Corporate blogging in general has not been that strong in the UK market. I believe that that there is still a feeling that blogs are for Americans. It is not exactly quintessentially English to tell the world about what you are thinking.

Charles Dunstone is the CEO of The Carphone Warehouse and started a blog after they acquired a broadband operator and launched the TalkTalk free broadband service. He was considered a pioneer in the marketplace at the time.

TalkTalk ran into problems with provisioning and customer service a few months ago, and Dunstone stopped blogging for over 2 months. He has received a lot of negative feedback about this and posted again on the 13th November apologising for the long absence.

Critics of blogs will be arguing that this is what happens if you are too transparent, and that blogs open you up to scrutiny that you might otherwise avoid. I believe that the error was in not continuing to blog through the crisis. If he had been able to continue the dialogue and explain to customers what they were doing to resolve the issues in a personal, human way, it may have helped with their public relations nightmare.

Dell used their blog extensively through the battery recall and by encouraging comments, they were able to follow up directly with the customer and try to find a way to resolve their concerns. Even sharing this information with the world shows that Dell was trying their best to deal with a difficult situation. Here is an example comment and response:

Michael Mace said:
I know you didn’t create the battery problem, but your handling of it worries me. Here’s my experience so far:

–I went to the battery recall site several weeks ago, entered my battery’s information very carefully, and the system told me I did not need a replacement.

–Tonight after receiving your additional notice, I entered the information again and now it says I do need a recall. I know you say you haven’t changed the batteries recalled, but I think you have.

If you change the criteria for the recall, you should say so very clearly. Others who had checked with the site previously may not bother to re-check.

I tried to reply about this to your e-mail, but the reply bounced. Apparently you sent the message from an address that doesn’t accept replies — even though you didn’t say so in the e-mail message, and you did say in the message that people should contact you if they have any questions.

This is a level of sloppiness I don’t expect from Dell.

So I hunted down this weblog — it’s the only electronic forum I could find for giving you feedback (I don’t want to invest the time in calling you).

That’s my two cents.
October 18, 2006 10:56 PM

Lionel Menchaca, Digital Media Manager said:
Michael: Thanks for the comments. My apologies for not following up. I can tell you that we did not change the criteria for the recall. We simply received updated information from Sony in terms of the number of batteries shipped.

In terms of your specific battery, do you still need to get a replacement battery lined up?
October 18, 2006 10:56 PM

In this example, Lionel from Dell was able to clear up a misunderstanding immediately that they had changed the criteria for the recall, when in fact they had not. It has to be better to know what your customers are thinking rather than trying to avoid the issue. Nearly every business deals with major product recalls or similar public relations issues from time to time and I believe that it is how the company handles the situation, which will have the most impact on the future perceptions of the brand. A blog is an excellent tool for maintaining direct contact with affected customers and giving them comfort that they are doing everything possible.

40 of the Fortune 500 corporations in the US are now blogging. This is up from 24 just six months ago so is definitely on the rise. Whilst tech companies dominate, there are a guys like Boeing and General Motors doing it.

Amazon.com Inc.
Avaya Inc.
Cisco Systems, Inc.
Dell, Inc
Electronic Data Systems
Ford Motor Company
General Motors Corporation
Hewlett-Packard Company
International Business Machines
Microsoft Corporation
Motorola Inc
Oracle Corporation
Sprint
Sun Microsystems Inc.
Texas Instruments
The Boeing Company
Time Warner Inc.
Viacom International Inc

The updated list and links are available as a Wiki so if you find any more, just add them to the list.

So blogging is on the rise and should be part of the marketing and communications strategy, but what are the key issues to consider:

Ownership
However, which department should own it? Is it the team that deals with the website, public relations, or the marketing team? The reality is probably all three. When a CEO commits to a blog, this sends a clear message to their business that it is important and will help accelerate wider adoption of blogs.

