Corporate America leaps into the ‘blogoshpere’
Friday, August 5th, 2005 at 10:13 pm | Business BloggingThe Oakland Times published an article on corporate blogging last month that found its way into my RSS bin this afternoon. The article starts off by pointing out how Boeing neglected their customers in deploying a blog and found it was a huge mistake (a pothole that could’ve been very easily avoided if they knew how to look for it).
Blogging, the online journaling that has helped build communities on the Web, has penetrated corporate America to serve its marketing needs.
The article went on to talk about how the corporate world is gingerly entering the blogosphere and how blogs don’t provide any ROI (basically).
Technorati, a search engine for blogs that has counted 13.4 million blogs by individuals, has tracked 9,000 corporate blogs, up from 5,000 six months ago. This is an enormous leap, considering corporate blogs are not a profit center.
Profit center or no, the subject of corporate blogging has raised enough interest to become the theme of business conferences, such as the Blog Business Summit set for Aug. 17-19 in San Francisco.
I have to take issue with this statement. Blogs are absolutley a profit center for companies, but not in the traditional sense of the phrase. It is nothing more than a tool to connect communities around a central idea/hub. If you’re able to see your operating model as a whole and where it is deficient and where a blog may be able to satisfy that deficiency on an ongoing basis then you absolutley have a profit center. It can be measured in employee satisfaction, bottom line dollars or man hours - it doesn’t matter, as long as a meaning measurement is established for your company.
I would encourage those of you thinking about a corporate blog to contact us and run through a Blog Readiness Assessment to find out what you’re getting yourself into. Boeing’s problem could’ve been easily spotted ahead of time and to know where and how to deploy a blog is the key to deploying the tool properly. You wouldn’t use a hammer to fix your toilet, you also wouldn’t use a screw driver to break up asphalt on the highway, so why would a corporation use a powerful tool like a blog in a similar fashion?
August 6th, 2005 at 2:59 pm
I agree with you that the ROI of a blog cannot be easily measured as is the case with other communications tools. How do you measure the ROI of a telephone? How do you measure the ROI of your email system? How do you measure the ROI of a corporate web site? Try and imagine a buisiness without one of these tools today and I would say it’s much more about efficiencies and cost-savings than immediate and positive return.
August 6th, 2005 at 2:59 pm
It’s the Oakland “Tribune” by the way.
August 8th, 2005 at 11:19 pm
Boeing rapidly corrected thier blogging and are it’s very successful for them. There was nothing ROI about it. They put it up, listened, updated it, listening some more, updated it more, and so on. I hear what you’re saying, but at the same time, the beauty of blogging is that you put it up there and try it out. It’s not a regular site, a big corporate redesign or branding effort. It’s just a blog. What’s remarkable about Boeing is how fast they adapted to the blogosphere.