Corporate blogging and PR...

I came across an interesting discussion on Corporate blogging and PR departments (via Scoble), and as so often happens, my short reply turned into a long one, and I thought I'd post it here. BTW, I agree with what Clarke said.

The question is whether a PR department should be involved with blogging. Elizabeth Albrycht posted a comment saying that PR could offer advice to bloggers, to help improve clarity.

I don't think having PR provide editorial advice is a good thing. My concerns would be:

1) Anything that gets in the way of making blogging drop-dead simple causes problems, which means no approval process. I would often answer customer email questions in my blog, and then point the customer to the blog entry. That means I need to have it show up right when I write the entry.

2) Regardless of the good intentions of the PR department, I think knowing the PR department is reading all the blog entries is going to have a chilling effect on the bloggers. If I had to tell developers that PR would be reading their enties, my guess is that 90% of them wouldn't have even started a blog.

3) It's really hard to scale on something like that. If my post shows up a day late because the PR department can't give me advice in time, I'm much less interested in blogging.

Finally, I think - and this is going to sound strange coming from an author who spends a lot of time editing - that clarity on blog posts is overrated.

Let me be more concrete.

I would rather have a blogger post 10 items that might not be totally clear and/or polished than have her post 9 items that were totally polished.

Blogs are all about content. Sure, it's nice to have stuff that is readable, especially if you're writing opinion stuff, but for the most part, it just doesn't matter.

And blogs already have a great editorial department. It's the readers. If I write something that's unclear, I'm pretty sure there's going to be a comment heading my way, and I have a great opportunity.

Comments

• Anonymous
  October 29, 2004
  The comment has been removed

• Anonymous
  October 29, 2004
  The comment has been removed

• Anonymous
  October 29, 2004
  The comment has been removed

• Anonymous
  October 29, 2004
  thank you
  ********************************
  http://www.goodscape.com.cn/

• Anonymous
  October 30, 2004
  Oh I forgot, you live in the USA, u have no rights :D

• Anonymous
  October 30, 2004
  The comment has been removed

• Anonymous
  October 31, 2004
  Re: Point #2.
  
  When a manager sat me down and told me that my blog contained information that could be used to piece together a picture of something that could possibly be used to determine something about our software and said that I should stop blogging about anything at work.
  
  Simply not true. The trivial details I gave out were only of interest in a general sense, unless you knew the guts of the software, and then they had other potential meanings. I guess. The personnel issues I mentioned were, well, the same information I'd give out if you asked me on the street.
  
  I really resented being handled like that.
  
  From there on, I stopped saying anything positive (or negative) about that manager. At all. To anyone. He later got fired -- with great prejudice.

• Anonymous
  November 01, 2004
  Thank you for your comments. I thought I'd offer a clarification. I am not suggesting editing/policing employee blogs. By all means, blog away! I am advising companies to have a blog policy that explains libel, etc. so employees don't accidently run afoul of the law, but I am a wholehearted supporter of having employees blog. You are absolutely correct that the PR dept. can't scale to manage that and shouldn't.
  
  When I refer to providing some kind of advice to bloggers, I mean to the official company/executive blog. There are challenges to having the top guy/girl blog that the rest of the staff don't have. Even then, I don't propose to stifle the voice of the blogger. Just to help them communicate clearly. In some cases, there won't be a role for PR people, if there is a truly fluent blogger at the top. But, this often isn't the case, at least at the beginning as they are learning how to do it.
  
  

• Anonymous
  November 02, 2004
  The comment has been removed

• Anonymous
  December 18, 2004
  Helpful For MBA Fans.

• Anonymous
  May 28, 2009
  PingBack from http://paidsurveyshub.info/story.php?title=eric-gunnerson-s-c-compendium-corporate-blogging-and-pr

• Anonymous
  June 15, 2009
  PingBack from http://einternetmarketingtools.info/story.php?id=5454