B2Bridge

As a general rule I believe that an external blog that is bound by a "corporate message" and a "corporate tone-of-voice" is a dead blog. The nature of a blog is close to that of a real life conversation. Professional people want to talk with professional people, real people of flesh and blood that radiate competence, not ready-made messages. Real people are less one-dimensional, more subtle, less easy to see through, less easy to laugh at.

The blogger is the message

So a blogger should not be told to express a corporate message, he should be your corporate message. Instead of picking out some assistant that happens to have some time and moulding her/him to the wishes of Corporate Communications, a better idea would be to choose a blogger that you can give free play in all confidence. And if you can’t find people like that in your organisation, my advice would be to forget about starting an external blog. But if that is the case, who do you send to your clients?

As Christopher Locke, Doc Searls, and David Weinberger wrote in their Cluetrain Manifesto back in 1999:

Increasingly, we value only two qualities:

• The engagement and passion-for-quality of genuine craft
• Conversations among recognizably human voices

The simple, if painful, prognosis: organizations must encourage and engage in genuine conversation with workers and markets - or go belly up.

This book was of course provocative and overenthusiastic, but its essence becomes more valuable every day, and it certainly applies to the blogosphere.