Corporate Blog Ruminiations

I found this originally on Digg, and went looking for blogs that haven't been updated. They do exist, which is surprise and not so surprising. Blogs take more work to keep up than people realize, especially if you want to make some money off of it. Creating the content isn't the hard part. The hard part is getting the blog out there and getting people to come back on a fairly consistent basis.

There is WebAbility that started off okay but hasn't been updated in over a year. From his profile, you can guess that he has very busy dealing with IT issues at whatever university currently employs him. It is a personal blog, and personal blogs often falter when things get busy. You'd think the same would be true of business blogs, and possibly even more so. Yet business blogging doesn't seem to have taken off quite as much as people seem to think.

We all know Jonathan Schwartz's blog and might even consider him a pioneer of business blogging. He has, afterall, called for business information disclosed on a blog such as is to be an official public statement. And if we want to continue down that route, we can consider him, like Google, as making up his own rules regarding the Internet since, well, there aren't rules, exactly.

The newspapers have gotten into blogging as well, which is pretty much having columnists blog instead of write out columns, or blog in addition to writing their usual columns. A Garrison Keeler blog would be hilarious!

Then there is Leven10, and their blog The Level10 Buzz Report which is updated fairly infrequently.

I wonder if there is a trend here, that large corporations have embraced blogging either as a way to communicate better amongst themselves or communicate better with customers and the outside world to better build and promote their brand. If you logged onto MySpace when the Superman DVD was released, all you saw were promotions for the DVD. They even did the background of the homepage to reflect the cover the Superman DVD.

So does the size of the corporation really have an impact on whether or not that corporation blogs, and how well that blog is kept up? Someone, or a group of people, need to be responsible for adding content (and useful content, we hope), and there need to be people out there populating the blog on the Internet, other people tracking the progress and then if anything comes from it, if that is of any concern.

Do large corporations have better writers at their disposal? Marketing and tech savvy people? Sort of makes it a little trickier to argue that the Web is a level playing field huh?

Or does it come down to one's desire and drive to post, distribute, track and watch what happens? And do such people just not exist in smaller corporations?

Apparently there are quite a few factors that dictate the success or failure of a corporate blog, which might be why there aren't that many just yet. Plenty of blogs about corporations, just not quite as many written by the corporations themselves.

Anyone think that will change in the next 2-5 years?