Marketing Begins At Home

Yesterday I got my hot little hands on Peppercom’s corporate blogging survey.

I admit to being completely agnostic on the subject of corporate blogs, character blogs, alien blogs, etc. If corporate interests want to blog, well welcome to the party. If they do it in an open and conversaional manner, that’s great. If they don’t, well they’ll be found out soon enough by the rest of the blogosphere.

My own take on this is that most agency and internal communications people look at blogs as just another channel to spam up, just like they do everything else. Maybe it’s my experience in agency life. I’ll get to that in a later entry.

One number in the survey jumped out at me and almost gives me hope for the future of corporate blogging. Of the two groups surveyed (’internal’ or PR people in agencies, and ‘external’ or PR and communications staff at companies) clear majorties indicated that self-promotion and and obvious ghost writing would be mistakes. And both groups were postive about a blog’s impact on their company’s reputation as a thought leader and its usefulness in dialogue with stakeholders.

I think we’re probably entering a point where the rank and file in most agencies either ‘get it’ or are at least aware of social media. As these folks move up the ranks, we might see more and more agencies embracing social media, instead of running away.

Steve Cody’s (aka managing partner of Peppercom) take is here