Eight Ways for Business to Incorporate Blogs
Teresa Valdez Klein at the Blog Business Summit ran an interesting piece calling out Waggener Edstrom as blog savvy (they are the agency of note for Microsoft and many other major technology firms) and pointing to some white papers that they put out earlier this year on the subject. The papers are:
Are You Listening?
Engaging the Blogosphere
Being someone who is interested in how to make a business case for blogging, I read both reports carefully. While they are a little outdated, there was a list of eight ways organizations can integrate blogs and blog technology that I thought were interesting. Here they are with some of my commentary:
- One-on-One: Facilitate direct dialogue with customers, for example, through a customer service-type platform
- Events: Use to enhance events with back-channel blogs and bloggers. This isn’t always productive though, as we found out last week with the big blowup at Les Blogs between Mena Trott (her story) of SixApart and Ben Metcalfe of the BBC (his story) over back-channel comments on IRC
- Product Launches: through employee or niche bloggers
- Issues Management and Crisis Response: Monitoring with quick response to criticism, concerns and rumors. Insta-blogs during crises to communicate with stakeholders
- Internal Relations: Blogs behind the firewall, i.e., personalize management to employees
- Blogger Outreach: Which includes being involved in the community and more than just “pitches” or worse yet, press releases
- Employee blogs, both internal and external, witness Robert Scoble, the most famous at this time
- Executive Blogs, such as GM’s Vice Chairman Bob Lutz
Kudos to Wag Ed for taking this on with their clients, but I do have a few critical thoughts for them:
- A quick search at Technorati only netted me ONE Wag Ed employee blog, and it is a personal blog that includes and interesting comment about PR people blogging about PR. (she doesn’t think it is all that useful) 😉 One of their tips is that in blogger relations it is better if you have a blog. Now this might not be an accurate representation of Wag Ed employees with blogs, but I couldn’t find them.
- I saw little in the way of measurement or metrics for success in their discussion. In fact, I am in search of some ideas to make measurement more meaningful in the blogosphere. More on this in a future post.
