Halley Suitt revisits a case study, A Blogger in their midst, she wrote almost a year ago for Harvard Business Review. What she says is both very interesting and encouraging:

The piece I wrote last year in Harvard Business Review was a case study of a company trying to deal with their worst nightmare - a smart, loudmouthy, well-loved, radical weblogger as an employee. Even if your company was in this kind of a pickle, I'd still vote to keep the weblog and see what good might come of it.

First I think blogs come as close as anything to fresh word-of-mouth buzz marketing and so I think there's much more upside than downside to having a company blog.

That said, I think you really have to bite the bullet and let someone who really may not always agree with you in the company, do your blogging.

If you have to vote for someone with a fresh voice and real criticism of the powers that be within your company OR a dead-voiced PR corporate communications blog, always pick fresh - it's like vegetables. You may have to dodge some bullets or stamp out some fires thanks to that kind of blogger, but the trade-off is worth it. The trade-off is a voice of great intimacy and knowledge talking about your product or service directly to your customers.

Absolutely, this is the 'paradox' of blogs' penetration into the business world - blogs are, among other things, a tool for creating a brand, maintaining customers' attention and affection. And as such appear to be under the domain of the marketing and PR departments, especially in the context of business-as usual. However, an authentic voice will not materialise unless they delve deep into the company itself and its true value - employees.

In theory, there is no reason why clued-up PR people cannot blog on company's behalf but in my experience this is bound to backfire unless PR and marketing people are duly de-programmed of decades of interruption marketing.

PR and marketing departments need all the control they can get to force the rest of the company to be 'on-message', which makes it impossible for them to blog. Blogs are a very different species of communication...

But what's really going on is establishing word-of-mouth intimacy based on a bedrock of credibility. I'm sorry, but if you think advertising on TV, on the radio, in newspapers, in magazines or even on the sides of buses can do this - you're wrong. They may create brand awareness of your brand, but they don't create brand lust.

A good blog that allows for an honest consideration of the product, the market, the industry where that product lives and dies and gives useful information to customers is beyond amazing in this world of phony-baloney advertising. I've seen my kid since age 5 know that most of the commericals on TV are completely bogus and enjoy throwing things at the screen when they are on.

Meet the new generation, which I hope is going to be much worse for marketing and advertising industry than the most sweat-breaking nightmare of a Chief Marketing Officer.

Back to Big Blog Company