Blogs make you a "fly on the wall"
Nearly everything offered up for public consumption by companies and their PR machines is pretty sterile. Any hint of controversy is usually scrubbed clean during the editing process. Blogs are different - at least the good ones are. Written properly, blog posts are the next best thing to being a "fly on the wall."
Blogs give you an insight into what people on the inside are really thinking about regarding their market and competitors. BEA's Bill Roth has a great post on October 27, "Oracle OpenWorld: Sound and Fury, Signifying Almost Nothing." Roth sniffs at Oracle's "boring conference" and then grades himself on his pre-conference predictions for his competitor's SOA and ESB announcements. It's interesting stuff - and something you'll never see in a press release. Another example comes from an August 15 post by Eclipse's Mike Milinkovich (full disclosure time - I'm on the Eclipse media relations team here at Schwartz). Milinkovich's comments on Sun's plans to open source Java sparks a nice exchange with Simon Phipps, Sun's chief open source officer. It's not often that two high-profile executives get into a candid exchange like this in public.
I only hope that as companies discover the value of blogging they don't impose strict "message controls" on their writers. Press releases, ads and marketing collateral represent official corporate speak - it's necessary, but boring. Blogs should be opinionated, honest and a little edgy. This may make the corporate communications and legal people a little restless, but if you want to use blogs properly you have to write straight from the heart.
Posted by John Moran on October 31, 2006 at 8:39 AM
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