How Do You Deploy Blogs Across A Large Company?
January 12, 2008
The recent launch of the blog council is an important development in corporate blogging research. I was reviewing the FAQ of the site and noticed these questions the council seeks to answer.
4. What issues will you address?
· How do global brands manage blogs in more than one language?
· What do you do when hundreds or thousands of your employees have personal blogs?
· What is the role of the corporate brand in a media landscape increasingly geared toward consumer-generated media?
· What is the correct way to engage and respond to bloggers who write about your company?
· How do you use a blog during a crisis?
· How do you build buy-in for corporate blogging?
· What is the appropriate way to respond to external posts?
· What do you do when you provide product samples for review?
· … and more.
One question had me thinking about the strategies companies deploy in rolling out corporate blogs:
What do you do when hundreds or thousands of your employees have personal blogs?
From my research and work with many companies about blogging and social media use, the deployment of such technologies falls into two camps 1) the cluetrain manifesto approach 2) limited deployment approach. Microsoft and IBM use the manifesto approach and Adobe used the limited deployment approach. With the limited deployment path companies identify people within the company who will blog, and give them the tools and resources to blog, blogging becomes part of their job. With Microsoft and IBM, everyone is encouraged to start a blogging and using social media, tools and training are available. In addition resources are deployed to certain individuals to showcase social media use, which in turn encourages more social media adoption. I suspect this latter approach is particularly relevant to very large companies where a top-down approach just will not work.