This can be pretty tricky, since blogging is so new and only a small amount of research has been devoted to it thus far. We might think we have the right subject matter targeted, only to find out later through research and surveys, etc. that it was wrong. That’s why its important that maintaining a good blog be coupled with maintaining a strong and consistent research of what your readers are writing about on their blogs, not just about your corporation, but others as well. You can gain a clearer understanding of what bloggers expect from your corporation by reading what they write about other corporations.

You wrote that, “A little like the telephone when the telephone rings its important to pick up the telephone, companies are finding that when a post online is made its important to find comments about their company and respond if needed.” Along these same lines, companies need to respond quickly to both comments made on their blogs as well as comments on other blogs. Sometimes a response is delayed, to the point that people become even more frustrated and annoyed. If companies are going to have a blog, they must take it just as seriously as their blogging consumers do. When someone leaves you a message on the telephone, it’s important that you respond in a timely fashion, just as in responding to a blog comment.

Great post!

Thanks for you comments and questions. I think in my experience that the companies that have seen some of the best results have been those companies that encouraged their development and customer service teams to blog. Macromedia and Intuit come to mind here. Customers want their questions answered and if you let the people who can best answer those questions blog, not only do you satisfy your customers quickly, but because of the public nature of blogs and the web you extend the value of any response on a blog to a wider forum. While once it would not have been cost effective for your CTO to answer every question on a blog, now because of the wider circle of readers, there is a big payback.

However, I think there are times when having the support of a word of mouth marketing team can help to support the ‘techies’, specifically, in blog monitoring and ideas for response. It’s a matter of time you see, Bob Lutz from GM on the FastLane blog has an agency helping to moderate comments and make suggestions on what to post in response. In a recent interview with two GM customers who commented on the blog, I discovered the customers were not satisfied with GM’s response.

Laurie Mayers, Senior Vice President and Deputy Managing Director at Hass MS&L’s Ann Arbor, Michigan, office, recently gave a presentation at the business blog summit in San Francisco. Laurie directs the agency’s work for the GM FastLane blog and she explained that GM does not have the time to respond to every comment.

Based on my interviews with the two customers I made some suggestions to companies on how to mitigate any negative reactions to comment response.

http://blogsurvey.backbonemedia.com/archives/2005/09/the_gm_blog_les.html

While a word of mouth marketing team will help in mitigating negative brand challenges, through triage, the technical staff’s time can be used most effectively.

I also agree that its important for a company to set some blogging policies and sit down with employees on how they will be implemented, this requires training and forethought. In fact I think most of the rules and policies are already in place, but up until now, most employees did not have access to a corporate web site that could broadcast to thousands if not millions of people via the web. It will be merely a case of employees being reminded of good etiquette for liability and competitive intelligence.

John

You mention company bloggers should be those with product-rich knowledge, but it seems that a whole raft of skills are required - including blog content strategy development, blog product/brand mention monitoring, corporate positioning strategy via blog activity and blog response … almost a whole team of differing skills - do you see these roles being driven by as an adjunt to an in-house communications department with hands-on blogging from product ‘tecchies’ - or greater involvement from CEO or non-communications management …?

As an aside, I would add that it would seem that in this current climate of reputation management, it would be necessary to ensure a politically and commercially astute blog content manager was in place within a company to ensure responses on the right side of corporate governance …. in case a posse of company product enthusiasts got carried away with blogging to customers and forgot key communications boundaries and corporate messages ….

Bernie

You mention company bloggers should be those with product-rich knowledge, but it seems that a whole raft of skills are required - including blog content strategy development, blog product/brand mention monitoring, corporate positioning strategy via blog activity and blog response … almost a whole team of differing skills - do you see these roles being driven by as an adjunt to an in-house communications department with hands-on blogging from product ‘tecchies’ - or greater involvement from CEO or non-communications management …?

As an aside, I would add that it would seem that in this current climate of reputation management, it would be necessary to ensure a politically and commercially astute blog content manager was in place within a company to ensure responses on the right side of corporate governance …. in case a posse of company product enthusiasts got carried away with blogging to customers and forgot key communications boundaries and corporate messages ….

Bernie