What happens to your brand when your corporate bloggers leave your company?
Mike Moran started a great dialogue about corporate blogging and made a compelling argument in favor of “corporate” blogs that’s worth a closer look. First off, I think many corporations need to have blogs. Not all, but many. Your company can prepare itself for what it will take to blog and benefit from creating a conversation with your customers.
The question I have is: what happens when your blogger’s brand becomes bigger than your company’s?
For instance, look at what happened when Danny Sullivan left Search Engine Watch and started Search Engine Land last year:
To be fair, the Microsoft.com/scobleizer.com comparison isn’t as compelling an argument :-) :
Frankly, you should be so lucky as to have a company blogger whose brand grows as large as these two have. What’s important isn’t whether or not they eventually leave – they will. What is important is how you respond. And that needs to be part of your preparation, too.
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This is a great question, Tim. To me the answer revolves around having more than one blogger. Certainly, they’ll all eventually leave, but the impact of any one leaving won’t completely shut your message off the air. My suspicion is that when Robert Scoble left Microsoft that many of his subscribers followed him but that many of them also might have subscribed to another Microsoft blogger if their motivation was to hear from Microsoft. If Microsoft didn’t have any other bloggers, those people might have been lost. In a very small company, this multiple blogger strategy is harder, so be really nice to your blogger.
It’s also not a bad idea for small company owners to blog, or at least post to a corporate blog, too – not that they don’t have enough to do. They’re not always the best choice for a blogger, but with proper commitment and planning, they can be a good choice.
Of course, that also might maintain the “I’ll do it myself” problem all too common in small businesses. Still, each company should consider its situation and make a decision that works best for them.
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