by: Sigurd Rinde
"Blogs will change your business" – front page Business Week a couple of weeks ago.
Read the article, lots of interesting stuff, lots of positive vibes. But a simple clear answer as to why blogs will change your business? Nope, not really.
So as a public service on a Sunday, here are the two most important reasons why corporate blogging matters:
1. It invites the customer into the company. Untouched by the marketing department.
I, the customer, get a direct line into the real part of the company, the part where they actually do important stuff, make products and such. Non-marketing, you know. Just have to love that.
2. It hacks away at the hierarchy.
No jackhammer of course, more a dainty little hammer, but still. Opening channels outside the command and control structure.
And, dig this, it gives a person, the blogger, visibility, credibility if he’s reasonably good at it and a chance to test his integrity. In other words all the traits of a leader.
In practice a small test of having leaders without command structures. Leaving out the marketing department and the managers, that’s why you’d better keep mum about this.
Thus it is an under-the-radar, subversive, cloaked-as-something-else practice that are like hors d’oeuvres, giving the corporation a first unplanned taste of a better future.
Did I mention it? Please do not tell the managers what’s really happening, just keep on telling them that "it is important!" That’s why articles like the one in BW is so immensely important, managers goes nodding when they read such in a Real Management Magazine, and it does not disclose the real (and subversive) reason. Excellent.
They’ll buy that for now, while the important stuff can happen under their radar, slowly but surely. With luck the leaders will win and corporations will open up to new forms of structures (you should know where I stand by now) 🙂
Go corporate blogger, go!
