Blog it and they will come – or will they?

The blogging phenomenon has exploded in recent years, to the point where there are now more than 20 million blogs being tracked around the world. Blogs have risen in prominence as well as in numbers, to the point where some leading blogs challenge the established order of the mainstream press, and some large organisations set enough store by the validity of blogs to use them as performance barometers.

Blogs have become apparently independent commentary on corporate activity, with research indicating that 50 percent of bloggers talk about companies at least once per week. The emphasis apparently is deliberate, and this brings me to an important but potentially overlooked issue with blogs – as I stated in 2005, they are of dramatically uneven quality. Furthermore, they carry no guarantees whatsoever of impartiality.

Mitigating these issues to some extent is the fact that monitoring blogs is an extremely low-cost option for an organisation, one might even argue that any information gathered as a result is almost free. We should, however, bear in mind that when employees are reading blogs, they are not performing other tasks that provide a definite value to the organisation, so there is still a cost being paid.

Here, I will consider the issues and advisability of establishing and maintaining an organisational blog, one that faces out towards the rest of the world – and I will begin by stating that creating a successful blog is not likely to be as easy as one might initially think.

To begin, there is a real risk that the decision to establish a corporate blog could be made on a "me too" basis, simply because other organisations, especially competitors, have made blogs available. This thinking is always a mistake, and we should never allocate resource to any project on such a basis – but in the real world, there will always be times when common sense is overruled by the worries and beliefs of the Powers That Be. Objectively speaking, however, the time and resource issues associated with a blog are likely to be quite low compared to other corporate projects, making this a far less demanding choice than most enterprise strategies. This is not to say that creating a blog can be allocated to a single person and then forgotten about!

The blog should be created with a purpose in mind, and delivered with that aim as a priority throughout its life. If it is to serve as an information vehicle, then it should promote the values and ethos of the organisation in a customer-friendly and accessible manner; if it is a point of contact for business and/or trading partners, then the style and content should reflect this as well. Often, an organisation will select senior employees to spearhead the blog – examples can be seen in the vendor community, where Microsoft and Sun Microsystems can point to blogs written by thought leaders in the developmental and managerial divisions of each company. If the organisation has recognised thought leaders, then it is a good idea to encourage those individuals to take a stand on this virtual soapbox, and to give them reasonably free rein in the expression of their opinions – this is a confident image to present to the world, and gives a good chance of improving the corporate profile.

However, one important point to recall is that, like any other literary endeavour, writing a blog entry takes time. Does the potential value of the blog justify a loss in productivity from senior executives, however small this may be? Each organisation will have to determine the answer to this question for itself, as there are no hard and fast rules. Having said that, the blog author should have discretion in what is to be said; before the blog is launched, decisions must be made...