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One of my favorite bloggers is Jeremiah Owyang. If you don’t read his blog, Web Strategy by Jeremiah, you should!

Jeremiah wrote a post recently asking for thoughts on The Many Challenges of Corporate Blogging. Since this is something that I have spent the past 16 months working on at a $1.2 billion company, I feel that I can add some perspective. Let’s take a look at these challenges one at a time:

1. Most (blogs) don’t receive a lot of traffic:

Yes, this is true, but its not as important as the Traditionals might think. New Media is about the power of the small audience. I’d rather have 200 regular readers who are passionate about my product or service than 10,000 looky-loos driven to my site by a contest to win a free MacBook Air. It’s all about the RSS subscriber. If someone has gone out of their way to subscribe to your corporate blogger’s feed, they are making a statement that they trust the blogger. Don’t you want to be known as the company with the most trusted and respected employees in your industry?

2. May require a lot of time:

For some reason, there seems to be this notion that corporate blogging is a full-time job. This does not match my experience. My two most popular corporate bloggers write one post per-week and one post every-other-week respectively. As for time commitment, each says that it takes them between 1 and 2 hours per post.

I’ve found that there are two things that are much more important than time:

• Corporate bloggers need to be passionate about their subjects and LOVE to write. By far the most successful of my bloggers are driven internally to create their content. My less successful bloggers see it as a chore.
• Corporate Bloggers need to release blog posts on a consistent basis. If every other week is consistent, then so be it.

3. Being conversational is unnatural:

Being conversational is unnatural in business communications because we’ve been taught NOT to do it. Communication specialists are used to writing “Press Releases” and marketing web pages. The good news is that outside of work, employees are very good conversationalists, so they already know how to do it, they just need to break some of their Old Media habits. Training works very well in this area. Lastly, companies cannot forget the most important ingredient of a corporate blog — transparency. Corporate blogs are conversational and transparent, and therefore should NEVER be used to spew traditional marcom drivel.

4. Often, no ending date:

Traditional marketers have these weird war analogies to describe their work. They “launch” “campaigns” and “initiatives.” They “target” markets and “blast” emails. Old Media content has a very short shelf-life, which is understandable if your corporate communications are built around “news.” Stories are only “newsworthy,” for a finite amount of time.

A corporate blogger on the other hand is “married” to their blog. Their posts become part of a searchable database for readers, both new and old, to use for present and future reference. The Long Tail is one of the frequently overlooked powers of a blog — a fact that has caused more than one brain aneurysm to a Traditional with a “fire and forget” communications methodology.

5. As employee bloggers become popular, brands get concerned:

I see this challenge more as a Human Resources problem than as a “brand” issue. Corporate bloggers can become “Industry Rock Stars,” causing their influence to go up, both externally and internally. On one hand, the corporate blogger can be seen as ripe pickings for a competitor who seeks to cash-in on the audience that will probably follow the blogger. That’s why companies need to think-through how to keep these folks happy. On the other hand, I’ve also seen some internal craziness due to the Rock Star syndrome. Influence is power and some will see this power as a threat. If a Rock Star blogger has an opinion on a future product that doesn’t agree with the Traditional whose “officially” in charge of that product, tensions will rise, and quickly.

6. Legal has hangups:

First of all, it is Legal’s job to have hangups! Second, I believe that this challenge should top the list. The very first thing that I did at my former company was to create a Corporate Social Media Policy — blessed by both Human Resources and Legal. The policy states, in non-legalese, what is acceptable and unacceptable Social Media behavior.

Jeremiah also asks the following question: “…how do we react to colleagues that may look like they are making promises on behalf of the company?”

I’ve found this point to be less of a challenge and more of an opportunity. It’s what I call the “Dick Cheney Principle,” the fact that the Vice President is always tasked with being a lightning rod for the President. Corporate Bloggers can do the same thing. Recently, one of my corporate bloggers was quoted in an article. The journalist made a point to say that this was the blogger’s opinion, not necessarily corporate policy. It all comes down to how your business describes the role of its bloggers. If we’re talking the “Official Google Policy Blog,” then so be it. If on the other hand we’re quoting from “Elmo’s Stochastic Methods of Widget Simulation using ACME products,” you may have the opportunity to set Elmo loose!

