Still from the Financial Times, but a less heavy topic than the dollar or China or oil, I give you
Lucy Kellaway, the FT's no nonsense commentator on "business life" and tireless debunker of silly management trends.
This time, she uses her sharp wit to slam companies that try to turn that bright new shiny concept, the blog, and turn it into a tool of corporate propaganda. Her conclusion:
The point about blogs is risk. If they are made risky in any way - either through publishing negative comments, or because the author is honest about themselves or their business, people will take notice. If they are merely another conduit for sanitised corporate information, or exercises in executive vanity, they will go the way of the corporate mags, the voicemails and the company spam.
(more extracts below the fold)
The chief executive of a US company recently put a question to his board. Why was it, he asked, that so few of his 5,000 employees took the blindest bit of notice of the memos, videos and voicemail messages with which he continuously bombarded them? And why was it, he asked again, that anything remotely secret whipped around the entire company before you could say Jack Knife?
(...)
This CEO's problem is one that affects all executives. Employees don't want to listen to what they are saying - mainly because they communicate too much and most of it is too boring.
But now there is a new way that executives can reach not only their internal audience but the world at large - through the blog, or web diary.
According to an article in this month's Fast Company magazine titled "Exec meets Blog. Exec falls in love", this is a trend with legs. What better than a chatty letter a couple of times a week saying what is going through the boss's mind? A gift, surely. The great thing about blogs is that people actually read them.
To introduce you to the form, I will start with Randy's Journal, the outpourings of Randy Baseler, vice-president at Boeing.
(...)
Randy is new to the blogosphere, and I'm afraid it shows. The point of blogs is that they are personal and fun to read; his is a tarted-up press release. (...)The result is a case of Dad at the disco.
(...)
[Another] sort of executive blog gives authors a chance to air their opinions on world affairs in a self-serving fashion. [Lengthy quote follows]
This entry bangs on and on. Alas, no one is listening. When I looked it had been on the site for a week and had attracted not one comment. But at least Mr Edelman invites comments. Neither the HP nor the Boeing blogs do, which is typical of the bad old ways of executive communication. It is the age-old message: I talk and you listen.
And now, finally, the executive who does get blogging. He is Bob Lutz, vice-chairman of General Motors. To me his blogs are excruciatingly boring because they are all about models of cars. What isn't boring, though, is the way he does it. He defends his new Saab as if he means it, but then invites comments. On the same day 20 longish replies were posted - many of them critical. All there on the GM website for anyone to read.
Lucy Kellaway writes well, and she is usually right on target. She is the first thing that a number of people (me included) want to read on Monday mornings.
So I won't bore you with my personal comments on her column, I'll just emphasise her conclusion again:
The point about blogs is risk. If they are made risky in any way - either through publishing negative comments, or because the author is honest about themselves or their business, people will take notice. If they are merely another conduit for sanitised corporate information, or exercises in executive vanity, they will go the way of the corporate mags, the voicemails and the company spam.
Blogs are about open debate, honesty, authenticity. The corporate world is not going to take the blogosphere over.
Or are they? In the economist 3 weeks ago (behind subscription wall), they had an article about Microsoft's attempt at corporate blogging:
ROBERT SCOBLE, known in the blogosphere as "the Scobleizer", is a phenomenon not just because he has had an unusually strange career of late, but because his example might mark the beginning of the end of "corporate communications" as we know it. Mr Scoble is, first, a blogger--ie, somebody who keeps an online journal (called a "web log" or "blog") to which he posts thoughts and web links several times a day. But Mr Scoble is also an employee of Microsoft, the world's largest software company, where he holds the official title of "technical evangelist". Those two roles are intertwined. It was his blogging prowess that led to his job, and much of the job consists of blogging.
Mr Scoble seems to be worth his salary. He has become a minor celebrity among geeks worldwide, who read his blog religiously. Impressively, he has also succeeded where small armies of more conventional public-relations types have been failing abjectly for years: he has made Microsoft, with its history of monopolistic bullying, appear marginally but noticeably less evil to the outside world, and especially to the independent software developers that are his core audience. Bosses and PR people at other companies are taking note.
So, it it actually working? Well, Microsoft is smart, but is facing the same problems::
Mr Scoble is at his best when he opines ruthlessly on Microsoft's technology. When Google or Apple or anybody else makes a better product, he blogs it. "
I've been pretty harsh on Microsoft over the years," he says. This gives him
credibility, and thus power. If somebody somewhere takes a swipe at Microsoft that is unfair, Mr Scoble can cry foul and actually have his readers concede the point.
(...)
Mr Scoble (...) thinks that there will always be a place for traditional PR, with its centrally controlled corporate message, alongside the spontaneous cacophony of blogs. Microsoft's official PR boss will not even comment at all on the subject. Sun's Mr Schwartz is also circumspect. "It's not the end of PR but the end of the old PR department," he says. "The clarifying force will be credibility and reputation." The truth is, nobody yet knows how corporate blogging will evolve.
This caveat is especially important because it is probably "only a matter of time" before a serious blogging embarrassment leads to litigation, says Joseph Grundfest, a professor at Stanford Law School and a former commissioner at the Securities and Exchange Commission. As with e-mail, but perhaps more so, "people blogging get taken in by the immediacy and the hotness of the medium and say things they later regret," he says. This fear is now prompting internal compliance lawyers to cast an eye on their firm's bloggers.
This suggests another possible development. Will corporate bloggers start to get tongue-tied and sound just like tedious press releases? Mr Scoble, for his part, hates the question but concedes that, theoretically, Microsoft's corporate view and his own could come into severe conflict, and it is not clear what would happen then. Will he criticise only the small things, but toe the line on the big issues? As his page views, fame and influence increase, it might become increasingly difficult for him not to feel self-conscious, and to resist the deadening effect that this can have on any writer's prose.
So, authenticity and credibility vs control... What will be more valuable to corporations?