Monday, July 23, 2007

Corporate Blogging Strategies: Grass & Orchids

A few months ago I posted my version of a corporate blogging strategy - which basically says: "Open it up to as many people as possible, make it easy and see who's left standing".

You could call this the "grass" strategy - i.e. you seed the environment, give them a bit of encouragement and see what happens.

At the other extreme, you have one blog (possibly for the CEO). This is updated, cleaned and polished (probably with ghost-written articles). Comments may or may not be allowed and conversations are unlikely to emerge. You could call this the "orchid" strategy. It is important to note that the "orchid" strategy is not wrong - but it is a bit dull. However your organisation may like dull. In which case it should probably select this one.

However most organisations will end up with something that lies mid-way between grass and orchids. In fact, given what a blog is (a series of bite-sized chunks of content delivered at regular intervals with RSS alerts and reader comments), you will probably have a range of different bloggy "plants" (around departmental news or project updates or some persons fave links) in your organisational garden - some of which you will have cultivated yourself and some of which just got there. They will all be a bit different and require differing investments of time & energy. And recognising that these differences can be "OK" is an important first step.

2 comments:

Anonymous said...

I guess that makes me a weed. Growing a successful blog without official corporate approval and spreading the idea to colleagues.

Matt Moore said...

Nothing wrong with being a weed Vincent - hang in there...