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Beware of the blog

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How the web was won by Microsoft

The leader today in corporate blogging is Microsoft. For many years, the company was dogged by negative publicity. Such was the vigour of public sentiment that it may well have been on a par with Big Tobacco or Big Oil. But a simple change of focus turned the company’s online reputation around. The solution? Blogging.

While it still gets the odd negative article today, in the blogosphere much of the venom has gone. When bloggers write about Microsoft these days they usually don’t start with a negative statement.

Microsoft didn't just establish the odd corporate mouthpiece blog that ran the company line; it allowed nearly all of its employees to blog. There are now thousands of Microsoft employees worldwide maintaining blogs. Most don't have large readerships, but the people who read these blogs are important, because usually it's people working with the products being blogged about, the very people who make recommendations on purchasing within large-scale corporations.

Microsoft also established Channel Nine and Channel 10 (no relation to their Australian namesakes), video blogging channels that involved Microsoft employees interviewing other employees about their work and marketplace.

What blogging did was humanise the corporate giant. Microsoft had a human face – in fact, thousands of human faces – who spoke honestly about the challenges they faced, and the products they were developing – real people who answer questions and receive customer feedback directly on their blogs.

Think blogging is self-indulgent diary writing? Duncan Riley explains why this medium can literally make or break a company’s image in minutes.

Three years ago, 12 September 2004 started like any other day for the Kryptonite Lock company. Its range of bicycle locks was advertised with the guarantee that Kryptonite would pay US$3500 to any person who had their bike stolen whilst locked with a Kryptonite product, and that it had grown to be the leading bike lock manufacturer in the US.

But in some small corner of the internet, a Kryptonite lock owner had just published a video demonstrating how to open Kryptonite locks with a normal, everyday pen. Viewed alone, the video was unremarkable; the ability to open the locks with a pen had actually been published 12 years prior in a lowly bike owners’ magazine. But that was before the internet.

Two days later, the video went viral. On 14 September the world's most popular blog, Engadget, published the hack, and within the space of hours thousands of websites and blogs worldwide were reporting that Kryptonite locks were not secure. By 23 September the story hit The New York Times (‘The Pen Is Mightier Than The Lock’), and most of the mainstream media in the US.

Despite having over a week to respond, Kryptonite said nothing until the news hit The New York Times itself. The problem was that by this stage it was too little, too late. Millions of people worldwide had already read the story online, a story for which Kryptonite did not present a counter case, defence or any other public relations response.

Fast forward three years and some 80 percent of Americans know what a blog is and 50 percent read them. The figures of course aren't so high in Australia; take a walk down a suburban street and try randomly asking people what a blog is, and you'd be lucky if 25 percent could tell you – but things are changing.

Before considering how blogging can be used as part of a marketing strategy it's important to consider what a blog actually is. Many people, even in marketing circles, still consider blogs to be nothing more than amateur online diaries. While blogs can be diaries, dismissing them as such is counterproductive, because they can also be much, much more.

The common parts of all blogs are a content management system that defines it as being different to a static web page, chronologically dated entries and commenting. What a blog actually does in practice though is as broad as the books in your local library or magazines in your local shop. Blogs can be serious, investigative sources of cutting edge news, they can be gossip magazines, pictorials, they can be sources of satire and comedy. The most important thing about blogging from a marketing perspective is to have absolutely no preconceived notions of what a blog is – no two blogs are the same.

To blog or not to blog?

Is running a blog right for your company? Unfortunately there is no simple answer. In the majority of cases the answer would be yes. In considering whether blogging is right for your company, you must consider your communications strategy, including its goals and contingency planning.

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