Corporate blogging

Friday, August 12th, 2005

I read a few company blogs, for different reasons. Some because I have an interest in the company (eg, I’m a customer) and like to see what’s going on behind the scenes. Others because the company is doing interesting things and occasionally writing about them. In no particular order:

While these are all by businesses, none of them are what I would call corporate by a long shot. One thing they all have in common is that the companies are small and the blogs are informal. There also needs to be that interest in what the company is doing that I mentioned above. I couldn’t imagine reading, say, an HP blog. This is not to say I wouldn’t read an HP employee’s blog, even if it was endorsed by the company; it all depends on the focus of the blog, what they are writing about, and why the motivation behind it.

Another thing these have in common is a lack of hype and advertising. Nothing will turn me off faster than that. I’m here to read conversational writing, not a press release.

This began as a reply to something Tania just posted, but I thought I’d post in here instead.

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Comments

avitania
August 15, 2005

Thanks for those links, those are really helpful. I totally agree that there’s nothing that kills interest in a blog faster than any sort of “artificiality” — that is to say, once you can see that the blog is there for marketing’s sake rather than some sort of “window” into the company, then it’s just not worth reading anymore.