Big Blogging - 5 Steps to Corporate Blog Rollout
The Big Three, Big Pharma, Big Tobacco, Big Steel.
Who will be Big Blogging? What form will it take?
This is an open blog post like one of Hugh’s.
pre-update I’m seeing comments, and I’m still editing. Bad blogger. I’m not covering up, just composing. I’ll be done in a bit.
UPDATE
Fortune 500 Blogging: 5 Steps for Major Corporations Launching Blogs, as good a place to start as any. This comes to by way of Scoble and Corporate and Political Blogging, Get Rid of the Fear and Be Yourself.
Synopsis: Before you throw your kickoff party and let marketing run the show, please, try to imagine the fun you’d have if the 800 number on your box of soap flakes rang any phone in your firm at random.
Discussion: What are your 5 Steps for Major Corporations Launching Blogs?
There’s a dark note mixed in with the happy buzz about blogging these days. Bloggers have been fired from their jobs for what they thought were innocuous posts. Investor relations departments are having legal nightmares over an innocently-meant blog revealing critical info to the world before it’s sent to investors. PR departments are finding themselves side-stepped by the media who go direct to blogging staffers, instead of carefully prepped official spokespeople.
This is a bit much. First, as you’ll see, I’m not going to take pity on the poor-widdle corporation that doesn’t know how to manage it’s own information. Second, stories of dismissal are few, and stories of employment are many. If anything, you should be concerned that once your employees are blogging, the headhunters will be able to dial in your best talent.
Releasing confidential information?
- If your employees are releasing confidential information, that’s not a blogging problem. It is a more general problem. It’s called incompetence.
Look at your brand identity and messaging, and ask: How can blogging augment those things? “Augment” is a key word here, because having corporate blogs should mean *more*, not *different.*
This is peachy. I have a firm with a couple tens of thousands of employees. I’m going to get them all blogging the corporate message, instead of, oh, say, serving customers, or whatnot. How will a couple tens of thousands of folks who’ve been handed foreign software and concepts respond to my blogging edict?
Most likely by forwarding it to Scott Adams.
Employees who plan to blog must be very clear on the company’s PR and communications stand, and should be instructed not to “take a radical left or right turn from the corporate message,” says Poulson.
Making a sharp left or right turn from the corporate policy?
- If only your CXOs are blogging and even they can’t toe the line, then your blog gets filed under comedy. Make sure they’re not also releasing confidential information. (See above.)
- If you’ve gone off and told everyone in your company to blog, handed them the corporate message, and told them not to take any turns. Please, also provide them with instructions on how to use the clipboard to cut and paste.
Staying within the boundaries of a corporate message is pure non-sense. You can count on your employees to avoid insulting your firm, but if your message is “synergistic customer quality” but one of your CNC machinists goes off half-cocked and blogs about “quality customer synergy”, well maybe you’ve tasked the wrong employee for torch bearing.
Oh, and what happens when that machinist goes on strike? May he blog about that?
You can simply hand out the policy to your marketing director to share with the appropriate people, or have a big kickoff party, hand off the policy, and invite everyone to blog, or post it on an intranet.
This is advice for a Fortune 500 company?
The problems faced when allowing everyone to blog, are many. It is fraught with risk, and you’re not going to mitigate that risk by printing out instructions and throwing a kick off party.
This army of bloggers will be met with commentators.
Commentators are NOT customers. They certainly are not employees. They will say things.
They will say good things. They will say bad things. They will say paisley things. They will say ANYTHING.
- Are your employees prepared to field scathing criticisms of your products?
- Are customers going to ask individual employees for customer service, circumventing your customer service queues?
- How does an employee for one brand route a comment regarding another brand to a person who can respond intelligently?
- What about employees who maintain a strict partition between their personal and business lives (read: restraining order)? May that employee blog anonymously?
- How are they going to respond to ugly, ugly comments, or e-mail messages, that are personally or politically insulting?
- Conversation means that people talk back. When is it okay for an employee to take issue with or dress down a commentator?
Five Steps to Launching Corporate Blogs
- Get an feed reader, Feed Demon, or NetNewsWire. It’s a software program that pulls blog articles into an e-mail like program, so you can read through blogs the same way you read through e-mail. Instead of going from site to site, the articles come to you.
Until you use a feed reader, you won’t get it.
