Watch what you say
In some cases, blogging about work is best left to the boss. Someone in middle management blogging with a ‘human’ voice may end up sounding all too human. Bob Parsons, founder of web hosting and domain names company Go Daddy (and, along with General Motors vice-chairman Bob Lutz and Jupiter Media’s Alan Meckler, one of the stars of the new wave of ‘CEO blogging’) recently made a blog post that effectively endorsed the use of abusive interrogation techniques at Guantanamo Bay. Readers descended angrily upon him, pointing out, in classic blog style, errors of fact. “One good thing about having an active blog is when you are incorrect you find out in a hurry,” Parsons wrote in a rueful follow-up.

Anyone further down the chain of command who dragged the company into such pointless controversy would have been in big trouble. To avoid such embarrassments, a number of US companies, including Hill and Knowlton, Yahoo and IBM, are now devising their own corporate blogging guidelines. In general, bloggers are cautioned against releasing secrets and talking to the media, and urged to be nice.

Another Jupiter Media blogger, Michael Gartenberg, recently sounded a warning to job-bloggers, who, he said “need to remember that unless they’re working at a very progressive company, they need to take it slowly. When it comes to business and blogs, you had better know the rules before you hit that Post button.”

It won’t always be controversial, of course: Stephan Spencer has recently advised the American scientist and educator Steve Spangler on launching a blog about his work. And closer to home, he recently helped House of Travel start a travel-themed blog written by employees.

Duncan Shand, who is working with House of Travel on online development, says Spencer was such an effective evangelist for the blogging strategy that he even started one himself (www.iout.co.nz).

“Blogging while you’re travelling is a natural fit,” says Shand. “It’s not like we have to try hard to come up with an excuse to blog about the business. We’re not blogging about the business, we’re blogging about people travelling, and for a travel agency that seems like a natural thing to do.”

At the time of writing, the new blogs were difficult to find via the main House of Travel website, but links are gradually being added higher up in the site.

“It’s early days yet,” says Shand. “We’ve only had two travel blogs going so far. We had the e-commerce director at House of Travel going to Africa, so we set her up as a guinea pig because it’s an interesting place. Then we had Pamela Wade, the travel journalist, doing some stuff for House of Travel amongst other things in Australia, so we got her to blog on her trip.

“It’s been interesting for our product managers and from now on, anyone who’s going anywhere interesting, we’ll get them blogging about it. We’re looking to build up a library of travel journals for different destinations. We see that archive as being useful, as well as the current blogs.”

Network yourself
Both Cunliffe and Spencer testify to personal spin-offs from their blogs. Cunliffe has met new friends and business contacts through hers (“word of mouth is still one of the most powerful ways of getting new business,” she says). Spencer says his blog “builds credibility ... in the eyes of prospects and clients. For example, one of our recent clients chose us over a competitor for online marketing services partly because of my blog.”

Both of them get decent traffic: Spencer’s blog gets about 20,000 visitors a month, and Cunliffe’s one-off news blog on the Michael Jackson verdict got that many in a couple of hours. But both are experts in online marketing and the dark art of search engine performance. Others may find that, for a while at least, readers may not be beating a path to their blogs.

Which may be why most of the business bloggers in New Zealand are, like Spencer and Cunliffe, already in the online trade. (Rod Drury, former CTO of Advantage Group, also blogs prolifically at www.drury.net.nz.) But writer and investment advisor Philip Macalister (blog.goodreturns.co.nz) can draw some interesting comments, and corporate headhunter Steven Kempton (www.searchniche.blogs.com) regularly lifts the lid on the recruiting world. Several web developers spoken to for this story reported that clients of various kinds have begun to ask about incorporating blog-style features in their new web developments.

Revolution? What revolution?
At which point, it’s appropriate to sound a hype alarm. Blogging might be commanding the headlines but it’s not — yet — revolutionising business practice, even in the US. It’s going to take a while for all this to shake out. It may be that in five years, it will be commonplace for CEOs to talk directly to customers (or even staff) via an online journal. Perhaps the online chatter of the blogosphere will be a standard component of business intelligence. Maybe the ability to communicate online will be considered a relevant skill for some senior executive positions, the same way that being able to speak to a PowerPoint presentation is now.

For now, a few of what might be loosely described as business blogs — in that their authors trade to some extent on their professional profiles, or talk shop — feature in the Top 100 blogs list (as measured by Technorati.com): journalists Josh Marshall (number 7) and Andrew Sullivan (12), media designer Jason Kottke (15), software developers Doc Searls and Dave Winer (18 and 22) and various media and marketing types at Corante.com (25). But in general, their authors are people with personal brands to maintain rather than people with large businesses to run.

That doesn’t mean blogging is a bad idea for business, it’s just not a quick fix for anything. Getting yourself a blog is the easy part — the hard part is filling it with interesting words on a regular basis. You’ll have to work out who your audience is (customers, business partners, peers?) and how to talk to them. You’ll need to find fellow travellers and point people to their blogs. You’ll need to stay abreast of developments in your sphere of interest, and on the internet in general.

If one of your employees wants to mention work or professional issues in a blog, get hold of some corporate blogging guidelines and set some ground rules upfront. If you’re unsure of your own talents, just set up a blogspot.com blog under a pseudonym and see how you go. Find other bloggers, put them on your blogroll and tell them who you are. Show a little personality. It costs nothing to try.

Just don’t expect the earth. The most popular New Zealand blog sites get between 3,000 and 5,000 visits a day, but if you get just a few dozen regular readers who you actually engage with, you’re doing okay.

There are plenty of bad blogs on the internet, and many good ones that don’t last the distance. It takes a degree of passion to get out there and communicate daily — or even weekly. But it is precisely that passion — the desire to reach out, to find and pass on good information — that makes a good blog.

* Russell Brown’s own blog can be seen at publicaddress.net