i might not be the right person to ask

Posted Wednesday, August 18, 2004, at 02:13PM by e;

A friend IM'ed me the other day. He said his company had asked him to start a blog, and he was looking for advice on how to go about that. Obviously, he hadn't read my paper, "Can Blogs and Corporations Co-exist?" I told him to read that first, and then we'd talk.

Today we followed up a bit, and I asked him a few more questions. Turned out the company wasn't satisfied with their placement in google, so they were looking for something to expand their web presence. My friend's boss told him "blogging would be a good way of doing it."

Right. See, if I were using examples for how not to go about starting a corporate blog, this would be a bullseye. No direction, no vision, just the vague idea that this new-fangled "blogging" trend might bring in more eyeballs. Sorry, but it doesn't quite work that way.

Blogs need to have a voice. They need to have a vision. A personal blog is focused on the interests of that individual. A blog like google does might be focused on exposing details of a company that a whole lot of people are interested in. But it can't be something written by "the company." My friend's company does business consulting: business plans, venture capital advice, stuff like that. "The company" can't write about that kind of stuff and make it interesting. I don't trust "the company." I think it's going to sell me things. My friend can't write a blog about that; he just doesn't know enough about the subject to write authoritatively. Why do I want to go read something written by some college kid trying to bring people to the company website?