A week ago, I wrote about Yahoo's troubles and the lack of a conversation on it's main corporate blog. From a scan of recent blog posts on corporate blogging, it looks like I wasn't the only one noting the connection between blogs and vitality.
On Jan. 23, blogger Patrick Kuo takes note of a recent Valleywag post about the moribundity of several official Yahoo blogs and uses that as a starting point for discussing the difficulties that corporate blogging faces over the long haul, arguing that corporate culture tends to be antithetical toward that which makes blogs interesting.
I think there is some merit to Kuo's arguments, but I don't share his pessimism.
His strongest argument is about tying corporate blogs to individuals who are both passionate and deeply involved with the company. It provides the company with a human element that is more than just image building. That's because a good blog has a comment facility that turns the post from a mere monologue to a potential conversation.
Compendium Blogware has built-in support for personalized blogs and compended blogs, which are aggregate blogs that allow readers to view all employee posts for a company that are associated with certain tags. If you want to see one of the compended blogs, just click on one of the tags at the end of a post on this or one of my coworkers' blogs.
I part ways with Kuo on his opposition to post-by-post moderation. I don't think that such moderation is necessarily bad, just in the same way that if-then-else blocks aren't the root cause of bugs in software. The problem is in the logic that determines the course of action.
Moderation should be used to prevent the publishing of egregious errors, trade secrets, and wholesale violations of posting guidelines. It's micromoderation, the frequent rejection of posts for trivial reasons, that kills author enthusiasm.
Kuo is right about infrequent posts undermining the effectiveness of a blog. I know that the Client Services team at Compendium has been working hard to make sure that our customers get guidance on effective blogging and the subsequent feedback to let the client know how they have been executing.
