Corporate Blogging At Starbucks & Wells Fargo Reviewed By John Bell
April 18, 2008
John Bell reviews three corporate blogs in his valuable post, "Corporate Blogging Grown Up." John reviews Lenovo, Wells Fargo, and Starbucks. Both Wells Fargo and Starbucks are in the Fortune 500.
I'd seen the new Starbucks website, a voter popularity website very similar to the Dell Ideastorm website. Both that and the connected Starbucks blog are new to Starbucks; therefore I just added another blog to the list of Fortune 500 companies blogging. John gives a better than average score to Starbuck's work with social media.
The new ideas site is an exciting development, customers can submit ideas, the community votes on those ideas, and Starbucks decides whether to implement them or not.
Interestingly one of the top ideas voted upon by customers is the idea that Starbucks should focus more on making their stores a place for meetings and community.
Howard Schultz, the CEO of Starbucks has been saying the company needs to return to its roots and bring back more coffee. I wonder if the Starbucks brand it less about coffee and more about meeting, and if this high vote is a sign of that?
The Starbucks blog does not allow comments, but customers can comment on the voter popularity site. John Bell distinguishes between the two sites and would have given the blog a lower mark, but the two sites combined received his higher marks.
John Bell also reviewed the Wells Fargo blogs, and gave them high marks. One aspect of John's review was that he contacted Staci Schiller at Wells Fargo and people at the other companies he reviewed to get some broader insight into the ideas and thinking behind the blog.
Lastly John reviewed the Lenovo blog, however, Lenovo is not in the Fortune 500, but is in the Global Fortune 500. We cannot add Lenovo to the Fortune 500 Business Blogging Wiki.
The addition of the Starbucks blog puts the number of companies identified in the Fortune 500 that are blogging up to 58 or 11.6%. The wiki project is a community project, to complete a census of all Fortune 500 companies that are using blogs, and review those blogs.
I don't know if John Bell knew about the review portion of the project, but thanks for writing these two excellent reviews of Fortune 500 blogs and also linking back to the project.
Hat tip: @melaniephung