Issue a feed reader to everyone who will be blogging, and train them on how to use it.
- Read blogs. I go with Scoble on this, but it’s number two. Number one is get your feed reader, otherwise you can’t really read blogs.
Now look around. Who’s already blogging about you anyway? Do you have fan sites? Do you have flame sites?
Do a soft launch. Have your CEO or other future bloggers respond in the comments of relevant blog posts.
- Whoever is blogging needs support, and not from marketing, but from the people who know how to deal with problems (is that HR?) Scoble himself got worn down by the gadflies in this comments, and some of the stuff sent to political bloggers is horrifying.
These are not customers. You need a procedure for dealing with insults and threats. An employee blogging rah-rah for your firm should not have to endure personal or political insults alone, especially one who would otherwise be working internally.
- Does your firm do anything that makes for good television? Anything that is steeped in technical lingo, particulars?
Give a blog to the team that crash tests your automobiles, or conducts the taste testing of your snack foods, or the people create and record the voices of your cartoon ducks. Set them up like English Cut, or the new Horse Bliss. Create a blog where your employees can regale readers with stories of the know-how and history that makes your firm special.
- Look at leaks as failures not specific to blogging. You could just as well be leaking out of e-mail, camera phones, or happy hours. You must clearly mark trade secret information.
Recognize that by giving a person a blog, they are one more exit for information. They will be facing customers and the press. They may have no experience in these matters, and need exceedingly clear guidelines. Stamping documents as trade secret, or with release dates becomes necessary.
Kick off party won’t do. Bloggers increase costs, and increase risks. You need to have a real plan in place.
Which is pretty obvious to someone in IT. Computer systems, like blogs, are not rolled out with a marketing press release and a kick off party. Probably the best way to start out blogging in the a huge firm, is to start small. Give one of your CXOs a blog, sure, but find someone in your firm with a cool job, or a job attached to some interesting bit of your corporate history. If you were stodgy old General Motors, you could give a blog to the Small Block V-8 engineers, for example.
No, you do not want to miss this boat. You want to tap into blogging.
Before you throw your kickoff party and let marketing run the show, please, try imagine the fun you’d have if the 800 number on your box of soap flakes rang any phone in your firm at random.
What are you’re 5 Steps for Major Corporations Launching Blogs?
UPDATE: Hugh talks about the lack of free will, and how a corporate blog can exaggerate it.
December 18th, 2005 at 4:30 am
Kuzzzaaaahhhhh!!!
Good stuff, thanks!
December 18th, 2005 at 11:03 am
Thanks Robert!
I’d like to have this conversation with as many people as possible. I’m in the mid-West and I don’t see how a company out here can realistically take the blogging plunge like a purely IT firm in California or Washington.
It may make sense for a smaller firm, or a firm that already is built around a personality, but what are the benefits for a Fortune 500 firm? And what are the costs? There’s no IT or legal department that I know of that will go along with questions. What are those questions, and what is our answer?
December 19th, 2005 at 12:26 am
Great post - thanks for that.
Heading into week number two of my companies corporate blog and wish I would have seen steps one and two from “5 Steps to Launching a Corporate Blog.” Some people are still not “getting the blogging thing.”
Ah well, looks like I have an RSS and blogging training to plan. Better late than never, eh?
December 19th, 2005 at 1:05 am
Alan,
I love this and want to use it in my book:
The Big Three, Big Pharma, Big Tobacco, Big Steel.
Who will be Big Blogging? What form will it take?
But I don’t know your last name or who you are or where you are, etc. I’d like to give you credit. I’m finishing up the book in the next couple of days so email me pronto and let me know!
Reach me at wordbiz @ gmail DOT com.
December 19th, 2005 at 10:53 am
Excellent post, Alan. Thank you!
December 19th, 2005 at 11:42 am
[…] Alan Gutierrez: Big Blogging - “The Big Three, Big Pharma, Big Tobacco, Big Steel. Who will be Big Blogging? What form will it take? What do real bloggers think the 5 Steps for Fortune 500 blogging should be?” […]
December 19th, 2005 at 12:25 pm
When we launched our blog back in May, I had no idea what I was doing, or what I was in for. It was in fact unplanned, as neither the company’s business plan nor marketing plan had any mention of a blog. After all, I left the corporate world to start this small company, and within the scope of what I knew as “traditional marketing,” blogging had been largely unheard of.
