Corporate Blogging Doesn't Have To Suck

There’s a lot of healthy and well-justified skepticism about the idea of a corporate blogs, even though many of us take the idea for granted. So we spend a lot of time trying to show people how this Business Blogging thing should be done.

One of the best recent examples is at Wieden + Kennedy London. The communications agency has a fantastic business blog that’s candid, human, and shows a great sense of humor. For many organizations, this kind of conversational style might be more appropriate for an internal company blog than for a public presence. But in this case, the fact that the blog is public makes it a useful example to learn from.

The W+K team began the year by boldly posting a list of objectives for 2006. Then, last month, they followed up with a review of 2006 so far. In both posts, they outlined a series of high-level goals and then offered a candid assessment of not just their progress but their potential for improvement.

It’s a fantastic example of information that wouldn’t be useful to share in email format. There are some easy ways to tell which medium is right for your message:

• Blogs are great for sharing ideas that aren’t time-critical, that have enduring value after they’ve originally been posted, or that inspire comments and responses that are valuable when shared with the entire audience.
• Email is great for critical announcements or notifications that are worth interrupting someone’s time for. It’s also useful for messages that can be deleted or dismissed once they’ve been dealt with.

Since the big-picture thinking from W+K is taking place on a blog, their staff, clients, and the community around W+K can refer back to these posts over time, adding context or annotations through comments, and reviewing it when they have time to really think about the ideas. Instead of being yet another email to file away, there’s now a web page with a post that can be bookmarked for future reference.

In most companies, leaders welcome this kind of analysis and thinking, but want tools that will let them control the conversation. So here’s a link to pass along, showing one possible high-level use of blogging that’s impossible to do with any of the other communication tools commonly deployed today. And if your company’s a little less exhibitionistic than W+K, we’re happy to help you make sure it’s a private blog.

(Thanks to our friends at Mule Design for the image.)