Debbie Weil, author of The Corporate Blogging Book, talked about how few of the Fortune 500 are blogging, referring to this list. She said that there were six issues cited by companies who were thinking about blogging:

1. Fear: the fear of losing control;
2. How do we handle negative comments?
3. How do we deal with employees blogging?
4. What about the legal issues?
5. Who is going to edit this stuff?
6. I just don’t have time for this.

The answers to these questions were suggested by Paul Rosenfeld of Intuit (responsible for the Quickbooks online service) and Jeremiah Owyang of Hitachi Data Systems.

Paul: “Just do it. It gets you really, really far.” He told the story of how one of his guys had come to him on a Friday with the idea of doing a blog and he had agreed in an offhand sort of way, only to discover that by Monday morning the blog had been built by the guy over the weekend in his spare time.

For Jeremiah it began with getting the CTO Hu Yoshida, to make comments on analysts’ blogs. From there they have graduated to running three blogs: Hu Yoshida’s own blog, Claus Mikkelsen’s blog and Vincent Franceschini’s blog.

On the time question, Jeremiah observed that it took up 30% of his time. they had opened up the blog to comments, and Jeremiah said that this took up a “negligible” amount of his time. They all agreed that enabling comments was a good thing to do, but suggested that - unlike Bob Lutz - you probably wouldn’t get hundreds of comments. If you were worried about it, you should have a comments policy.

John: “Your biggest critics can become your biggest fans”.

This entry was posted on Thursday, March 2nd, 2006 at 7:16 pm and is filed under Market Sentinel. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.