher f-scores, however, there are counter-examples. Heather Hamilton has one post with a whopping word count of over 2,000 and an f-score of only 105. Generally brief posts tend to coincide with lower scores, but, as the example shows, there are exceptions.
Overall it is important to consider a few things, especially in regards to the those sources with a high standard deviation and a high f-score:
- the deviation is often high simply because there aren’t many posts (for example, Ozzie only has 6 entries)
- several of the high-deviation blogs are hubs, i.e. they aggregate a number of individual blogs (e.g. MSDN and HuffPo)
But the cool part is that the remaining sources usually contain very conscious stylistic variation (Jonathan Schwarz is a prime example). I other words, they write differently to address different people and achieve different things and this - at least to some extent - stylistically visible. Compare that with the scores for the three newspaper editorials grouped together in the lower right area of the plot. They are surprisingly consistent if you consider that we’re looking at texts published in three different papers, written by an even larger number of journalists. Which just shows that the editorial is a pretty solidified type of text in terms of style, while the (corporate) blog isn’t - at least not yet.
Anyway, I’ll wrap it up for now and save the more in-depth look for another post.
Sources
iUpload InSights
http://hopper.iupload.com/default.asp
Time Leadership
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I Love Me, vol. I
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Simply Albert
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ChristianLindholm.com
http://www.christianlindholm.com/christianlindholm/
PR Thoughts
http://www.prthoughts.com/
Occam’s Razor
http://mgoldberg.typepad.com/occams_razor/
Loic Le Meur Blog
http://www.loiclemeur.com/
CTO Blog
http://www.capgemini.com/ctoblog/
Lakattack
http://spreadlog.net/
Marcel Reichart Blog
http://marcellomedia.blogs.com/mrb/
stefan
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Amazon Web Services Blog
http://aws.typepad.com/
Cisco High Tech Policy Blog
http://blogs.cisco.com/gov/
Digital Straight Talk
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Direct2Dell, Dell’s Weblog
http://www.direct2dell.com/default.aspx
eBay Developers Program
http://ebaydeveloper.typepad.com/
EDS’ Next Big Thing Blog
http://www.eds.com/sites/cs/blogs/eds_next_big_thing_blog/default.aspx
From Edison’s Desk - GE Global Research Blog
http://www.grcblog.com/
Real Baking with Rose Levy Beranbaum
http://www.realbakingwithrose.com/
GM Fastlane Blog
http://fastlane.gmblogs.com/
Google Blog
http://googleblog.blogspot.com/
Dan Socci’s Blog
http://h20325.www2.hp.com/blogs/socci
Kara R
http://www.honeywellblogs.com/kara_r/
ING Asia/Pacific’s Blog
http://mycupofcha.ingblogs.com/
TinyScreenfuls.com
http://www.tinyscreenfuls.com/
Open for Discussion
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One Louder
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NIKEBASKETBALL
http://blog.nikebasketball.com/
OraBlogs
http://www.orablogs.com/orablogs/
Things That Make You Go Wireless
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The Lobby from SPG
http://www.thelobby.com/
Jonathan Schwartz’s Weblog
http://blogs.sun.com/jonathan
Texas Instruments Video360 Blog
http://blogs.ti.com/
The Jason Calacanis Weblog
http://www.calacanis.com/
Boeing Blog: Randy’s Journal
http://www.boeing.com/randy/
Guided By History
http://blog.wellsfargo.com/guidedbyhistory/
PlayOn
http://blogs.parc.com/playon/
Yahoo! Search Blog
http://www.ysearchblog.com/
The CEO’s Blog - John Mackey
http://www.wholefoodsmarket.com/blogs/jm/
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http://www.nixonmcinnes.co.uk/about-us/blog/
Kate’s Blog
http://katesblog.u3.com/
The Bocada Blog
http://bocada.typepad.com/bocadablog/
Michael M’s X10 Blog
http://www.x10community.com/michaelm/
Notes from MNR
http://blogs.adobe.com/notesfrommnr/
Entrepreneurial Marketing
http://blogs.accenture.nl/EntrepreneurialMarketing/
TiVo Blog
