Corporations Trying to "Get" Blogging

The afternoon session of BlogOn has been interestingly...well, it's been interestingly two-sided.

The focus here is very much from the corporate point
of view; it's all about what companies should be doing with blogging
and social media in general, ranging from how to use blogs to actively
engage customers, to how to do damage control when a blogger
slams your company.

Suffice it to say, it's not at all like the focus on citizen journalism at the We Media conference a few weeks back.


For starters, there are a lot more public relations folks here.


Anyway, there are folks who get it, and folks who...don't.

Naturally, I like to think I fall into the "get it"camp
(in case you forgot, I'm a corporate blogger), but this is all still
evolving and I'm sure I'll hear about it if you think I
could do a better job. (That's one of the beauties of the blogosphere;
because of comments and criticism, it is, to some degree,
self-correcting.)

Anyway, on the one side, we had a viewpoint from the McDonalds corporation, which is veeery
gingerly getting into the blog space -- they're just getting started on
using blogs as a tool to communicate internally -- forget about trying
to do consumer-facing blogs.

I kind of felt bad for the speaker, Steve Wilson,
because he sounds like he's working really hard to change an
entrenched, old-school corporate culture. But it was kind of funny.

I was more surprised to hear CBS's Gil Schwartz; he was funny and engaging, but at some fundamental level, I just don't think he gets blogging.

On
the other side, there have been a bunch of folks advocating that
companies get fully engaged with blogs and other social media to talk
to customers, including Shel Israel (here's his blog),
a PR guy who says (I'm paraphrasing) that PR folks who don't adapt to
the blogosphere and social media should prepare for new careers in food
service.

I guess that's a new variation of "publish or perish."

Anyway,
there's tons and tons more stuff I could be writing about corporate
blogging or citizen journalism, but I don't know if this is interesting to you folks. (I haven't
even begun with the buzzwords.) Let me know in the comments. Thanks --
Joe.




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