"Corporate Blogging" = Oxymoron

Doc Searls takes a promoter of "corporate blogging" to task (gently).  He writes:

"Corporate blogging" is so ironic it's nearly an oxymoron. Having "a system in place to monitor what is being said" seems more consistent with ending a conversation than with starting one.

But, credit where due. Sally Falkow (whose blog is Website Content Strategy) is trying to do a Good Thing here: getting companies to talk, and to engage, in  human voices, with real people.

Her problem — the same one all of us have — isn't with setting up practices, policies, strategies and so on. It's with trying to frame an understanding of blogging in too many ways at once, and losing track of its core virtues in the process...

When we said, in The Cluetrain Manifesto, that markets are conversations, we meant that conversation trumped all marketing jive. Conversation, and the relationships that follow, are what really matter in real marketplaces — which are places (whether in virtual or physical space) where people meet to do business and make culture. You can't "deliver" conversation. It's not "content." It's not about branding, or media, or building anything other than what conversation does best (better than "messages"): making and changing minds.

Blogging is personal. The voices you hear in blogs are personal ones, not corporate ones, even when they serve corporate purposes.

Yet companies have character too, just as individuals do. The difference is that companies themselves cannot speak. So, what you want are individual speakers, and individual blogs, that express and reveal what's best about their companies' character. That's what the best "corporate blogs" do.

And that what any nonprofit or advocacy blogs must do.  Speak in a genuine, personal voice about the issues that matter to you and your organization.  Give people a reason to be interested, a reason to care, and establish conversations with them.

If you view a blog as just another channel to deliver your message, it will fail.  Blogs have become so popular so quickly because the medium makes it easy for individuals to get online and start talking, and because people are interested in hearing individual voices--not marketing jive (In Doc's hepcat phrase).

But once nonprofits master the medium, and once they get beyond their risk-averse concerns about staying on message, they should be superb at starting conversations with the intention of changing minds--that's why they exist in the first place!

Comments

[Bill French]

Ed:

Blogging has a heritage of being about conversations. Word processing systems also have a heritage that [was] exclusive to legal firms.

There was a time when word processors were only found in law firms; and there was a time when blogs were used only by individuals to create conversations. Word processing has emerged as a useful technology for many purposes. And like word processing, blog technologies are doing the same. The not-so-recent past when blogs were used only for one objective, (and zealots argued religiously about the 'true' definition of a blog), has now passed.

Consider the telephone -- typically regarded as a "conversation" tool *exclusively* -- is now employed in many use cases as an effective broadcast tool; reverse-911 being a particularly valuable one.

Bottom line - there are business requirements where blog technologies can be very effective in corporate settings with and without conversational aspects; and with and without public visibility.

It's no surprise that some corporations will create ineffective and crappy blogs, but the greater injustice is ruling out valuable possibilities by over-generalizing and discriminating against blog use-cases under a label such as "corporate blogging". This is a broad, ambiguous term like "business blogging", and "enterprise RSS", and I think our "conversations" must better articulate these definitions and benefits.

[Ed]

Great food for thought, Bill, and thanks for the comments. I think you have a point, but I also think you're missing mine. Check out today's post.