How to Defend Yourself Against Blogs

Franki is always reminding me that many of my stories and comments on blogs are about their negative potential. Exposing secrets, talking about negative customer experiences, and ratting on your bosses are part and parcel of the blogosphere, but that's not an effective sales strategy on why companies should start their own blog.

Business Blog Consulting gives some great examples of positive steps that companies can take.

The work comes from MultiChannel Merchant (a pretty good site and an industry stalwart)

"Public relations experts say it is essential to assign someone to watch over the blogosphere. “It will take some time, but if you keep tabs on blogs every day or every week, it will be manageable,” says John Wagner, owner of Houston-based public relations firm Wagner Communications. “There's not going to be 500 posts a day about your company.”

The article goes on to suggest services like Blogpulse, which while good for someone like me to do research, is frankly not helpful to executives. Tracking the types of responses and the quality of the leads should be a regular strategy for corporate blog monitors. More important, monitoring online communications should be the goal, not just blogs.

The article does suggest some of this:

Let's say that you've found several negative references to your company on a few blogs. Your first reaction may be to rush right out and respond. But Wagner says that, generally speaking, you should bide your time. If you're a blog newbie, monitor the blogs silently for a couple of months first. This way you will get a sense of the language, tone, and style used by bloggers so that you can better gauge the potential for damage of the various posts. If you begin to respond to everything helter-skelter, Wagner says, you won't understand where to put your priorities.

You cannot understand what is going on in blogs unless you're reading and writing them. It's just one of those things that has become clear after four years of blogging.

It is precisely this reason that blogging hasn't caught on like wildfire at Fortune 1000 companies. Andy Beal asks if the executives truly understand blogging. I ask if the people advising the executives understand.

The new Harris Interactive survey:
Only minorities of top executives surveyed are convinced to "a great extent" that corporate blogging is growing in credibility either as a communications medium (5%), brand-building technique (3%), or a sales or lead generation tool (less than 1%). In contrast, most executives are somewhat or not at all convinced of blogs' growing credibility in these areas, (62%, 74%, and 70% respectively).

It's difficult to explain why a blogger who spends his time talking about his family and his softball league can have a major effect on the sales of a family furniture store in the month of May. It's even harder to explain how an unemployed blogger who writes in politics can cause 1000 people to drop their newspaper subscriptions, but these things happen.

To bloggers, it's easy to understand. Maybe we should be doing a better job of explaining.