I saw a post on Phil Gomes blog about a new group PR group on Ning started by Robert French called PR Open Mic. The group focuses on professors, students and practitioners of PR, and already has nearly 300 people have signed up.
One post in the forums by Kelli Matthews, " Does Hiring A "Chief Blogger" Suck the Cool out of Blogging," is about the issue of a news release by Kodak announcing the hiring of their new chief blogger, the release was spotted by Lori Grunin at CNet in her post, "Kodak sucks the coolness from blogging".
Lori was amused by the release, and ridiculed Kodak for the use of the title Chief Blogger. I think Lori might have a point about using a press release to announce Jennifer Cisney is the company's Chief Blogger, especially, when Jennifer's been working at the company as a blogger for a number of years, the new title is a promotion.
I found some of the content in the release giving an overview of what Kodak is doing with social media and blogging more interesting. Though the catalogue of accolades in speaker appearances and book mentions tickled my SEO nose. I wondered if the release was developed to get some rankings on some of the conferences and keywords.
Even though it is 2008, and blogs appear to be ubiquitous in society, especially on newspapers and in the tech community. Blogging is still in the early adopter stage for most companies. Lori quoted the press release, that 10% of the Fortune 500 are blogging. I can agree with that because I suspect Kodak took the number from the Fortune 500 Business blogging wiki, where we currently list 11.4% of the Fortune 500 are blogging. Even if Kodak is being innovative in the context of the Fortune 500, within the tech community blogging is yesterday’s news, most of the Fortune 500 that are blogging are in tech and telco, social media is definitely in the mainstream for tech companies.
Hiring someone in a company to manage the blog is a good idea. Blogging is not just about writing content on the blog; you also have to manage monitoring, what are people saying about your company, your industry and your competitors. That information alone can help with media relations, product development or customer service. Outreach on other websites should be a big part of the role of the people that blog for a company. I found one comment on Lori’s post that suggested the idea of employees who blog for a company a bad idea. Using blogging for outreach to talk directly with customers seems like a very good idea to me. Yet as I describe in my recent critique of the cluetrain manifesto, you have to pay people to do that sort of work, and that’s best done by employees.
Kodak’s release might not be very cool, but the new PR Open Mic network set up by Robert French is, check out the site, sign up and start participating in the discussions.
