Blogging was going to change how organisations communicated with their audiences forever. In 2005 a revolution was set to sweep through corporate communications. PR and communication teams would cease to exist as business leaders used the web to communicate directly with their audiences.

Blogs promised to fundamentally change the relationship between a company and its staff, customers, suppliers and the media. Web sites would be overhauled for the 2.0 era, the press release would cease to exist and the PR industry itself faced revolution.

We’re still waiting.

It’s an overstatement of the case of course but five years on there are very few examples of large UK organisations – outside the media and information industries – that have successfully used a blog as part of their communication strategy.

Blogging benefits

Yet the benefits of corporate blogging are undisputed: direct engagement, leadership, search engine optimisation (SEO), social capital and raw web traffic.

In a presentation to the CIPR Online Reputation Management conference in Manchester yesterday Cathal Smyth, managing director of interactive design agency The Group said that the UK adoption of corporate blogging was woeful particularly when compared with US companies. His firm tracks corporate blogging activity in the UK on its web site.

Smyth said that 18 of the FTSE 100 companies had a blog, but that only eight of these were blogs in the truest sense with conversational elements rather than corporate news feeds.

As a rule good corporate blogs are hard to find. Rob Fenwick of the Chartered Institute of Management Accountants (CIMA) says that for every success the internet is littered with the twitching corpses of dormant corporate blogs.

The typical life cycle follows a long tail but by accident rather than design. It starts with an initial exuberance of two or three posts per week, dropping to one a week, then one a month before drying-up completely.

CIMA is considering moving to a model whereby it aggregates content from its spokespeople from their personal blogs and articles that they’ve written in the press. It’s an interesting approach that should ensure that the CIMA blog reflects the conversations that are going on around the organisation on a day-to-day basis.

Why hasn’t corporate blogging worked so far?

One of the reasons that there are few examples of good corporate blogs is because of the clash between personal and corporate communication. There are fundamental differences between how people communicate and how companies communicate – and very few corporate organisations have managed to bridge that gap.

Then there is the issue of ownership. Should a blog be the pet project of a senior executive or fall within the communications or PR team, product marketing, customer relations or human resources? And legal will almost certainly want to get involved and pass judgement on blog posts and comments.

Finally there is the issue of the generation of authentic content. It’s the only way to attract and stimulate an audience yet organisations see it as time consuming and requiring the constant input of senior management.

While corporate blogging remains throttled by these issues it hasn’t a chance of taking off. But I remain optimistic. There are some excellent examples of corporate blogs in the UK that are reaping the benefit of being the only show in town.

Stephen Waddington, managing director of Speed, led a workshop on Corporate Blogging last week the CIPR Reputation Management conference at the Bridgewater Hall in Manchester. A copy of his slide presentation is available online.

Image via Connect Our People.