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Web Strategy: Individual Blogs may be more effective than Faceless Team Blogs

Categories: Community Marketing, Social Media, Web StrategyPosted on July 16th, 2006

Some companies are worried that personal bloggers will get too big and then leave a company –they could take the brand, audience, and sometimes intellectual property with them. Jeff Treem has been discussing this change mainly in relation to Scoble’s move from Microsoft to Podtech. Other notable bloggers include Niall, Tara, and Om.

I’d say that many of these bloggers have done great things for their companies –They’ve brought them to market, changed the perspective of the company to customers and prospects –they’ve changed the brand.
I worry that companies will silence bloggers by acquiring a personal blog that was published during the time of employment, or employers will build faceless teamblogs that provide a roster of bloggers that can be shuffled in and out without showing true personality. Shel gives a warning on the dangers of Group blogs.

Companies may suffer from an initial sting when their key blogger moves to another opportunity but the platform of communication they’ve brought to organization and culture change will continue to live on.

It’s not over, they’ve changed the culture of the company –the two way communication style has just started, they’ve just setup the foundation for this relationship between customer and employee.

If anything, the blogger who has changed the cultured may be best suited for new ventures and new opportunities.

Embrace these individual bloggers just as you embrace your core executives, they’re providing leadership during this ‘new era’ of business communication –the best ones will set you up for a culture of long term success.

I know that I latch on to individual blogs, rather than group or team blogs –I’m sure most readers will as well.

(Written at 30,000 feet, somewhere over Mid America flying back to SFO)

Edit: Intersting, I noticed this hybrid blog by Trevor Cook, which includes some of his staff: “A group blog by Trevor Cook and JWM colleagues”

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This entry was posted on Sunday, July 16th, 2006 at 9:26 pm and is filed under Community Marketing, Social Media, Web Strategy. 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.

Comments
  • Andrew

    I can't agree more --team blogs often can leverage the time needed. Here's some blogs that I've been involved with at my day job.

    We've got some talented blog administrators in the valley, he created a small simple aggregator that links from our homepage, and shows the top posts, then goes to the specific blogs.
    http://www.hds.com/company/blogs.html

    Adobe also does this:
    blogs.adobe.com

    Since there are four different topics --you may want to consider splitting up the blogs. Remember one of the strengths of blogs is that they build a conversation > relationship > trust.

    In my opinion, It's easier to do this with your 'face' forward.
  • We have four people who write on our blog. We all have different areas of interest which together are much more representative of what we’re interested in as a company than any individual could be.

    I agree that there may be issues if people aren’t themselves but this surely comes down to the corporate culture. Personally I’m more than happy when my team out do me and I actively try to hire people who will do that as it’s the only way we can grow.

    When we talked about setting up a company blog one of the things we took into consideration was the amount of time that it would take, Shel mentions this in his original post. We do this in addition to our day jobs and therefore do it because we want to and to produce enough content we need to have more than one person writing.

    It may be that over time we split out into 4 bloggers but we’d probably still aggregate the posts together but just allow people to subscribe to RSS feeds for each person.
  • Jason

    Perhaps, I wasn't as clear as I could have been. In my discussions with Shel, I believe we discussed that in some cases, having a team of bloggers (sometimes an executive and product managers) could result in the 'lesser' member of the org chain trying not to out do the 'upper.

    This could result in an akward type of group blog, where individuals are more concerned about the appearances of the group, rather than focusing on the conversation with the customer.

    does that make more sense?

    I'm so glad to hear that I was an influence.
  • Jeremiah,

    To respond to your response, what about companies that have an internal directory of external bloggers in the company? By putting direct links from the company intranet to these blogs, do you feel this might create that "manager-subordinate" effect you speak about? Given that my name is directly on my blog, anyone in the company could find it, it just seems to be stronger with official links.

    Jason

    PS: thanks for being one of those responsible for helping me start my work-related blog.
  • Shel mentioned something similiar anyways --that one individual will tend to dominate the group blog anyway.

    I've heard other suggestionsthat having a subordinate and a manager in a blog together may actually cause people to publish in a way that is less natural than from a personal blog. There's much direct comparison on a team blog --that it could detract from the real focus of engaging customers

    excellent thoughts as usual Dennis.
  • Jeremiah - I wonder if what you say might also be relevant to the common "group blogs" put together by groups of professionally related people, say, groups of people interested in publishing, groups of consultants interested in e-learning, etc. Even with such group blogs, I invariably return (or subscribe) to see what oe particular individual has to say. Such might be the case with corporate group blogs -- failure to establish individual personalities and identities will result in less effectiveness, even if the grouping of content might have certain SEO benefits.
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