Dan Katz of a new PR blog, “Ponderings and Wanderings," provides a great overview of the recent PRSA Boston event on social media that I moderated.
I noticed that Dan had commented that all of the panelists stated a company employee should write his or her own blog posts, as only a staff member would be able to provide certain details and a level of authenticity that would not be possible with a communications professional. Dan thought the comment was interesting, and suggested that he and his colleagues are more transparent, knowledgeable and tied to a client’s mission than those who hire him.
Dan suggested that if properly integrated into a company it was possible for public relations professionals to represent a company and provide blogging services. Dan suggested that such blogging efforts would be transparent. I was not sure what Dan meant here, if he meant that public relations professionals would write the content for a blog and be open about being a public relations professional writing the content of a blog then I think that is okay. Though I would suggest having the public relations professional write a blog for a company that is not involved in selling public relations services or products directly would not be as effective as having other types of employees in a company write a blog. One company comes to mind, Indium Corporation. Indium provides materials to the electronics assembly materials industry. Indium works in an industry where the customers are very gun-shy about marketing and public relations. That's why Dr. Ron Lasky writes a blog for Indium; Dr. Lasky is a senior scientist at Indium and has developed a large following in his industry by writing a blog because he is not in marketing or public relations. His expertise in the industry is demonstrated on what he writes on the blog. A reader of Dr. Lasky’s blog, Don Ballard, told me his thoughts about Dr. Lasky’s blog. http://www.indium.com/drlasky/
In fact I’d say in a majority of companies you don’t really want the public relations people writing a blog, you want the people who understand a company’s product or services, or deal directly with customers. This happens at SUN, Microsoft, Dell, Stonyfield Farms and numerous others.
I think that the people who are most successful at blogging are not always in communications, partly because people who are not in communications will probably use and talk in the language of customers rather than the language of corporate communications. Oh, you can definitely talk about products, but really blogging has a lot more to do with personalizing a company, giving it a human face, even showing some of a company’s warts. Though a communications or marketing person can certainly write a blog for a company, if that person has a lot of industry expertise and understands what language to use, then as a communications professional it is possible to be successful with a blog by writing what people want to read and by personalizing a company through each blog post. An example of this comes from a blog reader, James Thomas is a blog reader of Tim Jackson's blog MASI Guy, and Tim is the marketing manager for Masi, a bicycle manufacturer. James answered my questions in a survey of blog readers about his thoughts on Tim's blog.
He said,
“Though Tim obviously wants to promote Masi bikes, the blog does not read at all like marketing material. I think the genuine, sometimes offbeat content allows readers to put a personal face with the company and the products. If potential customers want to read technical specs on the bikes, they can check out the Masi website. If they want a casual peek into life at Masi and the thoughts behind the products, they can check out the blog. That personal connection really gets to the core of what fascinates me about blogging.”
