Blogoz Blogknot – Corporate Blogging
2 October 2007 6 Comments
The blogoz session on Business and Corporate Blogging was the most valuable from my point of view. The three panelists, Joanne Jacobs, Nick Hodge and Des Walsh, all gave valuable contributions. They had prepared slides with useful contact and link information. Nick provides comprehensive rough notes and the slides on his blog.
The panelists had even anticipated likely questions and their list was:
- Can you afford not to blog?
- How to measure ROI?
- Should the CEO blog?
- Should PR and /or legal vet all blogs?
- How to find enough to write about?
- How to handle negative comments?
- Blogging codes of conduct?
Joanne started out and immediately gave us a valuable use for a blog: communicating with the audience after a presentation. She went on to give her reasons why a business should be blogging:
- Raise profiles
- Communicate better
- Journos 1st choice
- Market intelligence
- Know what others are saying
- Smarter intranet
- Establish thought leadership
I was particularly interested in blogging policies and codes of conduct, the last question listed by the panel. Nick talked about the evolution of the Microsoft policy and how there is strong support for the latest version within the company. We were provided with a link to the TheNewPR Wiki with very rich resources on blogging policies and related information.
The session went on to discuss all the other questions in the list. Some thoughts and comments I found valuable include:
- Biggest cost in corporate blogging is the people to support and protect it from security attacks and spam
- Have a comments policy on the top of the blog – see www.thinkinghomebusiness.com
- Use blogs for knowledge management to generate a tacit history of an organisation
- Simple 10-minute podcasts split into 3 or 4 sections are effective
- Use www.Freeplaymusic.com for free music content
- For measurement use: surveys, blog traffic, tone of blog comments, and CGC (consumer generated content) monitoring
- Think about Return on Blog instead of ROI
- Risk of doing nothing in the social media space is high, so doing something is a lesser risk
- Business continuity planning – blogs central to this, particularly off-site blogs
- Use blogging to support business processes
- Cajoling the CEO to blog/podcast takes careful handling and constant monitoring (some spoke from experience)
I was impressed by the panelists and the astute questions and comments from the audience – a very valuable session indeed.
About Michael Rees
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Thanks for the kind words and the great summary. This has reminded me of some of the gems that came up, which I did not make a note of at the time. Like you, I was impressed particularly by Joanne’s eloquent and cogent explanation of why corporations are smarter, administratively and fiscally, in spending money on people over software to manage the security issues, such as around comment spam. For a discussion on “Return on Blog” see my colleague Debbie Weil’s The Corporate Blogging Book (just released also in Chinese!). One thing I did not mention in the session, which is for me a looming issue for many middle managers and senior executives, is that they need to understand what is happening with social media and the only way to really understand is to be a player – you can’t get this stuff (or “grok” it if you wish) without being in there, blogging, social networking etc: I know from our conversation on Friday that you do get this and walk the talk, as here. Your students are more fortunate than they probably realise.
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