Posted 10:28 AM by Gene

Another big company embraces "blogging":

In some respects, employee blogging is reminiscent of traditional employee testimonial advertising -- after all, if pilots and flight attendants can extol the virtues of Southwest Airlines in ads, why shouldn’t IBM’s own experts open blog discussions with consumers?

“What [Vice Chairman] Bob Lutz is doing with the General Motors blog [fastlane/gmblogs.com] is not much different than what Lee Iacocca did in the '80s,” Mr. Blackshaw said. “It’s all about being genuine and relevant and conversational with consumers.”

The problem, however, can sometimes be the tenor of the conversation and whether employees running amok on the Internet fits with a well-crafted, traditional marketing strategy.

“If employees are given appropriate guidelines, it can certainly be right on strategy,” said Jonathan Paisner, brand director at CoreBrand. “The broadcast model of a centralized voice saying this is our one voice out to the world isn’t realistic anymore.”

So now we'll have 200,000 individuals speaking in one voice. Makes sense to me.

And there's a problem with blogging: 20,000,000 bloggers and three or four voices.

P. S. Obviously the author never went to gmblogs.com or she'd have seen the site has two blogs with the same contents, and it's had all of four entries the last month. This is important?