I have not seen any good corporate blogs yet. And I think it’s because ‘they’ (corporate blogs, I mean) are not really blogs. I consider them adjuncts to corporate marketing. True, there could be some corporate leaders with itchy fingers who’d want to blog their heart out, but they will have to tangle with Legal no matter what. It’d be a terrible blow to shareholders if someone in the C-suite loose their job for saying the wrong things in a blog in addition to the threat of law suits. I guess that’s where Legal come’s in to apply the brakes.

Further, I don’t think C-level corporate blogs really help from a business perspective. The guys in the C-suite are anyways presenting at conferences and their views are well heard by their industry and customers. I think it is more useful to have blogs from the chief’s of SBU’s, product design and/or product marketing. These are folks who do not command an industry presence and can effectively serve to augment the corporate marketing messaging by providing their view’s in their area’s of expertise.

And finally, I agree with you that good blogs are typically edgy, thought provoking and provide a valuable data point.

What do you think of internal corporate blogging? I worked a large semi giant for many years and found C/SVP-level blogs very useful. The only downside was the ‘cut & paste’ risk - as some of the blogs found their way into EETimes and such ..:)

Regards,
-Laxman

“Blogs should never go though a “sanitization” step or they aren’t really blogs…”

The term “never” covers a lot of ground. I just had to disagree on two points:

1 - The definition of a “successful” blog is ambiguous especially given the vast number of ways they can be pursed for business benefit. Should a support blog about safety advice concerning a company’s fire suppresent systems be “sanitized” in some way to prevent injury or death or lawsuit? I suspect it should.

2 - A debate concerning the definition of a “blog” is a waste of time. Instead, business should build their advertorial marketing solutions based on business requirements. Lots of marketing solutions are successful and are not considered “blogs”. As such, it’s likely there are lots of blog-like marketing endeavors that are far more successful than blogs based on legacy-driven ideals.

With specific regar to legal risks in blogging, your advice is good. But it’s also importantto realize that businesses have far different requirements than “bloggers”. Any attempt to fit a corporation into a “bloggers” role will produce problems. In addition to legal risk, corporations are likely to care about platform security, message quality, technical quality, productivity, reporting, analytics, etc. These are requirements that are rarely considered by those building blog tools designed for individuals.

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