Business blogging does not mean CEO blogging

Employees, as opposed to corporate CEO’s, are the best bloggers for a company writes Chris Anderson, editor-in-chief of Wired Magazine, in his blog The Long Tail. CEO’s give the less trusted corporate speak while employees are part of the online conversation, something consumers and businesses trust more today.

The most successful business blogs are peer-to-peer: engineers, designers and managers within a company blogging about their own projects for the engineers, designers and other customers outside the company who use those products or care about that project.

Traditionally corporate messaging is directed up through the management structure within a company until it is released via an executive speech or press release, at which point it is supposed to be picked up by the press, filtered again, and trickled down to the public and ultimately the customers. But now that sort of top-down messaging is losing its effectiveness as consumers vote with their browser to go directly to the unfiltered voice of people like them.

Simply put, we’re starting to trust what executives say less and what employees say more. And if given a choice, as is the case with companies that let their employees blog, we’ll take the word of an articulate engineer in the belly of the beast over the double-speak of a press release any day. As institutional credibility declines (from Enron to the White House), individual credibility is taking its place.

Most large law firms are not ready to turn their associate lawyers loose on the blogosphere but the innovative law firms who are have a lot to gain. An associate’s posts on a blog are likely to do more to generate work than the standard marketing speak we read on law firm Web sites.

Microsoft, with over 1,500 blogs, nay be the best example of employee blogging.

Source of post: Robert Scoble