Nicholas Carr has a column in Business Week on corporate blogging – it’s a nice precis with sensible advice, and a cautionary note drawn from the recent mugging of Dell after it launched its own blog. Much of what I read on this is written by people who have a financial interest in selling that advice to companies. Experts, maybe; unbiased, who knows. It’s nice to see a short-but-sweet piece that comes at it from another direction. Extract:
Still, a blog can be a useful communication channel. By providing companies with unvarnished feedback from customers, it can serve as an early-warning system for product or service problems. It can also provide an easy and inexpensive way to deliver specialized information to narrow segments of the market. And because subscribing to a blog is a snap, it can be a great way to distribute technical updates, new product announcements, and other periodic messages.
There are a few rules of thumb that can help companies reap the benefits of a blog while sidestepping the pitfalls. The first one is simple but critical: Don’t blog for blogging’s sake. Make sure you have a clear business goal for your blog—and that you stick to that goal and track how well you’re fulfilling it. Remember that, for companies, blogging isn’t an ideology—it’s a tool.
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Rob, I also liked Nick Carr’s piece and intend to post about it soon. I’ve been following the Dell one2one blog closely and hope it learns quickly from its mistakes. Certainly there is, biased or not, a TON of free, unsolicited advice out there that Dell ought to at least take into consideration.