EightBlack.

Session title: Corporate and CEO Blogging.

Moderated by Debbie Weil: Panelists (Paula Berg-Southwest Airlines, John Earnhardt-Cisco, Pete Johnson-HP, Jennifer Cisney-Kodak & Brian Lusk-Southwest Airlines)

Kodak Blog - A Thousand Words, hosted off site. About regular people who work in the company and who love photography. This blog been up for over a year. Maybe have 50-60 contributors within the company. Don’t edit anything unless glaring spelling error.

HP - Pete Johnson. Refers himself as the panel’s “Lone Techie guy”. HP blogs are here. There are more than 50! Most common question he gets “Can you fix my printer?” Debbie raised a good point about maybe HP needs to have a blog titled “Canyoufixmyprinter.com” blog. Mmmm! Good idea. I love wireless and I love GoDaddy.

Cisco - John Earnhardt, responsible for one of Ciscos Government blogs. 20 initiatives as a company in 2007. Cisco identified bloggers within the company who could go out and participate in the blogosphere and engage in the conversation about the topics Cisco were interested in.

Southwest Airlines - Blog Boy and Blog Girl (Brian Lusk and Paula Berg). They knew a conversation was going on about Southwest so the company decided that they wanted to be able to participate in that conversation, and to perhaps, control it to an extent. Company is known for it’s transparency.

First blog went up in April 2006, and Southwest have a blogging team of about 30 employees from all walks from within the company (ie Pilots, baggage handlers, back office folks, senior management). Things they learned - major time commitment. Seen a huge media benefit from the blog - 70% of the media look to the blogosphere for content. Went into this with pure intentions. Become a virtual focus group, passionate feedback, both good and bad. Could not get this feedback from any forced focus group.

Blog is completely moderated (which I totally agree with). Concerned with Intellectual Property when they started the blog. They will post extremely negative comments. Very little they won’t publish.

They’ll tie in major press releases with their blog (smart).

SUMMARY:

More and more US corporate’s are taking to the blogosphere. Debbie Weil keeps referring to this space as “the revolution”. Which I think it is. Static websites are dead and blogs are definitely here to stay. All panelists agreed that in order for a company blog to survive (or even get off the ground), it requires an internal evangelist. This is a critical point. Brian from Southwest also made a good point in saying that some companies shouldn’t blog. Which is true. A blog won’t fix a bad culture within a company.

This was a good session. Refreshing. To the point. And surprising insight from people who clearly love working for their companies and see the real, tangible benefits from blogging. Bravo.

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This entry was posted on Friday, November 9th, 2007 at 6:12 am and is filed under Blogging For Business. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.