A Corporate Weblogging Manifesto

I recently referenced ChangeThis, a sort of new manifesto portal. Microsoft bloggeur Robert Scoble has written an excellent treatise on corporate weblogging:

#11 – “Know the information gatekeepers.” If you don’t realize that Sue Mosher reaches more Outlook users than nearly everyone else, you shouldn’t be on the PR team for Outlook. If you don’t know all of her phone numbers and IM addresses, you should be fired. If you can’t call on the gatekeepers during a crisis, you shouldn’t try to keep a corporate weblog.

Probably the most controversial one is #18 “Link to your competitors and say nice things about them”. This one has been a real problem for some of the corporate-types I’ve helped get into blogging.

Here are a couple of additional suggestions:

#22 – Make Sure You Can Commit: Nothing is more irritating that the corporate weblog that is started and then abandoned. Decide what a reasonable rate of posting is, and try to maintain it. You don’t have to be verbose–one decent posting a week is acceptable.

#23 – Know the Established Players: As a corollary to #11, know who the external players are. If you’re writing about Outlook, who is the independent blogger who all the Outlook-heads read? They’re going to watch you like a hawk, and you should do the same to them.

#24 – Do What You Say You Will: If you say you’re going to post once a week, then do so. If you say you’re going to offer incisive industry criticism, you better not be writing about your cat.

Speaking of doing what you say you will, when I first wrote about ChangeThis, I complained that they didn’t offer an RSS feed. Noah from ChangeThis wrote to promise one, and now they’ve got it. Nice work. Now, if I could just discourage them from that attractive but impractical PDF format.