NewCommForum: Best Practices for Corporate Blogging & Social Media

This one promises to be a lively panel discussion with Mike Manuel moderating.  Panelists are John Cass, Shel Israel, Giovanni Rodriguez, Debbie Weil, and Josh Hallett.

• Don't do blogging half-way.  Make sure you get your own domain name and think out what your blog is going to be.
• Corporate IT often has trouble doing blogging platforms right.  Keep IT away from it.
• It's hard to claim best practices since that really means "tried and true" and blogs and other social media are too new for that.
• Shel says take risks.  Stick your neck out, yank someone's chain.  Don't do something stupid, but don't be boring.  Taking risks humanizes a company.  Don't allow your company to be a faceless monolith.
• Debbie says "confront your fear" over loss of control or being criticized.  Embrace experimentation.
• Giovanni thinks we may have been blinded by the term "conversation." 
• Digital video is coming on strong, but blogging is still preeminent and was first.
• Crisis communications can be used to sell blogging to senior execs.
• Lawyers and IT resist change but decision about blogging should be a customer relationship one.
• Shel doesn't believe you should try to quantify things that are unquantifiable.  He gives the example of counting the number of impressions of a New York Times story.  He says if it is 3 inches below the fold on page 37, it was probably only about 14 people who read it (not the millions of subscribers) and most of them probably got distracted at paragraph 2 and never finished it.
• Shel says he completely disagrees with Charlene Li's study on the ROI of blogging.
• Shel believes people overlook intangibles too much. 

This may have been the most entertaining panel so far.  The high concentration of bloggers on the panel as well as in the first few rows of the audience ensured a healthy back and forth.  Shel Israel seemed to be the popular target, but he endured the barbs well.  (And as usual he gave as good as he got.)

UPDATE: Brian Oberkirch, when he wasn't recording podcast interviews, wrote up a nice summary as well.  (FYI - you can see the back of his head in the photo above.)

Technorati tags: NewCommForum, New Communications Forum, Mike Manuel, John Cass, Shel Israel, Giovanni Rodriguez, Debbie Weil, Josh Hallett, social media, corporate blogging, best practices, PR, Charlene Li, ROI, blogging

Comments

[Giovanni Rodriguez]

Great meeting you finally!

g

[John Cass]

I liked Charlene's framework, but I have some doubts about the GM case study, mainly because I do not think GM is doing a good job of responding to customer comments. And from several interviews with GM fastland blog readers that lack of response has resulted in a negative impression of the company. Charlene mentioned in a blog comment on my post that she did not take account of the negative consequences for their brand in her GM case study. I wonder if Shel was concerned about those issues?