More companies are helping employees to speak freely — and bond with customers.
An article in the most recent Business Week about how companies are turning to blogs to communicate with and amongst employees and customers.
An excerpt:
Other companies, such as publisher Ziff-Davis, started the process by setting up internal blogs that proved enormously helpful to teams by cutting down on e-mail. They also let employees learn what was appropriate when blogging to the outside. Nike is going further. This month the company launched a blog of its own — “The Art of Speed” — and hired hip gossip blogger extraordinaire, Gawker Media, to produce it. Nike says Gawker has the following it wants to reach.
Given blogging’s ability to give nobodies such awesome powers — The New York Post headlined the way political bloggers did in former Senate Majority Leader Trent Lott as “The Internet’s First Scalp” — you’d think the idea of workers firing off would strike companies as akin to putting dynamite in the playpen. This is, after all, a medium once referred to as the electronic Jerry Springer.
Indeed, blogs can be dangerous, representing a new legal netherworld. Microsoft’s most famous blogger, Robert “Scobleizer” Scoble once got into big trouble in a previous job for talking up a rival’s products.
Therein lies the rub: The more truthful they are, the more valuable blogs are to customers. It’s likely only a matter of time before some workplace pundit spills a trade secret, unwittingly leaks a clandestine launch date, or takes a swipe at a CEO that turns into slander.
For now, though, many are running the risk. In an era of fragmented media, with companies struggling to get their message out any which way, blogs are becoming a kind of undercover megaphone. One way to think of them is as the latest guerrilla marketing tool, a new kind of brand bait.
They’ll likely backfire, though, if employers attempt to exert control. “Companies inevitably will try to co-opt blogs,” says Dan Gillmor, author of We, the Media, a book about blogging due out next month.
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