Little did I know that our blog, would become part of the company’s marketing plan, that it would help to increase our ranking on search engines, or that it would get twice as many hits as our homepage in a given month.
I thank Alan for sharing his Five Steps to Launching Corporate Blogs - key steps that I wish I had when we got started seven months ago.
Excellent post, Alan. Thank you!
December 19th, 2005 at 12:42 pm
Debbie
Oops. I took down my old blog, in September, but didn’t have time to personalize this new blog in any way. I didn’t even notice that I was missing my full name…
Alan Gutierrez - alan@engrm.com
The old content is gone, but I probably need to update it. I’m going to create a wiki page on Alan Gutierrez, a real quick and dump some information about myself. Thank you for calling this to my attention. I’ll e-mail you as well, of course.
December 19th, 2005 at 1:40 pm
Simone
Good to know that I’m on the right track. Thank you.
I’m in the mid-West, and I’d like to help local firms with blogging, but I know full well that experiences with West Coast technology firms do not translate to large uninoized durable goods firms. It’s great to meet people that are running into some real world experinces. I’ll be reading these blogs.
I’m eager to find procedures that will avoid the big gotchas, or to set expectations so that strange occurances are seen as exepected events that can be delt with procedurally.
Marketing Punk
Please blog about, or let me know about, the feed reader traning program you set up. I’m interested in how you’d teach software that was not purely task oriented software in a corporate environment.
Is it hard to convince the customer of the value? Is it hard to get the backing of IT?
Also, I liked your shorted versions of the 5 Steps. Thanks.
December 20th, 2005 at 10:02 pm
[…] I love this quote from Alan Gutierrez’ blog: “If your employees are releasing confidential information, that’s not a blogging problem. It is a more general problem. It’s called incompetence.” […]
December 20th, 2005 at 10:55 pm
How about expanding this a little bit. (Historically, my experience is software so my POV is from that aspect of industry.)
Why limit blogging to employees? Microsoft, for instance, has an MVP program where non-employees are certified and empowered to spread the word about Microsoft products. Why aren’t these people, obviously fans of a company, tapped for both their experience and fervor?
To point 4: It’s well and fine to say that the people who are leaving comments aren’t customers, but it’s not accurate. Some of them are. Policies that deal only with flame-worth comments are policies that will make your blog laughable. Sure, people will complain or use the comments to make a case for their particular plight, but there are also potentially legitimate points made by some of those people. Acknowledging commonly-known issues is just as legitimate as banning a spammer.
To point 5: Please. Do you honestly expect that the person you entrust with the keys to a corporate blog to be the source of a leak? Stamping documents “Confidential” is not going to stop the person sending memos to F**d Company; it’s encouraging it. Corporate bloggers are exactly what they sound like: marketers. Pretending they are anything else by implementing onerous document security based on their existence only increases the likelihood of a leak from elsewhere.
Don’t get me wrong, I’d love to see more corporate blogging, but setting companies up to be disingenuous is doing them a disservice. Corporate blogs need to be closer to the personal blog world: honest, open, and engaging. Anything else and they will fade into deserved mockery.
December 21st, 2005 at 2:04 am
[…] Very good post on corporate blogging on Alan Gutierrez’ blog. […]
December 21st, 2005 at 3:28 am
Ryan
Well, first off. Don’t let the bullet points fool you. I’m a programmer first, windbag second.
As a programmer, I’d like to talk down to earth to Michiganders about blogging. There are considerations in a union state that makes UL listed products, that are not faced in a stock-option fueled startup that makes social bookmarking software.
That’s all. The conversations must be Naked Conversations, honest, open, and engaging. (Thought it was clear I was coming down against the notion that blogging *augments* the corporate message, I’ll retune after some sleep, I guess.)
I want us to get real about how hard it is get a blog going. It is lost on the uninitiated. This is a bit of reality that was driven home hard by my efforts with Think New Orleans.
When you undertake an endeavor as a corporation, there is a lot more liablity, and reponsiblity than if you blog as an individual. I’m trying to get a fix on the true costs, and the necessary infrastructure for corporate blogging. You can’t have each and every employee start from zero, it’s not cost effective.
Yes, you are right, MVPs. Maybe encouraging your resellers to blog, like your dealer network. Maybe just engaging other bloggers in your industry in their arenas, not yours.
