The Corporate Blogging Book

If you’re a business marketeer, considering blogging for your organisation, or a blogging evangelist preparing to introduce blogging in your organisation, Debbie Weil’s book is for you.

Not only does it contain a 360 degree description on the blogosphere. The book also includes a selling kit for the skeptics, and prepares you for the cultural barriers you might face. A few of the arguments:

• Blogging allows organisations to communicate more easily, more broadly and more regularly
• From talking to the media, you become part of the media, and have the possibility to communicate directly with your target audience

A common theme is the continuum between e-mail and blogs. If you accept that blogs are a logical extension of e-mail, it can be quite liberating to write blog posts as if you were writing e-mails. This gives blogs their conversational style and puts a face behind the communication.

It also works the other way - write e-mails as if you were writing blog posts. If you keep in mind that you’re e-mail will ‘live forever’ on the web, it helps to avoid some of the pitfalls of using e-mail. And in some cases, the e-mail you’ve taking trouble to compose might be a very suitable blog posts, re-using the content you’ve already created for other’s benefit.

In between e-mails and blog posts, we have group mails, typically used by project teams for planning and decision making. Why not manage your project through a blog? It gives you the benefit that all project team members have the same repository to refer to, and gives an access point for briefing new team members joining in the middle of the project. And for older team members more comfortable with e-mail than blogs, you can offer e-mail subscription in parallel to a blog feed.

Debbie Weil devotes some pages to describe the emerging trend of executive blogging, a small but fast growing niche of the blogosphere. Especially for this group, blogging is not without a downside, which can be managed, if properly taken into account.

This book is not a practical step-by-step howto guide into the blogosphere. But if you’re tasked within your organisation to evaluate the pros and cons of blogs, you should not do it without reading Debbie Weil.