Strategic business blogging
Just to be clear that Director Magazine is completely negative on blogging, here is an article in the May 2007 issue, Strategic business blogging by Matthew Stibbe:
With all of Airbus's recent woes—delays with the A380 super-jumbo, layoffs and cancelled orders—you would think that blogs are the least of its problems. But it has been losing out online, too. Randy Baseler, Boeing's VP of marketing, has been writing his successful blog for several years and landing PR blows on rival Airbus—which does not blog—on a regular basis.
This article is a straightforward piece on the value of being active in the blogosphere: attention, participating in the conversation, brand, changing perceptions, ... What the article doesn't do is give some statistics around what this has actually meant for Boeing. Did I miss something here?
And for what it's worth, I've created a feed for Director Magazine's technology articles.
Jack,
You raise an interesting question about the value of corporate blogging and statistics. Blogging is new enough that I don't believe there are industry-standard metrics yet, but some PR metrics are commonly used. They include competitive awareness (numbers of mentions about a company vs. its competitors in different media categories), reputation (positive vs. negative mentions in categories), and reach (the combined audience of the media mentioning the company). Blogs are the long-tail of media - many blogs with small audiences add up to the reach of a major publication -- and the only way to effectively engage in the blogosphere is through blogs. Airbus is clearly missing the boat, err, plane, here.
Lynda