7. Our employees don’t represent our brand:

I’m always amazed at how little faith the Traditionals have in their own employees. Who are they hiring, anyways? The truth is that not everyone can be a corporate blogger. Some people are much better suited to the task than others, and therefore, it is important to choose the right people. I suggest that companies hire a “blogging coach” who will not only help find and groom corporate bloggers, but will also help coach them.

And lastly, as for concerns about personal MySpace or Facebook accounts, these issues should be handled in the corporate Social Media Policy.

8. Hard to measure success:

The best part of blogging is that there are lots of measurements. The hard part is to extract business meaning from them. If all you care about is “traffic,” you’re already dead in the water. Blogging has less to do with traffic and everything to do with influence. The key is to have someone dedicated to measuring everything. Gather and plot RSS Subscribers, unique visitors, incoming links, and mentions in the press.

The next step is analysis, where someone (perhaps your blogging coach?) analyzes those measurements. For example, is it possible to calculate ROI? Yes.

For example, I know that my blogger writes every other week, spends one to two hours per post, and has some results based on his efforts. He has a growing readership of RSS subscribers, he’s has been mentioned in the press Y amount of times,has started Z amount of industry memes. If I know the fully-burdened cost of his salary, I now have everything that I need to calculate ROI. It’s not rocket science.

Lastly, don’t overlook “softer” measurements. Some of the best stories of influence come from my bloggers who’ll say something like, “Hey, you’ll never guess what happened because of my blog this week.”

I’d like to thank Jeremiah for publishing this list. It looks like there are lots of responses to his post and I recommend that you go and read them all. This stuff is so new, we’re all learning.

Tags: New Media Evangelist Jeremiah Owyang Corporate Blogging Traditionals Challenges

Have you ever had an article written about you? Or perhaps you were quoted in one? I’ve had the experience many times and they have all ended the same way — me with a bittersweet feeling. Of all the articles that I’ve participated in, all have left me somehow disappointed.

Last month, I was interviewed as a podcaster for the local business magazine called the OCMetro. I read the article, was pleased with the majority of it’s content, but at the same time, experienced that familiar pang of bittersweetness. Close. Really close. But not perfect.

And so, at 10:48 AM on Monday May 12th, I shared the article with fellow podcasters through Twitter:

“Nice little article on me in a local OC magazine. The reporter got most of it right:-)”

There was no malice behind the comment. I was just expressing that familiar bittersweet feeling. At 11:26 AM, though, just 38 minutes after my tweet, I received a one-line email from Linda Melone, the journalist who interviewed me. It said:

“So…what did I get wrong? Saw your post on Twitter.”

Wow. My first reaction was to laugh at the irony. Usually, an interview happens, the article comes out, the bittersweet reaction sets in, and everyone is done. The reporter works on other projects, I add the article to my personal archives and we all move on. But this was different. The conversation between journalist and subject continued — all because of comment on a fledgling social media service.

In an email conversation, Linda explained that both her husband and a writer-friend had seen the tweet, and forwarded it onto her. She expressed a concern that my tweet reflected poorly upon her, as if she wasn’t doing her job.

Wow again. I instantly saw the flaw of Twitter — the downside of expressing oneself in 140 characters or less.

I went back, studied my tweet and determined that it was indeed unfair. The biggest mistake that I made was stating that the “the reporter got most of it right.” Not true. The reporter executed her job flawlessly. My beef is not with her, but rather with the religion of Journalism.

Here’s the part of the article that caused my heartburn.

Creating a podcast can be a challenge for most non-techies, although in the past several years, podcast software has made great strides in becoming more user-friendly. But Ploof admits it takes him about 10 hours to produce a podcast. That’s why he dropped the frequency of his broadcast from bi-weekly to once every 5 to 6 weeks.

Linda did not misquote me; this is exactly what I said. Everything in the article would pass the toughest of fact-checkers. She did an amazing job considering the 400 words that she was allocated to capture a broad topic such as podcasting. Add the fact that she was bound by the sacred rules of journalism, and that an editor probably added a few words to the final copy, and we have a piece of journalistic beauty — 400 words of balanced facts sans writer opinion.

Unfortunately, the rules of journalism frequently filter out important parts of a story — like meaning.

Griddlecakes Radio, the storytelling podcast that I’ve been producing for over two and a half years, is one of the most labor-intensive podcasts in the podosphere. Each show is hand-crafted. Each show contains personally-researched podsafe music which is blended meticulously with the words of a custom written story. Does it take me 10 hours to produce my podcast? Yes. Does it take everyone 10 hours to produce a podcast? Not by any stretch of the imagination! Griddlecakes Radio is the exception as opposed to the rule.

