Blogging: Offense and Defense

Courtesy of Dennis Howlett I saw this Deutsche Bank report on Blogs as tools for Corporate Communications. Courtesy of Jeff Nolan, I saw Hill & Knowlton's guidelines for its employee bloggers. I also saw how this on Yahoo. Corporations are learning about blogging - at least outbound, "offensive" blogging.

On the other hand, corporations still do not seem to know how to monitor and react to independent bloggers - what could be called "defensive" blogging.  The technology vendor world appears even slower about this. 3 data points I can report in the last few weeks:

a) a conversation with a technology marketing consultant "Vendor marketing and analyst relations folks consider bloggers a nuisance. The major research firms - Gartner, Forrester etc get the majority of their attention. Then the tech media.  If a blogger writes something negative about a competitor it may get passed around"

b) conversation with another marketing consultant " Our recommendation is to monitor blogs. Look but do not touch. If there is something negative in a blog, use more traditional techniques - a press release, a white paper - to offset the criticism"

c) conversation with a  product consultant at a vendor I have written blogs on "I enjoy reading your stuff. But if I commented on your blog, I would get fired"

One of the frequent complaints I heard when I was at Gartner was vendors could not get "equal time" to debate what an analyst opined on. Blogging offers them a far more democratic format to engage a blogger and his/her community. "Look, but do not touch" is a significant missed opportunity, in my opinion.

May be Dell's recent experience will change  the way technology vendors (and corporations in general) look at blogs - offensively and defensively.