The so-called Blog Council, a group formed by AccuQuote, Cisco Systems, The Coca-Cola Company, Dell, Gemstar-TV Guide, General Motors, Kaiser Permanente, Microsoft, Nokia, SAP, and Wells Fargo in order to create and promote “best practices in corporate blogging,” launched on Thursday and is already taking a ton of heat in the blogosphere. I was going to write about this yesterday after I heard about it one of my favorite political blogs Scholars and Rogues, who put together what is still one of the best posts about this topic so far. Instead, I decided to wait and let my thoughts percolate overnight.
In theory, the Blog Council is a good idea — getting corporations to blog and communicate on a more personal level with customers and the new media (i.e., bloggers, podcasters, etc.) is a good thing. So is getting corporations to better understand and deal with the fact that their employees are going to blog, and that firing them for saying something that doesn’t toe the corporate line isn’t necessarily the best tactic. But the execution on day one doesn’t leave me with high hopes for the future of the Blog Council initiative. Most strikingly, how can a council that plans to promote best practices for business bloggers do so while not blogging?
The first two posts on the Blog Council are a FAQ and a press release — i.e., two forms of communication indicative of the old way of doing business. Neither are really blog posts — though they’re formatted as such, nothing on the site supports commenting and nothing new has been added since day one. As S&R points out, the message to the reader is: “youÄôre here to listen, because customers should be seen and not heard.” It doesn’t sound like these corporations really get blogging at all.
So far, what the Blog Council is demonstrating is, as Dave Taylor points out, not the best practices at all, but rather the worst. If businesses really want to learn how to leverage blogging, perhaps they should just start reading blogs. My colleague Marshall Kirkpatrick, for example, yesterday wrote a great post about how to deal with bloggers who criticize your company. Former corporate bloggers like Robert Scoble also often have advice for corporate blogs… no council needed if you just keep your eyes open.
