Session Notes: Corporate & CEO Blogging

These are my notes from the Corporate Blogging panel at BlogWorld Expo.

Debbie Weil, moderator:

Executing a corporate blog takes work. Policy, lots of decisions to make.

Technology is the easy part. A balance of creative and strategic. How do companies speak to their customers?

We’re in the early stages of a revolution.

FEAR – of being criticized, of losing control. Biggest block to adoption. Actually, a blog is a way of increasing control, not losing it.

Very few CEOs have the skills and disposition to blog. Hence ghostblogging.

Kodak blogger (Jennifer Cisney):

Kodak started a corporate blog (A Thousand Words) about a year ago. PR / CorpCom lead the charge. They host the blog offsite & focus on content. It is NOT a CEO blog, it’s mostly about photography and people who love it. Minimal editing after content is submitted. Every post has a photograph in it. Also a connected photo gallery. Lots of storytelling, very powerful, not a lot of product focus.

A Thousand Nerds – a newer, more commercial / technical photography blog.

HP Blogger (Pete Johnson):

HP IT is a showcase for their customers, so they are hosting internally. Large numbers of internal blogs – around 50. Very distributed approach. “Anyone who can make a business case for a blog can have one”. Describing different things people at HP do with their blogs – ranging from why HP is not in Second Life to templates you can download for your inkjet printer. Working with the HP standards of Business Conduct — proprietary information disclosure, proper crediting of information quoted, dealing with requests for support.

Cisco “Blogger in Chief” (John Earnhardt):

About 2 years since they started blogging. Started with the government affairs group – small team trying to increase their reach. It was hard to keep going so they started talking about issues a little beyond their scope & eventually it got notice. Currently 15 official corporate blogs. They are trying to do CEO blogging with video since Chambers is “more of a talker than a typer”. PR is attached to each blog to stay on top of it although they do not vet content before publishing. They have requirements for bloggers to make sure blogs are sustained once started. They treat key bloggers like reporters and treat them similarly in terms of outreach and support.

Southwest bloggers (Paula Berg, Brian Lusk):

They knew there was online conversation about Southwest and wanted to get involved. “We’re not afraid to take risks.” It is a major time commitment & took a while to get the balance right. Been great for getting notice from journalists. It’s a virtual focus group, they get immediate and passionate feedback, as many as 700 comments. The miniskirt issue was blog crisis management but they feel they did not do a good job managing it. They have some limits to their comment policy — no swear words, no personal attacks, no “where’s my bag from flight X?” — but try to be not too controlling. They try to do a blog post consecutive with every press release in order to give customers a place to comment. They run every blog post by an exec before it goes live.

Some common themes: blogs are generally an extension of PR not advertising. Try to drive individual customer support issues towards the proper channels. CEO blogging is hard and probably not the best way to go. Some comment moderation is appropriate. Be upfront about the grund rules and what customers can expect from the blog to avoid issues down the line. Comment moderation – everyone does it, but it’s about 50/50 between allowing comments to go live before moderation and screening all comments before they go live.

Notes from the Q&A:
Company culture comes out in a blog. If you have a lousy company culture do not expect that you’ll be able to paper it over in a blog.

Traffic is a metric but not the only one that defines success.

“The Ghostblogger” raises the issue of blogging and authenticity. The panelists didn’t like it that CEOs are ghostblogged – he defended the practice. General consensus seems to be that blog posts should not be scrubbed and crafted because that’s “inauthentic” and just like regular PR. Blogging should be different.

Vegas-Bound

So tomorrow I’m catching a flight on the all-new Virgin America airlines to Las Vegas to attend BlogWorld Expo. The conference looks to be quite interesting, and believe it or not, I have never been to Vegas before.

My employer is paying my way, so I’ll be taking plenty of notes while I’m there, and hope to blog at least some of the sessions.

I’m psyched!

On the Writer's Guild Strike

Seven and a half cents
Doesn’t mean a hell of a lot.
Seven and a half cents
Doesn’t buy a thing.
But give it to me every hour,
Forty hours every week,
And that’s enough for me to be
Living like a king.

— The Pajama Game

Well, the issue today is 4 cents versus 8 cents, but the lyrics are close enough.

I’ll miss The Daily Show, but good luck to the Writer’s Guild.

Forget PCs, We Want Robots

Noted today: a report on the state of PCs in Japan. The interesting part of the report:

“The household PC market is losing momentum to other electronics like flat-panel TVs and mobile phones,” said Masahiro Katayama, research group head at market survey firm IDC.

Overall PC shipments in Japan have fallen for five consecutive quarters, the first ever drawn-out decline in PC sales in a key market, according to IDC. The trend shows no signs of letting up: In the second quarter of 2007, desktops fell 4.8 percent and laptops 3.1 percent.

NEC’s and Sony’s sales have been falling since 2006 in Japan. Hitachi Ltd. said Oct. 22 it will pull out of the household computer business entirely in an effort to refocus its sprawling operations.

“Consumers aren’t impressed anymore with bigger hard drives or faster processors. That’s not as exciting as a bigger TV,” Katayama said. “And in Japan, kids now grow up using mobile phones, not PCs. The future of PCs isn’t bright.”

Is this a sign of things to come? Will the personal computer go the way of the dodo in another decade? Possibly, although it seems to me that Japan is a bit of an outlier when it comes to a passion for cutting-edge gadgets.

Perhaps the takeaway here is a reminder: consumers care more about what they can do than the tools they do it with. If they can do everything they need to on a cell phone, or with a DVR attached to their TV, then those tools will outsell PCs.

As for me, I’m a little old-fashioned. I like a full keyboard and a bigger screen when I’m writing blog posts, editing photos, or reading feeds. But 10 years from now, who knows what cellphones will be able to do?

UPDATE: Tony Hung weighs in with some good points.