A dozen major corporations are getting together to form “The Blog Council,” a group dedicated to developing standards for corporate blogging. The council hopes to address issues and challenges unique to multinational corporations.
Founding members include: AccuQuote, Cisco Systems, The Coca-Cola Company, Dell, Gemstar-TV Guide, General Motors, Kaiser Permanente, Microsoft, Nokia, SAP, and Wells Fargo.
The Blog Council plans to meet in Orlando in late January to address issues like managing blogs in more than one language, how to deal with employee bloggers, defining the role of corporate brands in the age of consumer-generated media, and how to respond to bloggers writing about companies.
“Every major corporation is struggling with the question of how to use blogs and engage the blogosphere the right way,” said Sean O’Driscoll, General Manager, Community Support Services for Microsoft.
Executives representing the member companies plan to meet in private to discuss their blogging standards, a move that critics already are saying is out of sync with the transparent nature and intent of company blogs. But council organizers believe that doing so allows the executives to speak freely about challenges that are unique to large corporations.
“Major corporations use blogs differently while abiding by the same rules and etiquette,” said Word of Mouth Marketing Association founder and Blog Council CEO Andy Sernovitz, who also runs GasPedal, the company managing the council.
“Individual and small-business bloggers don’t face the same issues. For example, we still need to deliver a responsible and effective corporate message, but we need to do it in the complicated environment of the blogosphere. We have to speak for a corporation, but never sound ‘corporate.’ And we have to learn to do it live, and in real-time.”
Well-known corporate bloggers, though, are skeptical that large corporations “get” blogging. Former Microsoft blogger and author of the blogging book Naked Conversations Robert Scoble is one of them.
“I’ve done enough speaking to enough corporations now that if they don’t get why they should be talking with their customers already I don’t get how hanging out at yet another boring industry conference is going to help them to get it,” he writes.
Scoble argues that the key challenge for major corporations will be learning to engage the public on a smaller, more personal one-to-one level.
Public relations professional Dave Parmet also blogs his skepticism that rigid rules of engagement will reach the people on their level effectively. “[T]he world of social media is in a constant state of flux and trying to establish formal ways of doing things and even best practices is like painting the moving train.”
But perhaps the most scathing criticism comes from management consultant and entrepreneur Dave Taylor:
My translation: “we’re all clueless, but don’t want anyone to realize just how unplugged our organizations have become from the world of “marketing 2.0″, so we created a club so our ignorance can be shielded from public eyes.”
While Taylor says he wants to believe in and support The Blog Council, he fears the corporate need to control their messages, to keep them safe and sanitary, belies the nature of and purpose of blogging.
“I just think that the very structure of modern corporations, with their managing to quarterly results, CYA tactics and massive aversion to risk, is the very antithesis of blogging and any word of mouth anything.”