Policy
A clear blog policy is also a must to ensure that employees understand what is appropriate and what is not. You can’t try to control content, but a business blog should be just that, you shouldn’t see their personal holiday photos up there. This policy can also detail how to deal with comments, a critical but potentially time consuming task.

Frequency
There is endless debate on what is an acceptable number of posts per month. I believe quality is better than quantity. Most readers will access the content via RSS, so it is not as if they are checking back every day. They’ll be aware when you post. A two month gap between posts clearly isn’t appropriate though.

Platform
I personally don’t believe the choice of blogging tools and software really matters, however, it is essential that they be connected to the various social networks and include support for:

RSS
Tags
Trackbacks
Ping search engines and RSS aggregators

Don’t let it be a major IT project, setting up a blog should take hours with the wide availability of excellent software and services.

I hope that more UK CEO’s and companies, take the plunge soon.

Technorati Tags: blogs, business blogs, ceo blogs

Dave Sifry, CEO and Founder of Technorati has released his quarterly State of the Blogosphere today.

Not suprisingly there has been another quarter of tremendous growth. The entire post is required reading for anyone interested in this space.

I still maintain AJAX is the way forward when it comes to web development, however, having just spent hours trying to debug issues that only affects IE when the same code works perfectly in Safari and Firefox, is extremely annoying. IE is very helpful and gives you this error message “Unknown run-time error”, which basically translates to “something went wrong, can’t tell you anything more than that though”.

Anyway, long story short, don’t try to have JavaScript write to an innerhtml element within <p> tags, I changed it to a <div> and everything worked. I really hope that IE 7 has better support or at least better debugging for AJAX.

Technorati Tags: ajax

You might have to be a gamer to understand it, but this is very clever.

Technorati Tags: battlefield 2, bf2, bravia, sony

Goggles is a very cool little Flash game that lets you fly a bi-plane around major cities using Google Maps satellite photos. Brilliant, I wish I had thought of it. Thanks Andy for finding this one.

This is a little old but I want to post this for future reference. SpringWise.com/ideas has a great story on a website in Finland called Igglo which lists all properties allowing you to post an offer online for a house you are interested in, that isn’t even on the market! What a fantastic idea. The site is in Finnish. Zillow.com in the US has a similar idea. Thanks to the trouble ‘n’ strife for sending me this one.

Technorati Tags: igglo, real estate 3.0, zillow

The Tribble Ad Agency site is a parody site set up by search engine marketing (SEM) firms to poke holes in how traditional agencies tend to handle interactive projects. Here is an example of what you will find:

“The print media industry has been in decline for years as well as TV viewership among key age groups. However, we here at Tribble feel that what you don’t know won’t hurt you. We make our clients feel secure by telling them that the internet is NOT as big as it seems. It’s just a lot of “fluff” and is actually on the decline, in fact the Internet is just a fad. We love to spend our clients money in this way. It’s great for the ad agencies like ourselves because you can’t really track ROI with the print media strategy, so the client can’t tell how much we are wasting. It’s a wonderful feeling to see our clients’ budgets get blown out the water and yet the client believes that we did something, well something postive that is.”

Ouch! But hey…the truth hurts.

This is an interesting idea from Shift Communications in the US. They have come up with this Social Media Press Release Template which takes advantage of the myriad of fantastic Web 2.0 options for sharing and linking information. The old press release is probably well overdue for an upgrade and so I support this. Brilliant move by Shift in terms of their positioning and exposure. Thanks to Andy for finding this.

Technorati Tags: puppy, Web 2.0

This is a very cool AJAX based clone of the Google Personalised Home Page concept. Start.com is the unofficial Microsoft one. Too many choices. Thanks to Will for sending me this link.

www.pageflakes.com

Not sure what to write a blog about? How about a blog about people who have blogs. Well that is just what these guys did. I reckon the smart money is in blogs about blogs that write about blogs. I might just register theblogaboutblogsaboutblogs.com now.