Best Practices on Corporate Blogging

Yesterday during the BlogOut 2007! event, I chaired a discussion with various bloggers on the topic of corporate blogging from the small medium enterprises to the big corporations. Corporate blogging is a new phenomenon in which the employees of the company blogged about different aspects of their company. The results can go in two extreme directions, either very negative or very positive. I will summarize the best practices discussed from the conversations I have with several bloggers and perhaps, in the hope to generate more interest in corporate blogging.

Believe it or not, unlike the US, the corporations in Singapore are not warming to the idea. In fact, the only corporate blogger who has achieved a significant audience is Mr Tan Kin Lian, the ex-CEO of NTUC Income. If you look at the US, there are some interesting corporate blogs from big multinational corporations in the US: General Motors, Microsoft: Channel 10 and Google. Here are the best 10 practices which I summarize without order of preference in the discussion:

• 1. What’s the reason behind starting a corporate blog: It is not really urgent, but it is important to set an early direction to where the corporate blog should go. There are a few possible motivations for a corporate blog: (i) internal communication among the teams in the company, (ii) CEO offering his vision and strategy, (iii) showcase new ideas, products or even innovative applications (with no practical relation) in a company, (iv) marketing and public relations for the company for the outside world. It is imperative to know why the company has chosen to blog. For example, if you are a founder of a company that does mobile services, and you are interested in getting customers’ feedback, a blog may be a good idea to get some views how you can make the product better.
• 2. Who should blog?: There are two schools of thoughts. Some bloggers view that corporate blogs are personality driven, for example, you hear Tim O’Reilly in the O’Reilly radar offering his thoughts about the web 2.0 industry. In fact, usually, the CEO is an ideal person to blog because he provides vision and direction for the company. Another school of thought is that anyone can blog within the company. For example, Nic Fillingham explained about how Microsoft has allowed many employees to blog about different aspects of the company, and surprisingly, they have no code of conduct unless the employees seriously breached the terms in their employment contracts. The community is divided between a personality and group blog. One good point is that a personality can take his or her audience if he or she leaves the company, but the group blog can be sustained on a deeper level.
• 3. Handling Comments and Feedback: If you have a corporate blog, you may have the choice to decide how you want to obtain feedback. You can of course allow anonymous commentators or demand that someone is properly registered. Generally, the concern is that a negative comment can hurt the company if the issue is handled badly. In fact, Kevin Lim raised an example about someone dropped a rumour from the Apple company that the iPhone may be delayed, and what happened is that the investors has run amok with the share prices go tumbling down. So, one has to be careful about how people pass information about your corporation through your blog. That comes to my next point.
• 4. Dealing with Bad publicity: Of course, what about criticisms? A general consensus among us is that the blogosphere is self-correcting and we should expect our readers to be discerning and enlightened. Ming Shen told us the story about how his company suffered from a poison pen, and in the end, it is a neutral blogger who pointed out the poison pen is the same person who writes a blog counter to his company. So, we should trust bloggers and readers to go and find out for themselves whether the comments can be constituted as just rants or fair comment.
• 5. Internals or Externals?: Is your corporate blog catered within the company for the employees in different departments to share their human side or best practices that can help to add value to what the company is doing? Is it your corporate blog your channel to talk to customers and partners? These has important implications in structuring the message you want to send out. We all agreed that the corporate blog should be more focussed in fulfilling their primary objective in what it sets out to do.
• 6. Does Corporate Blogging make money or generate more customers?: The answer is rarely, but it delivers intangible returns to the company in the form of managing relations within or outside the company. It can also be used as a channel to market or giving teasers to pander from the expectations of the public in what you are going to launch next. In fact, short press releases can roll out quickly through blogs.

Perhaps, there are many other practices, and if I have the time, I will expand more on these best practices.

Acknowledgments and References:
[1] Check out Van Tan’s thoughts on corporate blogging after the BlogOut event, BlogOut 2007, Lucian’s “Corporate Communications is an Oxymoron”, Debbie Cai’s “The Corporate Blogging conversation” and Ben Koe’s “BlogOut 2007: discussing corporate blogging“. Walter has written an earlier article on corporate blogging and I think that it might be of interest to you here.
[2] I thank Darius, Nic, Ming Shen, Bianca, Debbie, Melvin, Ben, Wee Kee (Thanks to Estee) and many others who have joined in this interesting discussion.

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