A growing number of companies are employing blogs and podcasts as part of their communication mix.
Their problems seems to be where to put them. After all, an organization’s website is typically a hierarchical information resource: Follow the path to get the answer to your question. Some of the companies best known for blogging are still trying to figure it out. Visit Sun Microsystems’ website, for instance, and you’re lucky if one of the executive bloggers has recently updated his site; mention of a new post may just appear on the scrolling headlines. Similarly, there is no link to blogs on IBM’s home page, or Microsoft’s. “You can engage us but only if you can find us,” these companies seem to be saying.
Once you do find blogs, you may still be in for a frustrating experience. Finding Microsoft’s employee blogs requires a search of the site. The blogs appear under the heading, “Microsoft Community Blogs,” but the only items displayed in the list this morning were four posts by Raymond Chen and one from the IE Team. What about, say, Scoble? I used a pull-down menu in a search utility dedicated to blogs, but it listed only Microsoft products and business categories. I found Robert’s blog only after typing his name into the blog search engine.
Sun Microsystems keeps all of its blogs on one page, but they’re not organized in any way that makes sense. You can see recent posts to any blog along with a listing of “Hot Blogs” (dear God, when are we going to see an end to the overuse of the word “hot” on the web?). But if you’re looking for a blog on, say, Java Studio Creator, you’re back to using the search engine. And as for IBM, I wasn’t even able to find a list of company blogs. The company’s podcast, however, is discoverable…if you happen to visit the Investor Relations page.
It’s no easier to find the blogs and podcasts from BMC Software, but once you find them, at least they’re aggregated in one place: talk.bmc.com:
TalkBMC is a place to engage with us on topics important to you concerning the information technology industry. Read and participate in our blogs, listen to our podcasts, and let us know what you think. In the coming weeks, we will feature more blogs and podcasts of interest to you. Thanks for joining us today, and we hope you will return and participate. To comment on a blog, you must join this site and agree to the blog rules.
The three company bloggers (a mid-level executive, a corporate strategist, and a program executive) are clearly listed, along with the names of their blogs. A featured podcast is prominently promoted, followed by a list of the other podcasts currently available.
The aggregation is nice, but the BMC approach isn’t perfect. It’s easy to argue that the podcasts and blogs aren’t really podcasts or blogs, since there is no RSS or Atom subscription offered. You can download or stream the podcasts, and to read the blogs you have to visit the site. Still, I like the idea of putting all the company’s social media offerings in one place. The next step is to make it easy to find them from the home page.
Shel Holtz is principal of Holtz Communication + Technology which focuses on helping organizations apply online communication capabilities to their strategic organizational communications.
As a professional communicator, Shel also writes the blog a shel of my former self.