http://blog.tivo.com/tivo_blog/
Guiness Blog
http://www.guinnessblog.co.uk/blogs/home.aspx?App=guinnessblog&allowAccess=4r7a6h
Hu Yoshida’s Blog
http://blogs.hds.com/hu/
Forta Blog
http://www.forta.com/blog/
Novell Open PR
http://www.novell.com/prblogs/
Jeff Jaffe’s Blog
http://www.novell.com/ctoblog/
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http://rayozzie.spaces.live.com/blog/
Mena’s Corner
http://www.sixapart.com/about/corner/
Alan Meckler
http://weblogs.jupitermedia.com/meckler/
Infrablog
http://blogs.verisign.com/infrablog/
Thompson Holidays Blog
http://thomsonholidays.blogs.com/my_weblog/
Baby Babble
http://stonyfield.typepad.com/babybabble/
The Bovine Bugle
http://stonyfield.typepad.com/bovine/
Stone Creek Coffee Blog
http://sccv3.stonecreekcoffee.com/blog.cfm
bugBlog
http://rescuebugblog.typepad.com/rescue_bugblog/
Speaking of Security
http://www.rsasecurity.com/blog/
Hybrid Talk
http://hybridtalk.nyse.com/
Jonathan Bruce’s WebLog
http://jonathanbruceconnects.com/jonathan_bruce/
The Tinbasher Sheet Metal Blog
http://www.butlersheetmetal.com/tinbasherblog/
The NCC Weblog
http://www.northfieldconstruction.net/
Signs Never Sleep
http://signsneversleep.typepad.com/
ACCAbuzz
http://www.accabuzz.com/
English Cut
http://www.englishcut.com/
Life at Wal-Mart
http://walmartfacts.com/lifeatwalmart/
Scobelizer
http://scobleizer.wordpress.com/
The DustBlog
http://thedustblog.blogspot.com/
The Baby Blawg
http://babyblawg.blogspot.com/
life’s short…make it sweet…
http://dunlin.blogspot.com/
xbsg
http://mi50.blogspot.com/
I am the evil master genius
http://arnique.blogspot.com/
i want you
http://nuratikahnabilah.blogspot.com/
44 Words for 365 People
http://44for365.blogspot.com/
neurotic kitten
http://nkitten.blogspot.com/index.html
Discover Norwegian Music
http://discovernorwegianmusic.blogspot.com/
my smiles arent a facade
http://badass-freak.blogspot.com/
�?ů�?ð£з �?�? Ŧ�?ǿůĝ�?ŧ�?
http://chibinyu.blog.com/
Flying Tragic
http://tragicflyer.blog.com/
The Irony of Life
http://mujerlatina319.blog.com/
cudgeland
http://cudge.blogspot.com/
Over the Horizon
http://blogs.zdnet.com/OverTheHorizon/
DaveBlog
http://blogs.netapp.com/dave/
Earthling
http://blogs.earthlink.net/
developerWorks blogs
http://www-03.ibm.com/developerworks/blogs/
Irving Wladawsky-Berger
http://irvingwb.typepad.com/
Forum Nokia Blogs
http://blogs.forum.nokia.com/author_group.html?id=2
Nokia N90 Blog
http://n90.bloggercomm.com/
Sparkle Like The Stars
http://www.sparklelikethestars.com/
FYI Blog
http://fyi.gmblogs.com/
Southwest Airlines Blog
http://www.blogsouthwest.com/
Benra Blog: ZoomAlbum, Photos & Photo Sharing
http://benra.typepad.com/
WeatherBug Corporate Blog
http://blog.weatherbug.com/
CTO Blog - TalkBMC
http://talk.bmc.com/blogs/blog-bishop/cto/
Commentary from Cape Clear’s CEO […]
http://www.capeclear.com/annrai/
QuickBooks Online Edition The Team Blog
http://quickbooks_online_blog.typepad.com/
The QuickBooks Team Blog
http://www.quickbooks.blogs.com/
The Mindjet Blog
http://blog.mindjet.com/
Warehousing and Distribution
http://thirdpartylogistics.blogspot.com/
The Official Salesforce Blog
http://blogs.salesforce.com/
Park City Mountain Resort
http://parkcity.typepad.com/park_city_mountain_resort/
SunbeltBLOG
http://sunbeltblog.blogspot.com/
TaylorMade Blogs
http://www.taylormadeblogs.com/
Scenic Nursery Gardening Blog
http://www.scenicnursery.com/
Lightning Labels Blog
http://lightninglabels.typepad.com/blog/
Wiggly Wigglers
http://wigglywigglers.blogspot.com/
EIE FLUD
http://www.eieflud.co.uk/blog/
Eriska, Scottish Islan
http://www.isleoferiska.com/
Outdoor Landscape Lighting
http://www.residential-landscape-lighting-design.com/blogger.html
Thoughts of Beauty
http://www.overallbeauty.com/beauty-blog/
Stormhoek Winery
http://www.stormhoek.com/
Chevron Collectible Toy Cars
http://chevroncarsblog.com/
MSDN Blogs
http://blogs.msdn.com/
Ruby is Coming
http://rubyiscoming.blogspot.com/
am I lonely
http://rongsheng.blogspot.com/
Pineywoods Opinings
http://longleaf.blogspot.com/
Tangent, Oregon
http://tangentcity.blogspot.com/
Verizon - PoliBlog
http://poliblog.verizon.com/PoliBlog/Blogs/poliblog.aspx
