Huge Companies form Blog Council

The Blog Council

I learned earlier tonight of a very significant announcement tomorrow. A new group called The Blog Council has been formed.  What makes it newsworthy is that the members include
AccuQuote, Cisco Systems, The Coca-Cola Company, Dell Computer, Gemstar-TV
Guide, General Motors, Kaiser Permanente, Microsoft, Nokia, SAP (my client),
Starwood Hotels & Resorts and Wells Fargo.

If anyone still doubts that blogging and social media are going mainstream, here is smoking gun evidence. Each of these companies has active social media programs.

In a release slated to go out tomorrow morning, the council says it will:

• How do global brands manage blogs in more than one language?
  
• What do you do when 2000 employees have personal blogs?
  
• What is the role of the corporate brand in a media landscape increasingly geared toward consumer-generated media?
  
• What is the correct way to engage and respond to bloggers who write about your company?

These are complex questions, ones that are bewst resolved through collaborative thinking. In fact, what I like and respect about this announcement is it's collaborative nature. It feels true to the social media approach and hearing it from such formidable voices gives some vindication to some of us who have sometimes felt we were hollering in a hurricane.


Technorati Tags: SAP, The Blog Council, Accuquote, Cisco, Cocacola, general motors, Microsoft, starwood, wells fargo

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Comments

[Dennis McDonald]

I take it that this effort is looking at external connections, not at company-internal uses of blogs (e.g., project communications), right?

Dennis McDonald
Alexandria, Virginia USA
http://www.ddmcd.com/project_blog_01.html

[Paul Alexander]

It's not clear to me how these companies are hoping to benefit from forming this council. Is it just to discuss the issues mentioned above? Is it to improve their blog communications? Or are they hoping to better understand how social media can be used to drive marketing strategies?

I also agree with David and Phil – calling this the Blog Council and looking at blogs only gives you part of the picture. But maybe they went in blog direction because there are already many other Social Media groups?

On the final question - What is the correct way to engage and respond to bloggers who write about your company. I think this is jumping ahead slightly. If you look at the companies in the group - Coca Cola, Microsoft, General Motors - there are probably dozens of posts written every day about them, their brand, their products, their policies or their management. You need to have a system which firstly alerts you as soon as a post is published, and then shows its relative potential influence, ie which post or article is most likely to be picked up and read/quoted/syndicated by even more influential people / writers. You can then decide where and how to respond - directly to the blogger on his/her site, via your own blog, or if you need to seed responses in a number of other influential sites to generate the right amount of coverage. This is precisely why we created Reputica (www.reputica.com).