Business and Blogging

A Marketer Speaks Out On Corporate Blogging; Interview With PR Communications’ John Cass (Part 1 of 2)

by Laura Spencer on March 6th, 2008

(www.businessandblogging.com) I got to know John Cass through his blog, PR Communications, and also by participating in the Fortune 500 Business Blogging Wiki. John is also the author of Strategies and Tools for Corporate Blogging.

John has graciously agreed to share some of his insights about corporate blogging with the Business and Blogging Readers. In today’s post John covers the following topics:

• Why many companies don’t blog
• Advice for a business owner who wants to start a blog
• The Fortune 500 Business Blogging Wiki
• The biggest mistake a corporate blogger could make

I know that the readers will get a lot from John’s VERY comprehensive answers.

Why do you think that so many businesses don’t blog when it’s relatively inexpensive to set a blog up?

I think people are making a rational decision as technology adoption occurs through a cycle known as the Technology adoption cycle. Geoffrey Moore in his book, Crossing the Chasm, described how innovators quickly adopt new technologies, but the spread to the mainstream only occurs when there are overwhelming reasons for the mainstream decision makers to adopt. The pager was a technology that only became successful once doctors started using pagers in order to be able to have some semblance of a life when they went out to dinner or see a play. At the moment blogging is only in the mainstream with technology companies, many more companies in that industry are using blogs. Until the leap is made from innovators to mainstream for other industries you will not see greater adoption because people follow what their peers are doing.

That’s the structural argument for a company not adopting blogging. There are some more tactical reasons people use to explain why they do not adopt rather than those structural reasons.

• It may be inexpensive to blog, but it takes time to blog, time requires resources. There’s a lack of knowledge about the benefits of blogging for a company. That’s why it is important for a company to conduct a blogging assessment to determine if there is a justification for blogging. Elements of an assessment include:
  
• • Finding community members
  • Discovering the current issues in the community
  • Understanding the capabilities of the company to blog
  • Who would be able to write, write well and often?

Once an assessment has been completed a company will have a better understanding of the benefits of blogging, and be able to make a determination that the benefits are worth the investment of resources, a justification of blogging if you will. I write more about developing a blogging assessment in my book, Strategies and Tools for Corporate Blogging, where I have a chapter describing the assessment process, and a chapter that includes an example of an assessment in the automobile industry.

• Some companies are nervous about allowing their employees to write, or allowing the public and customers to make comments on a blog. The concern arises from allowing negative criticism of a company. While it is okay for a company to moderate constructive negative criticism if someone is saying something inappropriate on a company’s blog, if someone is going to negatively criticize a company, it is far better to have that criticism appear on a company’s blog where the company can discuss the issue, and set their side of the story.

With regards to employees, most employees are supporters of companies and will not try to do harm to a company.

• Lastly, in the case of Robert Scoble at Microsoft , he was renown for daring to criticize Microsoft on his own blog. Some of Robert’s criticism Microsoft agreed with, and some not. The effect for customers and partners of Microsoft of this self criticism was that those people begin to trust the company much more than they had ever done, as Microsoft was able to demonstrate that the company was run by well intentioned individuals that worked hard, and though sometimes were very human, were like the rest of us, which reflected positively on the company’s image and sales.

What one piece of advice would you give to a business owner that wanted to start a blog for his or her business?

Blogging is not just about writing content on your own website, it is also about building relationships and conducting a dialogue with others in the blogging community on their blogs. Make sure that your bloggers are actively monitoring, commentating and interacting with other bloggers in your community is as important as writing posts on your own blog.

I know that you’ve been really involved with the Fortune 500 Business Blogging Wiki. Where do you see that project going?

The Fortune 500 Business Blogging Wiki is an effort to survey all companies in the Fortune 500 to determine if they are currently running a blog, and in addition, to write reviews of the companies that are blogging.

The wiki project is a community-led effort. Anyone can research members of the Fortune 500 and if they find a blog, enter the blog’s name on the wiki, or write a blog review on their own blog and post the link to their blog review on the wiki.

I believe the census will tell us a lot about the state of corporate blogging in the Fortune 500, it will give us insight into the number of companies that are adopting corporate blogs.

Currently about 11% of the Fortune 500 is blogging. However, almost half of these companies are in technology related industries, so the numbers tell us something about the overall adoption rate of blogging in the Fortune 500, and the industries where blogging is reaching the mainstream.

I’d like more people to volunteer to write a review for their own blog, we still have many companies that have not been reviewed.

If you want to keep up with what is happening with the project, you can check out Easton Ellsworth’s blog , or mine, under the product category link: http://pr.typepad.com/pr_communications/fortune_500_blogging_project/index.html

What’s the biggest mistake that a corporate blogger could make?

Lying to the reader, a blogger can do this by not revealing their relationship with a vendor when they write a post, or by having someone ghostwrite for them. Blogging is about authenticity. Credibility comes from trust established through expertise and also the way in which you deal with people, if you tarnish your reader’s trust, the blogger and the associated company lose credibility.

A very special thanks goes to John for this very complete interview. Stay tuned, because tomorrow John will address the following topics:

• The future of business blogging
• The importance of social media
• Current projects
• General comments about blogging

Feel free to join this discussion by leaving a comment about any, or all, of this interview.

Image Source: John Cass

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POSTED IN: Corporate, Interviews