Conversation is a Two Way Street

Tom Murphy recently posted about the demands a corporate blog can have on a company. From posting regularly to the risk of putting your executive in the public domain, he pinpoints important implications to consider before blogging.

If you�re establishing a blog, you are doing it, in part, to create dialogue.� In planning a corporate blog remember that it doesn�t just require the time to write posts, it requires an investment in time to reply to feedback, engage in debate.� Without this two-way interaction you might as well just post a �letter from the CEO�.

The ability for people to connect with a corporation (or even a medium-sized business) through posting comments on their weblog is possibly the largest benefit of corporate blogs. Letting the public dialogue with your executive helps to put a face on your company, but not every company is willing to let this dialogue occur unfiltered.

Murphy highlights Richard Edelman’s blog, where the comments appear to be edited, eliminating two-way dialogue between Edelman and his readers.

While I commend Edelman�s decision to launch a blog (they are the first large agency to do so) they need to review the operational side of the blog and fix these problems.� If they don�t then the blog will simply become brochure ware.