Corporate blogs; they’re increasingly becoming “de riguerre” the “cause d’etre” of the corporation. And it is definetely an excellent opening move in the first act of corporations learning how to converse with the general public; whether reaching shareholders or consumers in general. Corporations, government and media are realizing the value inherent in social media relations - that this is where people are looking for opinion. It is a signal that the “corporate message” speaks a language that is always the same - everything is good and there’s no bad news. Consumers are smarter now, more connected and thus more conversant.

We discussed Molson as one example previously, of a corporation reaching out through a blog to communicate its corporate social responsibility program. I’ve monitored the Moslson CSR blog for a couple of months now - mostly because I think they are progressive in their approach - and because we’ve monitored several other companies and done our research regarding “feedback” on CSR blogs. Still, there are very little “responses” on corporate blogs and CSR blogs. Most don’t enable consumer responses and all monitor them and approve what gets posted. Conversely, GM has done very well with it’s blog and gets a fairly regular stream of comments (OK, we did some consulting here we admit) and permits negative commentary. A plus when a corporation does this, as the market sees them as more “real” and not just creating a marketing message.

Few corporations enable unmonitored comments on their blogs, and through the research that we’ve done with our clients, few people even leave comments; this is okay. Monitoring responses on a corporate blog is a good thing, since you don’t need foul language and abuse cluttering up the readership. What we have found, is that the conversation is often better served elsewhere. What this means is moving the conversation beyond the corporate blog, enabling people to share stories (precisely what we do with our corporate blog, as does Seth Godin with his blog and others) as that’s when people feel more interested in commenting - away from perceived corporate control.

By using share services like “Share This” or buttons to move the story to digg, mixx, Facebook etc., you are accomplishing two major goals - getting inbound links (good for ongoing search marketing tactics), and increasing the chance of more views. In addition, you can later see what happened on sites like newsvine, digg or mixx to see what the general public thought of your story. Keeping the conversation strictly on your blog limits exposure potentially broader audiences. Get it out there, the nature of Web 2.0 is sharing, not just comments, but links and stories as well. If enough people share your story, it’s an excellent sign of interest and can help you in planning where corporate social responsibility is placed in future.

This also follows a consumer behaviour pattern. We rarely speak our mind in front of the boss, but we’ll say a lot more at the pub after work over a few beers. Corporate blogs are best measured in the conversations that take place beyond corporate control, out in social sharing sites. We could go into our other findings, but we’re a business and that would cost us profitability. We hope you share this story…