There’s an interesting discussion going on over at John Mack’s Pharma Marketing blog about why the blogging initiatives of some pharma companies have failed. John mentions two companies in particular who’s blogs have gone dead in his post about New Years resolutions for pharma marketers.
As a response to my comment that many companies were only getting involved because of the hype around blogs without real internal buy-in, John wrote a follow-up post titled “Corporate blog is an oxymoron” in which he basically says that corporations can’t have successful blogs because if they are written from one person’s perspective then that blog is dead should that person leave the company, and if it’s a team collaborative blog, then there is no genuine voice behind it.
There is of course some truth to that, especially for small companies. But for large corporations, is that not just a succession planning issue ? Large companies should have no excuse for not being able to plan the transition of a corporate blog from one person to another. If the blog is indeed endoresed by management, then just like for any other important outward facing function, you plan ahead on how to replace people who are leaving before they do so and you create a process in which the new person coming in is trained to fulfill that role competently. The blog might get a different tone and style, but the core objectives of the blog can easily be kept intact.
For small companies this is much harder. At Alensa, with our team of just 11 people, there is nobody else that could take over running the blog at this time, so I can understand John’s comment better in this scenario.
As for large companies, my advice is don’t open a ‘corporate’ blog or twitter account or any other social media account just because you heard it’s the cool new thing to do. Social media takes daily input and community interaction so unless you have top management buy-in, authority granted for the editor to speak with a human voice and a real succession plan, you should probably not get into it. Or you could just do what Sun Microsystems does and encourage ALL your employees to have personal blogs - which should then make it easy for you to spot who would be well suited to running the corporate blog.
