Many thanks are due to Lisa Poulson of Burson Marsteller (via Constantin Basturea‘s PR digest). Here are some dos and donts for CEOs and PRs plunging into the world of corporate blogs. Lisa’s are in Italics and mine are in normal type.

- When you make statements – in a blog, a press interview, a speech – be certain that your facts are clear and defensible. “When you hit that little publish button and something goes up, you know that literally millions of eyeballs around the world are going to parse it,” says Michelle Malkin, a conservative blogger. The Wall Street Journal, January 21, 2005

- Connect. Link to source material and authoritative third-party commentary to add weight to your positions and show that you’re reasonable.

- Shout out your mistakes. Be the first to acknowledge and correct your own mistakes and misstatements. A reasonable communicator does NOT hold on blindly to a position and refuse to acknowledge errors.

- Be clear about what you can’t discuss and why. A reasonable communicator assumes that his or her readers are smart and reasonable people. Reasonable readers don’t expect material disclosures in a blog entry – they know the SEC has rules. They’ve heard of Sarbanes Oxley. As a PR person who has handled litigation more than once in my career, I found that if I said to reporters something like “I know you want access to all the evidence in the case, but we can’t show you evidence until after it is presented in court,” I pretty much always got an, “Oh, OK, I’d just like to see it when you can show it to me” response from reporters. Thus we avoided all sorts of conflicts. Reasonable explanation, reasonable response.

- Be respectful in acknowledging dissenting opinions. This is the single most important factor in building credibility. Two intelligent, motivated and reasonable people with the same fact set can come to opposite conclusions. And that’s just fine. Not everyone has to agree with and love your corporation. They just need to know that you’re not afraid of their dissenting opinion and that you respect it. When you respond to them in this reasonable way, your critics lose their fangs.

Additional dos and donts from Market Sentinel:

- Don’t leave the field to your opponents. Always publish some response. If you have undergone a widely-publicised attack in the blogs or mainstream media, reflect the fact on your website with a clear link to your statement. Talk to an expert about optimising your website so that your response appears high in a Google search of the keywords.

- When you respond, use facts. Bloggers link to facts, they don’t link to statements of intent such as “We take the problem of X very seriously …” (and as Lisa Poulson suggests, make sure the facts stack up – don’t say that there is no status in a story you haven’t checked out).

- Engage with your critics. Visit their blogs, or have the appropriate person do so on your behalf (they don’t expect the CEO, but the product manager would be effective). People who have been engaged in a sensible dialogue moderate their tone. And if they don’t moderate their tone they lose credibility.

- Seize the agenda. Take action against the underlying cause of the reputational problem. Announce that action on your own blog. And then link to that action in the places where other bloggers can find it. This is a very effective way of rebuilding your brand’s credibility and establishing your blog’s search engine credentials as an authorative source.