Michael O’Connor Clarke delivers a magnififcent blog post … nay, a practical manifesto (a manifestical, or a practicesto ?) for approaching the notion of using blogs in a corporate setting, ostensibly for marketing and public relations purposes.
An excerpt below – the rest (titled Faustian Bargain) is here, and is a great read.
“Anyone who has studied the history of technology knows that technological change is always a Faustian bargain: Technology giveth and technology taketh away, and not always in equal measure.” – Neil Postman
I’ve already said that the best thing the PR department in most companies can do with respect to corporate bloggers is to get out of the way.
I wrapped a caveat around this at the time – acknowledging the value of providing some elementary training on issues such as disclosure and media relations. Subsequent conversations, in the comments here and elsewhere, have picked up the topic of guidelines for corporate bloggers. It’s a topic worth noodling.
Looking at the blogosphere through the lens of a PR practitioner, there are a couple of different places you could start from:
1. The blog author’s POV: how blogs can work in a corporate environment as a channel of communications between employees and external interested parties.*
2. The blog reader’s POV: whether blogs as micro-publishers represent a useful medium and opportunity for flacks to engage in micro-market PR – reaching certain communities of interest to the PR person’s clients and/or employer through non-traditional means (a.k.a. pitching blogs).
I’ll take a crack at the second of these viewpoints in a future post. For now, I’ve been doing some further research and thinking about the notion of corporate blogs as a PR vehicle.
A quick definition: by “corporate bloggers” I mean employees at any level who blog “in plain sight” either on or off their company’ servers, either during or outside working hours. Whether the blog is about the company (its products, markets, or related areas of interest) is not so important to my mind – the defining characteristic for my purposes is that the blogger is entirely open about who they work for.
A fair amount has been penned on this topic already, by various blog luminaries including Robert Scoble, Tim Bray, and Ray Ozzie. What I haven’t been able to find anywhere is a set of guidelines written by flacks for flacks.
Having already told corporate PR people to keep their hands off their bloggers, it seems only fair that I should try to pull together a set of draft blogging guidelines for others to use, abuse, ignore, repurpose and/or distribute to their own ends.
A quick word, first, on why corporate PR departments should welcome the employee bloggers in their midst. It’s as simple as this: successful corporate blogging is good PR.
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