Motivations for Corporate Blogging 115
ringfinger writes "Ross Mayfield just posted an interesting blog essay entitled Fear, Greed and Social Software that examines the motivations (Fear and Greed) for corporate blogging. How many slashdotters blog for their companies? Do their companies fear that they might say something embarrasing? Or are they filled with greed for the additional exposure it generates?"
a few thoughts... (Score:5, Insightful)
As a corporate marketing tactic, in my (limited) experience, it only works only if the blog author has talent.
You need someone on your team who can write in a genuinely engaging voice, who can be intimate without telling you what he or she had for breakfast, and who knows the line between openness and damaging innuendo.
Also: blogging's strength is of course, ultimately, its biggest weakness when you view it from a corporation's point of view. You can budget and plan for it, but you can't forecast the results, which is enough to make the suits very nervous.
Bloggin' for the Man (Score:3, Insightful)
(Uh, I would, but I'm too busy on Slashdot. )
Why is it bad ("greedy") for a company to have employees pretend to expound on their personal opinions in the form of a blog?
Asked and answered. Official personal corporate blogs are too much like astroturfing.
Personal blogging... (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:a few thoughts... (Score:5, Insightful)
but you can't forecast the results
But that's true about most marketing initiatives. What makes them nervous is that the posters aren't having their material vetted (like press releases and so on) through the usual corporate processes.
EricMy new AdSense book [memwg.com] will be out mid-June
Re:Personal blogging... (Score:2, Insightful)
And what gets me are the bloggers who feel they are part of some kind of revolution.
Blogs are simply online diaries that have become popular because the simple fact is people like getting attention.
It's not an "either/or" question (Score:5, Insightful)
greed first (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Personal blogging... (Score:3, Insightful)
Exactly. And the fact is that virtually nobody outside of the "blogging community" even knows what a "blog" is. So the "community" ends up being a bunch of people patting themselves on the back.
I say it's another crass form of marketting (Score:5, Insightful)
One of the reasons that I pretty much never read corporate blogs like Schwartz's is that they are usually just launching pads. Some of the Microsoft employee ones are kinda interesting because you get to see a little bit of what goes on with the development of IE and stuff like that. Yet I don't know anyone who really takes Schwartz seriously at all except for a few entries I have seen on the copyright expansionist blog IPCentral [ipcentral.info].
I think it is only a matter of time before the bigger corporate bloggers screw up and get censored or fired for being too honest. What would happent to an IE developer that grudgingly admits that they're making CSS2.1 and 3.0 support top priority for 7.0 because Firefox's CSS support is better right now? They'd probably be fired. The same goes for a Sun developer who says that Apache's Harmony project may be what saves Java from being destroyed by .NET.
There is one thing that all of the elitists who post here saying how worthless blogging is ultimately fail to comprehend. Blogging gives the average citizen a stake in online free speech. It makes censorship actually hit home and does anyone honestly think that the average blogger is going to vote for a candidate that supported a measure that directly censored them? A lot are already jumping ship from the GOP because of Bush's uncritical support for McCain-Feingold. Sadly, blogging may be the last, best hope for restoring a drive for liberty in this country post-9/11 and the elitist nerds here and elsewhere should accept that and embrace it. So what if someone's blog is asinine, don't read it. Problem solved. Ironically I have seen few blog posts as utterly asinine as 90% of what gets posted by Anonymous Cowards here.
Re:a few thoughts... (Score:5, Insightful)
As for corporate blogging, the most useful blogs I've come across are from important developers in Microsoft (in particular) & also Google, Netscape, Python, etc. A number of times I've been investigating a fairly obscure question about some Microsoft API (shut up, it's my job), & found an excellent answer in a Microsoftie's blog. E.g., some feature seems blatantly missing, I'm searching for it, & the developer mentions in his blog that the feature IS indeed missing but he hopes to implement it in version 3.
This has nothing to do with marketing. I'm not sure what you'd call it in suitspeak, but it's sort of a conversational style of customer support & community-building.
Maybe, but in general (Score:2, Insightful)
Blogs are marketing, but not always positive marketing. Annonymous blogs also make it impossible to track where it comes from, so how is this useful? For the worker it allows you to know which places you don't want to work for and which bosses you don't want to be under. It's a good thing for the worker, and its a good thing for the CEO if the CEO treats its workers right. These tools simply enhance workplace freedom and democracy for everyone. This is good or bad depending on the side of the coin you are.
Re:corporate 'greed' (Score:2, Insightful)
I'm having trouble finding that in my post. In fact, I think I said just the opposite. That corporate officers will generally try to avoid that sort of thing, becaus it's bad for profits. Of course, we all have different views on what long-term damage is or how bad it is. But companies generally don't do things that are contra societies desires. If they did, no one would buy from them, and they wouldn't make money. I'm not saying that there aren't exceptions, but it's important to remember that they are, in fact, exceptions.