Thinking a little about how I blog, and why I blog today, I wrote these notes:
I interview people to ask them how they conduct effective blogger relations, and to learn the practical application of social media tools. I think it is the best way to understand and catalog best practices in the industry. I do this not out of intellectual interest, but in an effort to help myself and others in the industry understand what you have to do in order to use the tools of social media to successfully implement a marketing strategy. When I learn a new practice I often implement it with my personal blogging or social media efforts I’ve also implemented those practices with the three companies I’ve worked at, and with the clients I’ve worked with over the years.
My book, “Strategies and Tools for Corporate Blogging,” is not necessarily a book aimed at evangelizing and theoretical ideas about corporate blogging, but is a book for the person who is sold on the idea of corporate blogging and actually wants to implement a corporate blog now.
When I started blogging five years ago, there was not very much research about corporate blogging available, though ideas such as those developed in the book, “The Cluetrain Manifesto” have certainly been discussed for years, those ideas had not actually been implemented.
Five years ago, all the leading practitioners in blogging and social media were professionals, and at the time -- as there was not very much research on the topic from academia -- as practitioners in the industry and bloggers we started to write about how to do effective blogging and use social media. In fact, that's often the topic of our posts. I write about best practices here on this blog, and I believe my peers in the industry do the same because we are teaching and debating amongst ourselves the best practices of using social media so that we can implement those practices with our companies and customers.
I also think that five years ago the people who knew most about how to use blogs and social media with companies were those people who worked at the leading technology companies, Macromedia, SUN, and Microsoft. These were the companies that started blogging and really using social media tools extensively in the early part of the 21st century, mainly because those companies’ customers, partners and developers were building and using social media technologies like blogs. The consultants of today learned from those pioneers in the technology companies (Well at least I know I did.) and I took what I learned and implemented those tactics and practices with the various corporate blogs I’ve run, here on PR Communications and when advising clients.
Social media and corporate blogging is new, according to the Fortune 500 Blogging wiki, only 10% of Fortune 500 companies write blogs. Which means we are still in the early adopter stage at the very least with large companies. With the Inc 500, the number is somewhere around 20%, I suspect the reasons for the higher percentage with the Inc 500 is because more of those companies are tech and telco related. Indeed 50% of the Fortune 500 companies that write blogs are in the tech and telco industries.
From my reading I believe that a lot of the most up to date knowledge about social media is still with professionals who are working in industry, not academia. In fact one of my colleagues in the Society for New Communications, Dr. Nora Gamin-Barnes, recently told me one reason she was interested in conducting research in social media was because so few academics are publishing papers in this space yet. That’s part of the interesting nature of social media and blogging; the practitioners have often been the people who know most about the industry and who are constantly doing research to understand what works and what does not. I think this is part of the nature of social media and blogging: we write, we create, and so as writers and creators of content we have to focus on something to create. If you write about how to use social media, then you will write about what other people are doing in the industry. I suspect this will not change.