Ted’s Take
http://ted.aol.com/
The Student LoanDown
http://blog.wellsfargo.com/StudentLoanDown/
Emerson Process Experts
http://www.emersonprocessxperts.com/
A Thousand Words
http://1000words.kodak.com/
Glenfiddich Blog
http://blog.glenfiddich.com/
IT@Intel Blog
http://blogs.intel.com/it/
All My Eye
http://allmyeye.blogspot.com/
HuffPo Full Blog Feed
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/theblog/
News@Cisco Notes
http://blogs.cisco.com/news/
Mobile Visions
http://blogs.cisco.com/wireless/
Open standards, open source, open minds, open opportunities
http://www-03.ibm.com/developerworks/blogs/page/BobSutor
Marriott on the Move
http://www.blogs.marriott.com/
NYT Editorials
http://topics.nytimes.com/top/opinion/editorialsandoped/editorials/
Washington Post Editorials
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/opinions/columnsandblogs/?nav%3Dleft⊂=new
LA Times Editorials
http://www.latimes.com/news/opinion/editorials/
Nov 23rd, 2006 | Corporate Blogging, Debbie Weil, Jonathan Schwartz, PR, Robert Scoble | No Comments
I just came across this short article in the Guardian, posted last week. It follows the usual modus operandi of mentioning Robert Scoble and Jonathan Schwartz (and Thomas Mahon of English Cut fame) and goes on to quote Debbie Weil numerous times (not that there’s anything wrong with that).
But the real gem is right at the beginning of the piece:
When The Carphone Warehouse boss Charles Dunstone started his corporate blog earlier this year, he was hailed as a cutting-edge chief executive; a man prepared to open up the inner workings of his company to the wider world and willing to communicate directly with his customers.
But that was April, when Britain’s biggest mobile phones retailer was riding high on a wave of favourable publicity about its “free” TalkTalk broadband offer.
Scroll forward a few months and the web is full of tales of “My TalkTalk Hell” as the group struggles to cope with the demand it so badly under-estimated, leaving thousands of customers angry and frustrated.
So what did Dunstone do at the height of the crisis? He simply stopped blogging. From September 1 until earlier this week - two and a half months - he failed to make a single entry. His post this Monday largely consists of an apology for his lengthy absence and a reassurance that the broadband supply problems are being worked out.
Ouch. If there’s one general, universal rule of business blogging it’s in the midst of a crisis, silence is not golden. Posting positive messages while the sailing is smooth is fine, but if there’s any time when a blog is almost indispensable, it’s when things go awry. Why? Because a blog is by far the best channel to make clear beyond doubt that
a) you recognize that there’s a problem
b) you’re sorry
If you aren’t convinced that those two aspects are extremely relevant, ask these guys about it. It’s a bit like Seth Godin once pointed out in a very interesting presentation at Google. Godin shocked his listeners by telling them something both harsh and true: nobody cares about your product. I believe he later qualified the statement - obviously a lot of people do care about Google’s products - but in assuming a complete lack of interest and “passion” on the side of customers regarding the phone service, dog food or toilet paper that you sell, you’re usually on the safe side. And the same largely holds true for companies. If wireless provider X is reliable and moderately priced, will I actively seek out X CEO’s blog to add my praise? Not too likely. But once things go wrong - once I’m frustrated and annoyed and quite sure that nobody is doing anything at all about my problem - then I’m going to post a comment on the company blog and make sure that I’m heard.
Silence leaves a barn door open for interpretation. Explaining and apologizing are basic social abilities - a lack of them indicates that you don’t understand how interpersonal interaction works, or (even worse), that you understand quite well but don’t care.
Mr. Dunstone didn’t realize that he was saying a whole lot by not saying anything. Don’t make that mistake.
