Over some tasty lasagne with some friends last week, the conversation somehow prompted me to bring up Telstra’s new corporate blogs by a few of their employees as part of their attempts at friendly openness on nowwearetalking.com.au.
My enthusiasm was dampened when the response was something like “what, so a bunch of employees have online diaries?” Uhh, well, no.
At the time I didn’t have much of a response; I blathered something about how it’s part of their efforts to make the company seem friendlier and more human instead of being enormous and faceless. That didn’t hit the mark though, everyone kind of went “oh” and looked very disinterested, before the topic changed to something else. Mental note: don’t put “blogging consultant” on the CV. Phil Burgess from Telstra actually explains what they’re up to.
So here’s my attempt to explain all these blogging shenanigans.
I think that blogging is a bit like brand positioning. It’s indirect and fuzzy, and not easy to see what the fuss is. What could employees in a company like Telstra possibly have to say that would be worth reading? And how would this apply to some other company, especially smaller ones? What’s blogging really about, and how is it not just an online diary?
Well, I’ll start with the last question first. In a way, blogging is just like an online diary. But you don’t write in there how much you hate your parents for not letting you stay out past eleven. Or whinge about your stupid neighbour. OK, well some people do. A corporate blog lets people within the company get an unmuffled message out to the world (not to mention the rest of the company.) It lets people “out there” build a sense, over time, of what the blogger is like as a person who happens to work for Organisation X. There’s never been anything like it before, on the scale or low cost that blogging allows. The closest thing is your account manager or sales rep, but those guys have an agenda which is to sell you something. The blogger has no immediate agenda like that, she’s just telling it like it is, hopefully. Blogging costs next to nothing to distribute, is available to anyone who looks, is immediate, timely and permanent (mostly.)
Just the way you are more likely to do business with a company that a friend works for and is passionate about, passionate employees blogging about their company gives you insider info. You can see that Organisation X isn’t made up of ten, a hundred or a thousand people just trying to squeeze every cent from you. They’re personalities who care about their job, just like your friend does. The blogs can make the company seem familiar, friendly and enthusiastic, very much not how official, sanitised PR blurbs come across.
I read Sun and Google’s blogs via RSS. I’ll try and read Telstra’s as well now, although they don’t seem to have RSS which will make it a hassle. Baby steps, Telstra.