To blog or not to blog

ALI MOORE: Ten years ago, not every corporation had a website, but today you'll hardly find a business without one. Well, what about a blog? And what is it? A blog, or literally ‘web-log’, started as personal online diaries of the author's thoughts and experiences. Now businesses are finding the blog a useful tool for talking to customers. And many are starting blogs of their own, discussing their products, major developments and industry trends. This morning we look at why, and whether the corporate world can afford to ignore the so called "blogosphere".

MOORE: Meet the Arrigos, three generations of the family and three generations of bloggers. There’s dad or Frank Arrigo, a self confessed geek. The kids, twelve-year-old Billy and Emma who is eight, and the grandmother Alma Bryce.

FRANK ARRIGO, Microsoft: You haven’t done any links though Billy, you have got to link by my blog.

MOORE: At any one time you can find Frank or Billy or Alma or even Emma updating their personal blogs for family, friends or just keen blog browsers.

ARRIGO: I guess what we get out of it we are able to keep in touch.

MOORE: It is no surprise Frank works in the IT industry and he runs a corporate blog, one of two thousand Microsoft bloggers round the world.

ARRIGO: It’s really no different from the family blog where I’m talking to my family members who want to know about the kids and what we are doing, the corporate one is exactly the same, they want to know what Microsoft is up to and what events are happening and what is happening in the community.

MOORE: Is it a sales tool from a corporate point of view?

ARRIGO: It can be seen as a sales tool, really the way it has evolved for me and my team, it has really evolved as a communications tool to our customers.

SIMON VAN WYCK, Hothouse: I think the running of a comprehensive blog is an incredibly important way of attracting attention to yourself and your organisation.

MOORE: Simon Van Wyk is a pioneer of web marketing.

VAN WYCK: It is your opportunity to publish your expertise on a daily basis.

MOORE: Globally there are around twenty seven million blogs, but that changes literally by the minute. A year ago there were eight million, most of them are personal. Corporate blogs are thin on the ground. And if they don’t pass the smell test they don’t last.

ARRIGO: There’s a term called flog which stands for 'fake blog', and there is a lot of those floating around where you know, they make up a person, and that person represents the company and then they write the stories about X,Y & Z. And very quickly you can smell through that, it is an ad campaign rather than someone speaking from the company.

MOORE: What makes a good corporate blog?

TREVOR COOK, Jackson Wells Morris: A good corporate blog would be, I mean there are some good examples, of them overseas like General Motors and stuff, and it’s where you feel you are talking to person who is responsible for the area you are interested in, whether it is developing a product or involved in customer service, so it is a very personal relationship.

MOORE: Trevor Cook runs a PR agency and a corporate blog, he is not alone in his admiration of the General Motors site, called ‘Fast Lane’ it is written by the car makers vice chairman.

VAN WYCK: The blog that went, he went to a motor show and he saw the new range of General Motors cars and he wasn’t as really as happy with the one as he thought he might be when he finally saw it on the stand. And I thought, 'well that’s pretty candid opinion from the guy' but what he is done is he has given people an opportunity to engage with him, to talk to him.

MOORE: What Van Wyk sees on the GM blog is what Trevor Cook wants from his own version.

COOK: I’m regularly in the sort of top twenty or thirty top blogs in the world so.

MOORE: Engaging the reader means engaging a potential customer, through everything from Cooks’ professional views to personal passions.

COOK: I think we are starting to see a double benefit, we’ve certainly helped us win at least one client. People can see what they are going to get before they come along.

MOORE: It is the same for Frank Arrigo at Microsoft, the blog is a direct line to customers. And it gives the corporate monolith a face.

ARRIGO: I think the blog really allows us to humanise the company and people get to know who we are.

MOORE: But while blogs are direct they can be dangerous.

VAN WYCK: Some geek found a way of picking this very expensive bicycle lock with a ballpoint pen, and posted it on his blog and the company denied it and within days the entire blogosphere knew about this bike lock, and that company’s share price crashed, they denied it, the blogs went on and it just multiplies.

MOORE: To blog or not to blog, for a business it is a lot more complicated than writing a personal journal. Who in the company actually does the blogging, who has the time, and the expertise? How much information do they put out, what happens if they are bombarded with negative feedback, and how do they keep control?

ARRIGO: Blog smart, that is really what we say. So that is kind of our guidelines.

MOORE: But what does it mean?

ARRIGO:What it means is the way I interpret that is if I don’t want to see that something on the front page of the Sydney Morning Herald or the Fin Review I don’t blog it. It is basically as simple as that.

MOORE: Australia’s biggest corporate blogger is Telstra.

PAUL CRISP, Telstra New Media: In terms of responses coming back to our blogs once the blog is posted we don’t really have any, we don’t in any way shape or form .

MOORE: The Telstra blog is new and blogging evangelists claim it doesn’t yet qualify as a real blog. For one thing they say the posts are too long and too infrequent. Paul Crisp admits it is a work in progress but maintains the blog is transparent even though bloggers are hand picked by the company.

CRISP: When they sign on to become a blogger and I say that figuratively there is no contract they enter into, they basically have the guidelines it sets out to some very sort of broad brush stroke frame work of how they should blog and what a blog is, and they basically enter into the arrangement knowing that what they are going to talk about on a regular basis. So again we don’t provide any form of censorship in terms of blogging as such.

MOORE: The potential conflict between protecting the brand and being transparent is at the heart of the blogging debate.

DAVID REDHILL, Deloitte: The whole idea of a corporate blog which is sanitised and checked by risk managers is an oxymoron. Once you start putting in place regulation to tone down the expression if you like or minimise the potential damage you are essentially censoring a blog, which seems to me contradictory in terms.

MOORE: David Redhill works for accountants Deloitte, they considered their own corporate blog, but decided against it.

REDHILL: By unleashing a new medium which really is extremely powerful because it is worldwide audience and allowing people to use that in an unregulated manner is really a huge risk.

PATRICK FAIR, Baker & Mckenzie: You are becoming a publisher so you need to know that anything that goes up there, no matter how you got it or with what authority you thought you were receiving it, it will come back to you as the publisher.

MOORE: Specialist internet lawyer Patrick Fair says the risks are clear, defamation and copyright infringements are just two examples, and blogging has an added problem.

FAIR: It is also about opinion and I think opinion is a riskier area than posting facts or details or technical specifications. People are much more likely to honestly mean what they say but defame somebody else or some thing in the course of saying it.

MOORE: For many companies blogging will require a change of culture, they will be literally inviting the critics in but the blog believers say that won’t stop the corporate blog soon being as common as the website. So for a corporate can you afford to not be in that space?

ARRIGO: You can’t because it you are not talking about it other people are, either it is your competitors or your customers.