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Corporate Blogging: From the Discovery to Discipline
Cymfony and Porter-Novelli just presented the 2007 update of the Corporate Blog survey we initiated last year. We christened last year "The Discovery Age". Changes in the past year have brought more discipline to the management of some aspects of the corporate blog, while evaluation and monitoring lag.
First the progress. Management of corporate blogs has evolved quite a bit in the last year. PR has stepped up to lead most aspects of the corporate blog process. PR depts and agencies have implemented formal processes and guidelines on the management, writing and review of blog posts to ensure quality and consistency.
Fortunately, this has not appeared to censor or restrict participation. In fact, more employees across the company are now involved in contributing posts, and nobody is writing the posts for them. They generally have broad guidelines, not strict rule of what can and can't be published. Few require legal or departmental approvals. This is important to preserve the authenticity and honesty that corporate blogs need to be successful. PR seems to get it.
What they don’t seem to get is the strategic evaluation and analysis. For example, almost three-quarters of respondents felt the blog increased the company's visibility, but half were unsure if the blog was successful. The most popular measurement of success is blog traffic and not any measure of influence or business impact.
This is even more apparent when it comes to monitoring other blogs. Monitoring the blogosphere for mentions of their company is usually very infrequent (avg 5.1 times a month), manual (most rely on Google alerts) and lack strategic analysis of the findings. Only 26% have any sort of influential blogger outreach efforts in place.
Peter Hirsch, a Partner at Porter Novelli, and I had an interesting discussion about these results and what companies can do to improve their programs in our webinar. I encourage you to view the recording on our site. If you don’t have the time now, search “Cymfony” next time you are in iTunes and listen to an audio portion of the session.
Posted by Jim Nail on December 14, 2007 at 03:17 PM | Email this post
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Comments
Promising news Jim. With all the negativity from the blogerati around The Blog Council it's nice to hear a positive attitude towards corporate blogging. I say "bring them on", the Social Web is for everyone - even corportations :)
Posted by: Madhava M Bailey | Dec 15, 2007 12:16:15 PM
Corporate blogs will soon improve in time. Not that they're not doing an awesome job right now but I don't think it will take them long to get a hold of and understand the whole blog business, especially with a hundred or so blogs talking about their blogging efforts.
Posted by: Jay, writer MemberSpeed.com | Dec 23, 2007 1:08:20 PM
"I say "bring them on", the Social Web is for everyone - even corportations :)"
I get all tingly when "professional bloggers" moan about the migration of businesses into the blogosphere.
Have they forgotten that blogging started much like the Boston Tea Party? It was a revolt against high-friction, low-velocity publishing processes controlled largely by corporate web teams and based on antiquated content management systems.
While it's true that many businesses treat the blogosphere like a marketing dumping ground, it's also true that many have taken the words of Clue Train to heart. Can anyone blame corporations for attempting to participate (and benefit) in the blogosphere at a business level?
"...I don't think it will take them long to get a hold of and understand the whole blog business..."
The nice thing about the conversational web is that the conversations themselves will punish bad behavior and reward good blogging behavior. Natural selection and defense mechanisms will continue to play an increasingly important role in determining which companies will thrive in the blogosphere.
Professional bloggers are concerned about all things "blogginess". Blogrolls, trackbacks, hyper-transparency, and a few dozen chicklets - these are all interesting and helpful ideas with which to learn from and build on. However, we have to keep an open mind about new and emerging business and technical requirements.
When your blogsite has 3,500 posts and 20% of those posts have at least one broken link in them, how do you think that will affect search recommendations from a search engine that believes technical content quality is important? How will a high percentage of link failures affect the customer experience and sensitivity with your brand?
Professional bloggers aren't thinking about these types of problems because stuff like this isn't typically a concern for individuals. Blog tools and services are fundamentally designed for individuals that want to become "bloggers", not businesses that want to participate in the blogosphere - these are two very different ideas.
bf
Posted by: Bill French | Dec 31, 2007 10:45:24 AM
That is excellent that corporate blogs have not moderated speech that is posted. Blogs being a great PR campaign are still communication and opinion from one to another.
http://hotcookies.net
Posted by: John Calkins | Jan 4, 2008 10:55:06 AM
