What your company can learn about keeping an online journal from the likes of Dell, Microsoft, and Apple.
Business Week:
(…) The equity a corporate blogger builds up is portable, in other words. Rather than sticking to the company, it will follow the blogger - even if the blogger heads to a competitor.
Image And Strategy Aid. Still, a blog can be a useful communication channel. By providing companies with unvarnished feedback from customers, it can serve as an early-warning system for product or service problems. It can also provide an easy and inexpensive way to deliver specialized information to narrow segments of the market. And because subscribing to a blog is a snap, it can be a great way to distribute technical updates, new product announcements, and other periodic messages.
There are a few rules of thumb that can help companies reap the benefits of a blog while sidestepping the pitfalls. The 1st one is simple but critical: Don’t blog for blogging’s sake. Make sure you have a clear business goal for your blog - and that you stick to that goal and track how well you’re fulfilling it. Remember that, for companies, blogging isn’t an ideology - it’s a tool.
2nd, make sure your blog reflects your company’s desired image and supports its strategy. Dell’s blog one2one provides a good model. By emphasizing how the blog provides a direct connection between the company and its customers, Dell reinforces its core strategy of selling gear directly to buyers, without having to go through middlemen. The blog has also been designed as part of a larger coordinated effort to rebuild the company’s reputation, which has been damaged recently by service miscues and other snafus.
Risk Alert. 3rd, remember that there’s no one ‘right way’ to blog - no matter what the blogerati might say. You can certainly use blogs to let employees exchange information and ideas with customers. But you can design them more narrowly as well. Apple Computer, for instance, doesn’t allow employees to blog on its behalf - probably because it doesn’t want to risk muddying a painstakingly designed corporate image - but it has set up a blog to promote its Mac services.
A narrowly focused blog can be a particularly good idea if your company is just getting started with blogging. It allows you to test the waters before you open the floodgates. Finally, make sure you educate your employees about the legal and business risks inherent in blogging, such as the possibility that they might inadvertently disclose sensitive or regulated information.
Blogging is very different from the kinds of communication activities that employees routinely engage in, like speaking at conferences. Anything that goes up on the Internet is immediately available to a worldwide audience of billions - and it becomes a permanent part of the public record. Independent bloggers may not have to think before they post, but corporate bloggers do.
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