Oct 7th, 2006 | Blogging Legal Issues, CEO Blogging, Corporate Blogging, Jonathan Schwartz, Sun Microsystems | No Comments
Law professor Allison Garrett (scroll down for her bio) has a post on her blog discussing the letter recently sent by Sun’s Jonathan Schwarz to SEC chairman Christopher Cox (see my earlier entry, Jonathan’s letter). Being a law expert, her perspective is different (read: more sober and realistic) than that of most bloggers, including myself:
I can see a few problems with allowing blogs to be considered compliant with Reg FD, but there may be ways around the problems. Here are some of the issues the come to mind:
1. How will investors know whether a blog is legitimately the CEO’s blog?
2. How can the CEO’s blog (which would perhaps be deemed Reg FD compliant) be distinguished from the software engineer’s personal blog that also addresses company issues?
3. Are RSS feeds reliable enough for journalists and serious investors?
4. What is the security of the blog? Could others access the CEO’s blog in some way and post messages there?
5. What if “false and misleading information” is posted in a blog? Who, besides the CEO, would have liability for the information? The audit committee might review 10-Qs prior to filing; it would have neither the time nor the inclination to review blog postings.
6. If the information is truly material, it seems that one way for the company to flag this is to make a filing on a Form 8-K. Otherwise, investors just have to guess about whether the information is material.
7. If CEOs take to blogging, they may have to give up one of the most attractive features of blogging — the ability to sort of think outloud in a candid manner. After all, an unguarded comment of the type that we bloggers make from time to time, could be career limiting.
All of these problems are either of a technical nature or related to how trustworthy blogging is as a new form of publishing. Of course, if you ask bloggers none of this is an issue, but from the perspective of the non-blogging part of the population - which still makes up the majority - things look different. Still, I can come up with a few arguments, even if it’s just from a layman’s point of view:
1. The security and verifiability of a blog is no different from that of a corporate web site in general.
2. The authorship of a blog can be verified by embedding it accordingly in the overall web site structure - if it’s located under “Company” - “Blogs” - “CEO’s blog” it is hardly plausible to assume it belongs to someone other than the CEO.
3. “False and misleading information” in a blog entry is no different from “false and misleading information” published in an interview or newspaper article (this doesn’t rule out the possibility that they might by treated differently in a legal context though).
4. Propagating information through RSS is arguably more effective than any other form of distribution. No, I don’t think that one sticks.
5. “Unguarded comments”, when made by politicians or corporate leaders, have the potential to be “career-limiting” whether they’re made at fund raisers, in interviews or posted in a blog.
Anyone with legal expertise (or without) want to pitch in?
Aug 12th, 2006 | CEO Blogging, Corporate Blogging, John Mackey, Jonathan Schwartz, Sun Microsystems, Whole Foods Inc | No Comments
Why shouldn’t an officer of a public company start a blog? Hey, life is short.
These were the words used by Jonathan Schwartz, CEO of Sun Microsystems, in his first blog entry made a little over two years ago. The question that Schwartz raised seemed a little more daring two years ago than it does in 2006 - at first glance. After all, podcasting and vlogs have since then been added to the bag of online publication technologies and one could conclude that blogs are basically mainstream now.
Not in the corporate world.
Yes, there is a considerable level of new- and old-media hype about this new thing called corporate blogging. And yes, a new CRM-, product- or image-blog is launched almost daily by some major corporate player. But while PR departments from San Francisco to Sindelfingen seem to be at least curious and at best ecstatic, the men (and a few women) at the helms of the world’s largest and most profitable companies are rather quiet, a fact recently lamented by the New York Times. Some talk to their employees through an internal blog, but most prefer to pass the pen (or in this case the keyboard) to their ‘communication professionals’.
The question of course is why communication should not be at the top of the agenda for CEOs. When giving his reasons for starting his blog, Schwartz noted that he wanted to get unfiltered feedback from the community. Unfiltered, huh? If we suppose that the motive of Sun’s top dog is genuine (and his impressive track record as a blogger - at least in terms of how much he’s posted over the last two years - makes that seem plausible) it suggests that there’s a whole lot of filtering going on in old-world corporate communication. Of course blogging is not some magical wand you wave that makes such a communicative insulation magically dissapear. And it seems unlikely that many executives would even want that - after all, who really wants to listen the rants of disgruntled consumers and the diatribes of anonymous blog lurkers? But if Schwartz came to the realization that talking to people directly (whether that directness is real or just feels like it is) can actually be good for business, others will eventually follow, even if they are two years late and lack Schwartz’s dedication - a dedication that may well have to do with Sun’s problems as a company and Schwartz’s need to explain the massive restructuring he is undertaking to shareholders, employees and customers.
I’ll be looking at other blogging CEOs in the near future, and at why not just any executives should consider following the example of people like Schwartz and John Mackey.
