How to launch a corporate blog? You really can’t!
Jun 10th, 2007 by Hans De Keulenaer
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Loading ... BigPictureGuy in his corporate soap demonstrates the dilemma in setting up a corporate blog. Give it to the PR department, and your blog will be dead on arrival (Dave J’s expression ‘transparantly phony’ is priceless). But giving free reign to employees who may be out of touch with the market can damage your brand.
Going back a quarter of a century, Peters & Waterman, in their book ‘In Search of Excellence’ identified ‘Autonomy & Entrepreneurship’ as one of the 8 characteristics of successful corporations. They describe teams working from small garages beating much larger corporate teams, and introduce the concept of the idea champion.
The idea champion is the middle ground you need for a corporate blogging project. You cannot micromanage these rogue individuals. Probably you cannot even identify them, and if you could, ‘giving them the blog project’ will not work. All you can do is create an environment where blogs mushroom from the bottom-up in a fertile environment, giving latitude of action while setting some clear boundaries.
You can do all these things right, and still your blog champions may decide to set up their own blog on extreme sports, eMarketing or whatever. Let’s face it, if they’re really good, they can build a side career.
The bottom line:
- A corporate blogging project requires corporate strength - don’t do it if you have many skeletons in the closet
- You need to have high-profile individuals who can be your blog champions
- You need to motivate them to blog for the organisation - i.e. they need to be have made a long-term commitment to your organisation and industry
Wouldn’t the best bloggers be senior executives?