I think GM does a good job of getting out into the blogosphere and posting where the coversation’s at. Here’s one I ran across recently, Where’d the GM smallblock blog go?, well, there’s the answer right there in the comments. The Director of New Media, Michael Wiley chimes in.
Yes, there are customers out there. I wasn’t suggesting that the blog be culled of any critcism. I’m only noting that it’s not the same thing as someone calling in to ask about their warranty. Anyone can post, and some folks are going to be trollls. Maybe this part of the training explains the concept of trolls, how not to feed trolls, etc. It’s a little different from fielding a customer inquery, it’s the ability to moderate. Sound better?
If you’re downsizing, or tanking, early press releases are the least of your problems. (There’s an unpleasant question, what becomes of the blog of a terminated employee?)
Check out Scoble’s post on trade secrets. Great points on how employees can share knowledge and keep secrets. It’s their job.
Er, so I disagree with you on the last bit. But otherwise, I agree, and must be off message. Help.
December 21st, 2005 at 1:00 pm
Oh we can’t have employees blogging freely! That would be too much like talking to customers.
We must tightly restrict conversations between employees and customers and others.
Blogging and conversation policy: company personnel may only read sales and marketing literature to non-empoyees, and may only regurgitate it verbatim on blogs. The only exception is when they have memorized said literature and can speak or blog it verbatim without directly reading it.
Yeah, verily. We the company have spoken. No smoking or chewing bubblegum either - EVER!
Repeat after me, “We Are All Individuals.”
December 21st, 2005 at 2:24 pm
[…] Alan?s Blogometer - Blog Archive - Big Blogging - 5 Steps to Corporate Blog Rollout […]
December 21st, 2005 at 2:34 pm
We Are All Individuals.
Are you implying I’ve said anything less?
December 21st, 2005 at 2:53 pm
I’ll reiterate the incompetence sentiment, in this post for BlogWorks, “Monitoring What the Boss Says.” http://www.blogworks.org/archives/2005/05/monitoring_what.html
Here’s the abstract:
“So many who are watching the corporate blogosphere are afraid of people like Bob Lutz spilling his guts in a moment of impassioned reply to a post in his blog. Think about it. Bob knows what he can and cannot say. He’s not going to have dinner with his neighbor and spill the beans on the latest at the Design Center. He knows better than to say that, either on the blog or off.”
December 21st, 2005 at 3:08 pm
Christy
Thanks. Nice anecdote in the story. No, Bob Lutz knows that when he blogs about GM he puts on his CEO persona, his car guy persona, and talks as individual, but knows better than to divulge corporate secrets. Scoble notes that many people at Microsoft are privy to secrets, and keeping secrets is part of their job.
Note. A lot of people are responding to my post by first asserting that I advocate marketiod corporate bloggers, and then dressing me down.
I’m only trying to draw the attention of these blog from the heart marketing folks to some of the true costs, and issues of blogging. I thought I raised some good questions about boundaries, privacy, and training about the details we take for granted.
December 21st, 2005 at 11:07 pm
We Are All Individuals.
Are you implying I’ve said anything less?
No, not at all! We are all individuals, and blogs accentuate that, as they should. Just like having lunch with someone you’ve only enchanged corporate email with before accentuates their differences from everyone else as you get to know them better.
The thought that bloggers will all reinforce some holy corporate brand is ludicrous. Yes, they *should* like the company they’re blogging for of course, but everyone is different.
We’re certainly in agreement.
“Repeat after me, we are all individuals” is actually an old Steve Martin line. Some advocate (as theMarketingSherpa article seems to) that somehow, effective bloggers can be pumped out, repeating the same corporate message instead of being themselves and hopefully engaging and helping customers.
December 22nd, 2005 at 7:19 am
Ted
Alright then.
Yes. Blogging a marketing message does not scale.
I was so focused on the processes, I thought you were suggesting that providing infrastructure was disingenuous, but you are saying that handing out an edict to employees to echo the PR message is disingenuous. (The problem with long posts.)
So, you weren’t saying that trade secrets are disingenuous, but you got me thinking about it.
Bloggers need to consider persona. And maybe teach persona, or talk about persona with corporate types.
You can be open and keep secrets. If someone asks, simply say that it is secret. People have their secrets. There is always something someone is not telling you, and if you must know that that is, you’re the one who’s a little off. Allow an individual to decide what they want to share.