Is this a solution in search of a problem?
An organization called the Blog Council was launched this week. According to its website, its mission is to help corporate blogging efforts become more successful.
The founding members, 12 well-known companies, say that the corporate blogging community has been under-served, so the Blog Council wants to change that. How? Through creating “best practices, community, ROI, and advocacy,” they say.
The members are listed as “major corporations and brands, the key officials responsible for their company’s official blog presence, and the entire blog team — bloggers, management, marketing, legal, etc.”
The Council bills itself as a forum for executives to meet one another in a private, vendor-free environment and share tactics, offer advice based on past experience, and develop standards-based best practices as a model for other corporate blogs.
According to its press release, the Council CEO Andy Semovitz says major corporations blog differently from individual and small-business bloggers and face different issues. That means group members need to deliver a responsible and effective corporate message in the complicated blogosphere, speaking for the corporation without sounding “corporate”, and learning to do it live and in real time.
Let’s see: the Council says it brings together “key officials responsible for their company’s official blog presence.” What precisely is an “official blog presence?” These officials are listed as bloggers, management, marketing, legal, etc. Yep, that sure is different from an individual blogger like me for several reasons:
- I am the blogger, and the only blogger, responsible for More With Les.
- I am management, too, I guess, by default. Such as it is, I manage my blog.
- There is no marketing. I do not do this to market anything. To paraphrase Descartes, “I blog, therefore, I am.”
- Legal? The last thing I’d want to do is involve my $600/hour legal counsel, Dewey Stickem & Howe, in this.
The Council’s wording of its raison d’etre troubles me. Maybe I just don’t get it, but I believe blogging should be as Scoble and Israel (2006) say in Naked Conversations, that “bloggers just talk to each other. They make grammatical errors. They bop from one topic to another and back again. They interrupt each other to ask questions, make suggestions, challenge arguments. These conversations build trust. One blog pioneer, Dave Winer, calls it, ‘come-as-you-are conversations’ and says he enjoys seeing an occasional typo because it reveals authenticity, showing you are reading the unfiltered work of a real person” (pp.3-4).
The Blog Council says its advocacy role functions as a collective voice in support of responsible, ethics-based corporate blogs. That sounds entirely reasonable, but how will this manifest into reality? How will it affect the individual bloggers who I assume are part of the “official blog presence” along with legal and marketing? So much for Winer’s unfiltered work of a real person.
I completely understand the desire to perform more professionally, for example, that is why IABC and PRSA thrive. But this is the blogosphere. Neville Hobson said in Naked Converasations “if an organization isn’t already in a place where openness and transparency in communication exits and is practiced, then using tools like blogs will be unlikely to do anything positive for that organization.”
Am I off on this? It seems to me that this effort approaches regulation and bureaucracy. Why not just rely on controlled and very un-spontaneous and highly filtered “corporate speak” and be done with it? Or, blog and let blog.
Les, I’ve posted the same comment to several blogs now: Remember Mike Emanuel’s internal communications council? Representatives of large corporations’ internal comms departments got together three times a year to talk about internal communications issues unique to large corporations. They did so in a relaxed, informal setting. (Roger D’Aprix, Brad Whitworth, and I restarted this forum a year or so ago under the auspices of ROI Communications. It’s meeting in January in Atlanta.)
The Blog Council, as I see it, is the same thing, but focused on blogging instead of employee communications. I don’t think that’s a bad thing at all. Just as the internal communication challenges are different in big corporations, so are some blogging challenges. Why not a face-to-face get-together where bloggers and blogging managers from big companies can talk with each other and share best practices?
Shel, my dear friend, I see your point. You are the world-renowned expert here, and as always, I yield to your wise counsel. . In my social media naivete, I perhaps misjudged the motives of this group. When you contrast it to the Internal Communication Council, a group with which I am quite familar, then I see it more clearly.
Given your explanation, then yes, I agree that meeting face-to-face to share best practices is a good thing.
I guess it’s just the cowboy in me. Part of my great attraction to blogging is the wild west nature and spirit of it. The freedom is exhiliarating. But I can see what you see — corporate blogging does face some unique concerns. Yet, some of the Blog Council’s own language conjured up images of compliance or forced uniformity. Or then again, maybe this cowboy is seeingg things that are not there.
You know I am a social media novice. In fact it was about one year ago that we had lunch in downtown D.C. and I picked your brain about blogging. Thanks to your advice, I started blogging a few weeks later. I have loved every minute of it, but I have much to learn. Thank you again for your comment. Lead us on, my brother.
Hold on a second. Yes, our friend and esteemed colleague (and I mean that sincerely) Shel Holtz raises a good point about how the Blog Council might function, but forgive me for sharing Les’s initial suspicion that this is just another way of adding bureaucracy and formality to a medium that is, by its very nature, non-bureaucratic and informal.
Just the presence of legal counsel should be enough to send us screaming to the hills. Don’t get me wrong — legal counsel is a vital part of any strategic communication program; they have an important role to play in vetting messages that are communicated by more formal means.
But a blog is by its very nature a free-flowing, organic thing. If only Shel’s vision of how the Blog Council could function is accurate, then we might not have much to fear. But I will believe it when I see it. Seems to me to be antithetical to the spirit of blogging.
Robert, I think you make good points. When I saw that lawyers were part of the corporate blog team, I thought of my experience with corporate lawyers. To me, a blogger and the typical corporate lawyer are about as compatible as Britney Spears and K-Fed. My experience with lawyers involved in organizational communication is that they all too frequently tell you “you can’t say that.” To be fair (as you always are, my Brother), legal counsel is valuable to strategic communication. So, I am curious to see how the Blog Council makes it all work.
If the Blog Council is about sharing best blogging practices in the corporate environment, then I see some, though limited, value as most companies out there have yet to find value in the blog as a tool to advance the bottom line of the company.
I personally feel that the corporate value of a blog should come out of that word “tool.” The blog format can be a tool, if necessary, to reach audiences the company might not otherwise reach through more traditional means AND that the company deems as critical to reach. The fact that it is done through a blog format should be far less important than the content and messaging being delivered. The fact of the use of the blog format should be almost as invisible as the use of RSS. Many people aren’t even aware they’re using RSS when subscribing to content, and only really care about getting the content. Corporate blogs should provide a communications channel that offers better access and connection to specific audiences to achieve a specific business goal, even if the participants never really understand they’re participating in a blog.
However, I share Robert’s suspicion that there is a large element of promoting blogging for the sake of the success of blogging. Admittedly, that statement is made in some ignorance since I have not attended a Blog Council meeting or read a report of the minutes. It is more a visceral reaction I have to the notion of the promotion of blogging.