Tag: blogging

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.

A New Side Project: My Food Blog

I’ve done occasional posts on food and cooking here, but recently, as I was reading Bill Buford’s Heat, I was struck by a phrase and though, “wow, that would make a great domain name.”

Being a geek, I registered it. And since my new web host allows me to run multiple domains off the same account, I set up a small food & recipe blog to go with the name. I’ve set it up the way I want it, and gotten a couple of posts up. It’s ready for the world now.

Benvenuto, Profumo Profondo.

A couple of friends have expressed some interest in occasionally contributing recipes, but I expect it will be mostly me, and be relatively low traffic. We’ll see how it goes.

Well, That Went Well

I’m settled in at the new web host now — who by the way, is A2 Hosting, and no, there’s no referral link on that URL.

So far it’s been great. The blog and the assorted other web files are all in place. I’ve cleaned out some old stuff I don’t need to keep on the server anymore. I’ve updated my robots.txt to reflect the new site layout. I have IMAP set up on my desktop and my laptop. Everything is running smoothly, DNS seems to have transitioned, and all is right with the world.

I’m even taking advantage of the fact that my new account has more bells & whistles to set up a side blog for recipies. It’s not quite done yet but when it is I’ll post a link.

What’s amazing is how much easier all this has been. When I first set up a website in 1996, this was very much a manual process, and you needed to either have direct access to the server and/or be very comfortable with a command line do stuff like set up a domain name, create a new web hosting account, or customize a website. Today, it’s nearly all web-based and so very painless. I love it. YAY for progress!

Another Turn of the Wheel

Four years ago today, Fiat Lux came online.

I’ve averaged a post every 1.21 days since then. Not bad, for a solo effort (plus one guess post from Scott).

I’ve had days where fewer than a dozen people came to my site, and a few days where more than 6,000 people stopped by.

I’ve had days where I couldn’t wait to get something up onto the blog, and days where I’ve though about shutting it down entirely.

I’ve learned a lot about the mechanics of web marketing — SEO, how to build traffic, how to get links — that I use in my professional work.

I like to think that the discipline of writing this blog has made me a better writer (although this post is probably not one of me better efforts in that regard). At the very least, I’m more aware of my weaknesses as a writer now, and hopefully I do a better job of working through them.

Lately, though, it feels like most of what I want to write about is me, me, me. And this blog is at it’s best when it’s not all about me. Not sure how to resolve that contradiction right now; perhaps I need a few more days away from the blog to get my groove back.

I closed my first post like this:

What next? Who knows. But I think that I’d like to blog the journey.

And now, 4 years later, I still do. So let’s see what happens.

Pssst… Want to Blog?

Thinking about starting a blog? Then this article is definitely worth reading.

The one thing the author is overlooking (although perhaps he’ll say something about this is a later post) is that starting a blog actually isn’t the hard part. Keeping one up is. I’d be willing to bet that a significant percentage of new blogs get abandoned within the first 30 days. Just in the past six months, I know of three people who’ve started blogs, put a couple of posts out, and then stopped.

Not that there’s anything wrong with that, as the saying goes. Like any other activity, not everyone who tries blogging is going to like it enough to want to make it a regular part of their life.

I have to get going to meet some friends for brunch, but I’m going to start thinking about pulling some tips for “how to keep on blogging” into a post.