March 29th, 2006
Corporate Blogging Reality Check
Apparently it’s easier for Robert Scoble to get naked than it is for corporations — that’s the word from OMMA Hollywood:
Consider the blog by golf equipment company TaylorMade-Adidas golf, which launched about 18 months ago. When bloggers want to mention a particular golf club, the legal department wants a symbol–an ‘R’ in a circle–to appear next to the product name, to indicate that it’s a registered trade name, said Jason Woodmansee, manager, global e-marketing, TaylorMade-Adidas golf.
The problem, said Woodmansee, is that no one writes that way in casual conversation–especially bloggers. Including the symbol would violate one of Woodmansee’s principal rules for corporate bloggers: “Be authentic.”
Authenticity and corporations are like oil and water — companies employ armies of lawyers to guard against the liabilities of “authenticity.”
TaylorMade-Adidas is a great case study in how corporate blogging is so much harder the blogging hype-masters make it sound. Jason Woodmansee should be commended for taking the leap, but if an agency was advising him on the blogging thing, well, shame on them.
Here is Jason’s response (scroll down to the bottom of the comments) to the deluge of customer questions that showed up in the comments on the TaylorMade-Adidas product blog:
To be honest, we expected the “comments†to be comments, not specific questions like these, and it has been hard for us to keep up. Many of the questions asked are probably better suited to our customer service department, or the answers are found elsewhere on our website.
Nonetheless, this process has helped us immensly with what kind of information people are looking for, and we are working hard to come up with ways to help people better understand our clubs and how to select equipment.
Hang in there  this is new for all of us, and we are honestly trying to find a way to make this work.
Again, Jason appears to be doing a great job with the learning curve, but I can’t help wondering whether there was some Steve Rubel-like blog evangelist (if not Steve himself) who advised Jason on corporate blogging and who FAILED to warn him that this would happen.
On the same OMMA panel, David Carter of iUpload provided a refreshing reality check on corporate blogging:
In a departure from the notion that blogs are supposed to be freewheeling, Carter said he advises corporations that they need to exert control over their bloggers’ posts. Blogs, he said, are a vehicle to get a company’s message to the public. “In the corporate world, they’re about ‘The Man,’” Carter said.
On my last post about corporate blogging Shel Israel commented:
Scoble and the other 2500 Microsoft employees who blog do it on their own time, discussing what they choose to discuss. On more than one occassion, Micrposoft PR has infrmed bloggers of upcoming news and has asked them to participate in issues. But Microsoft cannot direct their blogging army to become part of some integrated marketing campaign to take on a cmpetitor.
How ironic that he said this just before the Scoble/Vista fiasco. So we’ve got the Scoble loose canon model at one extreme and at the other, we have the true corporate blog that is completely hamstrung in operating like a “real” blog.
My previous post pondered why blogging didn’t feature prominently in Microsoft’s marketing plan for going mano-a-mano with IBM, to which Mathew Ingram responded:
Blogs are a way of increasing interactivity between people, not between companies. Companies don’t read blogs.
This encapsulates so much of why corporate blogging is hard. “Companies” need to behave predictably, unlike people, for the sake of Wall Street and their shareholders. For companies and people to connect through blogging, companies will need to become a lot more human — advocates of corporate social responsibility can tell you how hard that transition is.
Of course, in Microsoft’s case, the Scoble loose canon model is still better than the Steve Ballmer lunkhead model — can you imagine Ballmer blogging? You could only read the blog on a Windows PC using IE, etc.
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I have to take full credit/blame for the blogging idea. I was looking for a way to get more information directly to our consumers. We had a different iteration of the blog last year, and the comments were, well, actually comments. We did a better job integrating the site into our brand website this year, and with that (I think) came a lot of people who don’t really get what a blog is. So they ask specific questions.
We’re very happy with how things are going, and will be adding additional features to both the blog site and the brand site based on the feedback we have gotten. This is an experiment, and we know that. We had no illusions going in.
Jason
P.S. I only met Steve Rubel AFTER we launched the blog…
Jason, thanks for the comment.
In case I didn’t make it clear enough, I have nothing but admiration for you and other practitioners of corporate blogging. Just because it’s hard, doesn’t mean it’s not worth doing–and it’s clear that you are reaping the rewards despite the learning curve.
My beef is with boosters of corporate blogging (consultants, etc.), some of whom don’t spend a lot of time talking about the challenges and pitfalls and don’t t demonstrate a deep understanding of big corporations and how they operate.
I wish discussions of corporate blogging would spend more time facing the pitfalls and how to overcome them (as you have) and less time making it seem like it’s all flowers and sunshine.
You make some good points, Scott. It is hard for companies to “get” what is required in order for blogging to work, in part because it means changing so much about how they do things — and even more than that, how they think and react. But as you said, just because it’s difficult doesn’t make it any less worthwhile.
I think it’s a risk/reward mismatch. The blog evangelist has no incentive to discuss any of the negatives. It’s all happy, upbeat talk, of authenticity and being with-it and cool and hip. If a disaster happens - the evangelist is gone, they’ve already hyped that company X is ON THE CLUETRAIN, got their attention, and they’ve moved to peddling the snake-oil to the next sucker, err, “voice in the conversation”.
Moreover, like financial firms which don’t like to discuss security failures, there’s a disincentive to discuss blog failures. A company president is very unlikely to say openly, something along the lines of “Yeah, we tried having a blog, but all that happened is some guys got into flamewars, and a lot of dumb customers took the comment section as technical support and were unhappy that nobody answered their question immediately - it was a complete waste of time”. And if they said that, they’d be told they didn’t “get it”, and they needed MORE services of blog evangelism to “build community”. So there’s a process of burying mistakes.
There’s too much venture capital money around, and secondarily people chasing to sell to the goldrushers, for honest analysis.
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