From the article, however, it looks like ALL podcasts take ten hours. And as a member of the Orange County Podcasters, an organization dedicated to helping others create their own podcasts, I felt that this paragraph would scare off future podcasters unnecessarily.

And there’s something else in this paragraph, something that needs to be addressed. It’s the hand of professional journalism at work and is demonstrated by the words “But Ploof admits…”

Let’s take that phrase apart.

“But,” is journalism’s way to say, “Okay, the article has included enough positive things about podcasting, its now time to balance that positive stuff with some reality.” The transition word then precedes a very provocative phrase: “Ploof admits.”

Think about the process of “admitting” things. Nobody ever “admits” to anything good, right? We’ve all heard people admit guilt, admit to lying, or admit to cheating on a spouse. One never “admits” to telling the truth, winning an Olympic gold medal, or walking on the moon. Statements like those are usually prefaced by another journalistic codeword: “claims,” as in “Ploof claims to have won his Olympic Gold medal while walking on the moon.”

Journalism is designed to find and report accurate facts. Yet, humans cannot live on facts alone. We seek meaning. We crave opinion. We want the truth. All things that unfortunately can end up on the editing room floor during journalism’s ruthless quest for the facts.

Journalism is a necessary part of our information-gathering process. We need our facts in black and white. But facts aren’t the only pieces of data humans require to make informed decisions. We need to add color to those facts and New Media tools give us the paint brushes to do so. In today’s Read/Write-Web world, printed articles are no longer static documents that enter our mailboxes, get read, and then leave through our trashcans. They are conversation pieces for anyone with a blog, podcast, YouTube channel, Facebook or Twitter account to discuss, add their opinion, or to clarify meaning.

Content creators of the new world unite. It’s time to start writing in color.

Tags: RonAmok New Media Evangelist OCMetro Journalism fact opinion Twitter

I’ve always heard that you never hear the bullet that hits you. And although I never want to find out if that saying is true, I have confirmed a corollary to it: “You never feel the pink slip that hits you.”

After one year and four months of working to bring New Media technologies into the Fortune 1000 company where I’ve worked for eight years, I have failed. Last Wednesday, at 11:00 in the morning, my boss telephoned to say that the company no longer needs a New Media Evangelist.

I won’t lie to you, it was a shock. For the past week, I’ve been wondering what exactly happened. What could I have done differently to prove the value of this stuff? What could I have done differently to clearly articulate the vision that I saw for my company — one that included better communications with customers, more influence over the industry, and ultimately better returns for our investors?

For the first few days, I wallowed in self-pity. During the next couple, I transitioned to wallowing in self-doubt. And then something amazing happened. I started speaking with friends and family. And although my ego was still battered and bruised, the passion that I have for this stuff shined through. I found myself explaining why New Media is important. I could hear the excitement in my voice as I listed reason after reason why corporations need to question fundamental assumptions about the way they communicate. The revelation was powerful. I LOVE HELPING PEOPLE UNDERSTAND THIS STUFF.

I’m not ready to declare myself healed yet. I’ve still got some bruises and this old body doesn’t heal as quickly as it used to. But I do declare that my mourning period is over. A new chapter of my life is starting. I’ve gone back to work.

Yesterday, for the first time, I printed out partial chapters of a book that I’ve been pecking at sporadically since last December. Today, I began organizing it, identifying its holes, and putting together a plan for finishing it. As I delved into the project, I focussed on some mistakes that I made in my last job, the things that I had learned, and the things I would change if I were to do it all over again. All of those thoughts are now incorporated into the book plan.

And I’ve made another decision. I’ve decided to offer these experiences to customers. Today marks the beginning of a brand new company: RonAmok Communications. Over the next few weeks, I’ll clarify the products and services that I’m offering, so keep checking this space.

And lastly, New Media is nothing without conversation. As a blogger, I look to you, my readers, as my board of advisors. As I hone my message, as I share ideas from the book, I’m expecting you to keep me on the straight and narrow:-)

That’s about it. A new direction for your New Media Evangelist. As with any journey, there is excitement mixed with uncertainty. I don’t know what this journey has in store for me, but I do know that I’m about to learn a lot. And as usual, I’ll be sure to pass these lessons along to you.

Tags: RonAmok RonAmok Communications New Media Evangelist New Beginnings