Corporate Blogs: Srsly?

I can't tell you how many time I've heard the advice given to have "corporate blogs." And lately they seem to be EVERYWHERE. Weight Watchers has a couple their members are advised to follow - but I don't because they are inane. Every politician it seems has one and they are all written by, well, someone else. Dell has one but I couldn't find it, not that I looked all that hard. So do GM, Yahoo, and Google. Amazon has a few to include one for the Kindle.

This afternoon I was getting ready to install the Neat Works scanner when I noticed the instructions reminding me to go their website blog which I assume is their way of saying "hey, we're hip. we're cool. we don't capitalize or spell out words unnecessarily."

In fact what their blog was, as they all seem to be, was a news reel in text about their products.

Look. I have no problem with companies blogging. But I'd like them to actually "get" what blogs are. So instead of finding my way to a marketing page for some company masquerading as a CEO telling me what he's thinking and yawning through the drivel I find - why not actually have the guy SAY it?

If you go out to HP's website and do a search on the word 'Blog' you'll come up with some pretty good ones. They don't seem to be recent, maybe current economic events have the honest bloggers running to the hills corporately, I don't know.

But I do know that if, for instance, one of the major car makers - like GM maybe - had the guts to say on a blog post something like "hey guys, big lesson learned for me - when you make cars, drive, do not fly to Washington when you are begging. Wow do I feel stupid. I promise never to do that again!" I'd be the first one in line to help turn the company around.

Or how about one like this from maybe a senior manager of AIG "Yikes! Sorry about that. We totally screwed up but we're going to fix it and here's how. First, we're going to go for a little financial transparency. We're also going to clean house and we're going to start with the guys with the big bonus checks - this year the mailroom employees get one instead."

But no. Instead we take one of the most powerful things about blogs - the human voice connected to human brains - and completely water it down and feed to people like strained & processed peas. It tastes no better than it looks.

All the folks out there claiming to be PR and Social Media folks - knock it off. The readers can tell the difference between corporate message and a real blog. You ought to be able to as well.

NL