B2B Web Strategy Blog - eMagine

Business blogging evolves toward a second generation

September 4th, 2008 Posted by: Bill Gadless

Perhaps because it’s so visible and buzz-generating, we tend to think of blogging as more pervasive among B2Bs than it truly is.  In fact, only about 12% of Fortune 500s run a corporate blog;  so it’s clearly a bit premature to call it mainstream.

Yet many of the companies that made an early commitment — and they include Dell, Eastman Kodak, IBM, Intel and SAP — are now deep into what one might call second-generation blogging programs, with multiple weblogs, dozens of bloggers and a wealth of expertise and best practices to share.  They long since disposed of the question of whether to blog;  now their concerns are how to grow and expand their blogging efforts and incorporate them as part of larger social media programs.

Over at BtoBonline, Rich Karpinski recently interviewed key bloggers and social media experts at these companies, and summarized those conversations in the handy post,  “Businesses embrace blogging.”  The interviews with these blogging believers unearthed a number of trends and variations, including:

Emergence of “Chief Blogger” as a corporate job title.  Kodak, for instance, recently named a Chief Blogger to coordinate its three outward-facing blogs …including “Grow Your Biz”, focused on the graphics communications market.  Aside from their own blog, Chief Bloggers are typically responsible for overseeing the company’s other bloggers, and for content on the blogs for which they do not write.

Globalization.  Dell finds itself driven by the rule of thumb that 10 languages will cover about 95% of the world’s population.  “Companies doing a really good job in global B2B (blogging) will be darn close to being in 10 languages,” says Bob Pearson, Dell’s VP – Communities and Conversations …a title, btw, that pretty clearly indicates the direction that corporate blogging is taking.

Segmentation.  Dell has a main corporate blog (Direct2Dell.com) and has opened up specialized blogs targeting IT users and small business.  SAP has introduced blogs and forums focused by industry, as well as communities built around tech deployers and business users of SAP systems.  More than 1.5 million customers have participated in those blogs and forums, along with about 600 of SAP’s 40,000-plus employees.

“Evangelist” participation.  The focus of all Intel blogs is about getting technical experts to blog directly, according to Annie Rodkins, Intel’s program manager for Web marketing.  “All of our bloggers have day jobs as engineers or executives, and that imposes limits to how much time they can devote to blogging,” Rodkins said. “Fortunately we are starting to see a gradual shift … whereby … conversational marketing activities are called out as part of an employee’s job description, and … recognized as a contribution in the employee’s performance evaluation.”

Transparency.  “…We want to be relevant in the conversations that our customers want to have,” says Dell’s Pearson.  “We want to be open and transparent about what people are talking about and, if people disagree, it’s important to have a real and honest dialogue about that.”

Does all this mean that your B2B should jump whole-hog into multi-lingual, specialized blogs, authored by scores of employees and monitored by a Blogger-in-Chief?  Probably not;  but it’s a pretty strong indication of where things are headed, and that you should at least have a plan in place for that point in time when your B2B should get started.  For some sage counsel on the subject, you may want to check with your Web marketing consultants.

Entry Filed under: B2B Web Strategy