Euroblog 2007: new whitepaper by Lewis PR - some thoughts.

In this afternoon session at the Euroblog 2007 conference in Gent, Lewis PR showed us the findings of their latest corporate blogging research and discussed their ideas on why companies should or shouldn't blog.

Marieke van Zuien and Mark van der Wolf from the agency spoke about how companies in different geographies are using or not using corporate blogs and then went into some advise. That's where it got very interesting in the way that some of their statements made several people in the room want to shout out.

Here are two of the points they made and what I think about it:

• Corporate blogging requires a significant investment of time, skill and knowledge. Time and skill can be sourced externally, knowledge cannot.
• Ergo, involvement from key company personnel is always needed - for at least 5 hours per week;

"Time and skill" - the person who writes the blog - can not be outsourced. This is totally in contradiction with the rule of transparency which is ruling the blogosphere. I asked the question here at the conference and was not convinced by the answer. You can not have an authentic blog if you outsource it to a copywriter.

5 hours per week as a minimum...? There has been a lot of talk about how many times bloggers should post, but stating that five hours per week is a minimum to start corporate blogging is simply unrealistic. The time you dedicate to a blog depends completely on how many people blog on it, how much added value the blogger(s) can come up with and how important this blog is viewed.

I'll have to go through the full white-paper before writing more about this but you can already download and print it here.

What do you think ?

Technorati : blog, corporate blogging, euroblog, lewis PR, public relations, study

Comments

[John Cass]

I think the amount of time you spend on blogging depends on a number of factors as you suggest. I think you have to conduct an assessment of your blogging community. Determine the number of blogs in the community and get some sort of sense how many articles are written every day on your industry's themes. You can use some of the RSS feed search engines to determine the number of times a blog post is written on a particular theme or keyword. Develop a basket of keywords for your industry, and run seaches in Technorati, sphere, google blog search and icerocket. The last search engine, IceRocket provides some handy graphs and states on individual keywords. While for the others just scroll down to the bottom of the results page and look up when the bottom post was dated. If it was 5 minutes ago, you will have to write a lot, if it was three months ago, you probably only have to write once a month. The amount of time you need to spend on keeping up with the industry may mean that you have to develop either a number of blogs or multiple author blogs. Southwest airlines did this, and also Dell.

[Mark van der Wolf]

The 5 hours you mention here are our estimated minimum for a CEO blog. This is based on the assumption that a CEO can get away with writing one post per week as long as it's high quality. In fact, one could argue that if a CEO spends much more than 5 hours a week on his blog, he's likely not doing his (real) job very well.

As for outsourcing time & skill and not ending up with an authentic blog: I'd say this fully depends on the quality of the copywriter and the way he cooperates with the blog owner.But granted, it's hard to find good help these days..

[Philippe]

Hi John, thanks for your comment.

As to the "posting rate"; again I think you can post whenever you add value to something or when you want to point your audience to interesting information. This happens when it happens... If you want to organize this definitely yes, the tools you suggest + RSS are a great combination.

Hi Mark,

Thanks for your reaction.

I still don't agree. I know a CEO who posts very frequently and who just records his thoughts on a digital recorder when stuck in traffic or on an airplane. He then gives/sends his words to his secretary who types it up. Doesn't require "at a minimum" 5 hours/week.

Outsourcing blogwriting is not done period... As you saw at the conference, it is all about authenticity and trust. A copywriter, however good he/she is is still a "copy" writer = not the original voice.

[Igor]

Hi Philip,

I was Euroblog too (thanks for including me on the picture in your previous post on Euroblog). This Lewis presentation was one the presentations that really got my attention. Maybe it's not that bad to produce some thought provoking statements. Though I doubt if that was the intention of their speech. Afterwards I have spoken to the Lewis-couple. When you face clients asking questions you can't answer (should my company start a blog) one of the options is to do a research on this subject. They did, though the conclusions were something too shortsighted. But to presenting this research on this kind of conferences you get a lof of interesting feedback.
Thanks for your posts on this conference (and your workshop on RSS)!

[Gert Asselman]

I think you're both right. I want a corporate blog to be 'corporate': qualitative content, regular updates and professionally written. I don't think the average CxO qualifies to do so, due to a lack of time and writing skills. I have no objection to a little final editing It raises the blog's credibility, that of its author and the company he or she works for. Professional journalists too have an article corrected before publication, don't they? It makes for a better and coherent magazine or newspaper.

However, I do believe we should respect the author's freedom op speech, which isn't to be taken for granted at all. Companies spend a lot of time, effort and money to keep both neat and dirty laundry to themselves. Why wouldn't we tackle this problem by means of something like corporate editorial guidelines? Traditional media use them too. Better to be safe than sorry...