Ghostbloggers

More PR Than No-Holds-Barred On Bosses' Corporate Blogs
By Amy Joyce
Washington Post Staff Writer
Saturday, March 19, 2005; Page A01

Is it really a surprise that the new medium of blogging has spawned its own version of Astroturf?

The soul-baring, anything-goes, free-for-all phenomenon called the Web log has come to this:

"This is the first of many commentaries I will make on this forum," wrote General Motors Vice Chairman Robert A. Lutz in January when he first started his blog, fastlane.gmblogs.com, "and I'd like to begin with, surprise, some product talk -- specifically, Saturn products."

Web logs -- or blogs -- started as a way to talk about new technologies, vent about life and interact in a no-holds-barred forum. Since blogs became the next big thing, an increasing number of companies have come to see them as the next great public relations vehicle -- a way for executives to demonstrate their casual, interactive side.

“What’s a blog?,” people ask me with surprising frequency.  A new survey shows that blogging is catching on, although it may be a guy thing.

But, of course, the executives do nothing of the sort. Their attempts at hip, guerrilla-style blogging are often pained -- and painful.

Hey, this writer must have read that AP memo about “alternative leads.”  Instead of boring old facts we’ve got words like “hip” and “guerrilla.”  And we don’t have to wait for the end of the story to jump to conclusions . 

"Looking back before the dust settles on 2004, it was a great year of building momentum for BCA [Boeing Commercial Airplanes]. Our orders went up, with 272 in '04 compared to 239 in '03. It was a super year for widebodies for us," wrote Randolph S. Baseler, Boeing Co.'s vice president of marketing, on Jan. 17 in his first entry at boeing.com/randy.

With blogs like that, who needs news releases? Some Internet watchers wonder if a blog that sounds like nothing more than a corporate press room is worth the effort.

We’ve been through this before.  What is a legitimately expressed point of view, and what is propaganda?  If a ghostwriter puts words in a writer’s mouth, does anyone hear them?

"Repositing marketing materials on a blog is a waste of time," said Rebecca Blood, author of "The Weblog Handbook: Practical Advice on Creating and Maintaining Your Blog." "I would advise them to just stop right now. Those materials already exist. The blog that is powerful is when it is real."

Right on, sister.  I like that “stop right now” quote.  No ambiguity there.

Ideally, blogs can provide companies with a connection they don't otherwise have with the public, employees and clients. But it may take some time before executives figure out how to best use them.

Ideally is right.  Name a company that engenders love through the Internet.
I said love.

"Success in blogging is exactly the same as success in conversation, where if you stay on message, you're being a bore," said David Weinberger, a research fellow at Harvard Law School's Berkman Center for Internet and Society. "It's very hard to wean yourself. You stay on message then congratulate yourself for staying on message. Then what you do is alienate readers."

I didn’t quite get that, could you run that by me again? If you talk to me about dumplings, and I start conversing about Siberian throat singing, am I getting the message?

Although corporate blogging gives many readers what they want from a company -- an avenue to listen to and talk to decision makers -- it also loses that edgy, voyeuristic feel of personal blogs about bad bosses, annoying roommates and flings. As much as personal bloggers blithely ignore the conventional boundaries of etiquette, corporate bloggers edit themselves to avoid disclosing a company secret or representing an organization in a way not intended by the marketing department.

Raise your hands if what you want from a company is a pipeline to the boss.  Early subscribers to AOL remember the regular emails from Steve Case that earnestly promised a different, more responsive company. Ha!

Company in trouble? Chief executive in the middle of some scandal? Don't expect anyone to be emoting about it on a corporate blog. No mention on Lutz's blog, for instance, that GM's stock fell to its lowest level in more than a decade this week. The day Boeing's board announced its chief executive had resigned after an investigation uncovered that he had an affair with a female employee, Baseler wrote about competition from Airbus SAS.

Sun Microsystems President Jonathan Schwartz rants against new executive bloggers who essentially post news releases. "Authenticity is fundamental," he said in an interview. "Blogs get pretty dull if you just blog your products. There has to be something personal."

It's not often that even Schwartz writes about his private life on his blog, at blogs.sun.com/jonathan, but once in a while, readers will get something like this: "And because I don't want it to come out on some tech tabloid tell-all, I would like to inform everyone that reads my blog that I did, in fact, taste kangaroo meat at a luncheon yesterday," he wrote during a trip to Australia in October. "I feel bad saying that, I hope my [nieces] and nephews don't find out about it, but I tasted it."

Wow, what a juicy story.  Some CEO I’ve never heard of tasted forbidden flesh.  Who needs newspapers, when corporate suits can regale us with stories like that?

Schwartz railed in a November entry titled "Stranger Than Fiction" against the have-someone-else-blog-for-me practice some executives use. "Who would've thought the world would come to this? Funny. My view, it's not a blogger that makes a blog effective. It's authenticity. Everything else is just along for the ride," he wrote, with a link to an eBay auction that ended in December that offered "Blogger for Hire -- Start or Improve Your Blog." It continued, "Hire a Successful Blogger for your Company." There were 30 bids, the winner grabbing the service for $3,350.

The auction probably left die-hard bloggers banging their heads against their ergonomic keyboards. Blogs were invented to vent, to offer a personal look into others' lives. They were not meant to be written by someone else.

Neither were op-eds, speeches and books.  But it happens.  And as I noted in 2003, Astroturf letters to the editor are now cropping up in newspapers large and small (mostly small).

Schwartz probably knows he will win points with his audience by taking a little more liberty with his blog than other executives.

In August, he criticized competitor Hewlett-Packard Co. when the company missed earnings predictions. "So we all saw that HP had a bad week. My bet? It's only going to get worse -- and it has nothing to do with their SAP implementation," he wrote.

He explained why he thought HP was in trouble. HP's lawyers filed a cease-and-desist order. Sun fired back, and the issue was dropped.

"I rarely have a lawyer look over what I'm posting. It's like, am I going to have a lawyer read my e-mail? A blog is no more dangerous than e-mail or a mobile phone," Schwartz said. But not, he said, in the view of HP, which Schwartz said went out and hired people to write a blog for one of its executives to fight back.

Is it really winning points to dis the competition?  I guess that’s being “edgy” and “voyeurstic.”But you can’t have it both ways. Either blogs are the same as private conversation, or they’re public speech.  And in the marketplace of ideas, no one can hear you scream “it’s alright, I’m only blogging.”

"That's a ridiculous claim, but not entirely unexpected by Jonathan," said Rich Marcello, a senior vice president, general manager and one of several new bloggers at HP. A poet and songwriter outside of his job, Marcello said he sweats over the entries in his blog, at www.hp.com/blogs/marcello, trying to show readers the inner workings of the company while also writing in a way not typical in his environment. To wit:

"Last week was a good week and it reminded me of something I've believed for a long time -- we are all Michelangelos. Sometimes we don't like to call what we do artistic and we certainly are much too humble to equate ourselves or our work or our teams to Michelangelos, but I believe it's true," Marcello wrote Jan. 19. "I guess that's because I believe anytime we do something that's a work or act of love, what we produce is as much about who we are and what we believe as it is about the actual product we produce.

"Take OpenVMS."

Huh?

Huh?  Did you go to journalism school?  This story has a bit too much personality for me.  Here the reporter is saying, I know you went to sleep during those previous  paragraph, but I want you to know I thought it was boring too. That’s my point.

"I think it's going to be a while before we see actually that real honest transparency in public facing corporate Web logs," said Meg Hourihan, co-founder of Blogger, a software that allows people to create and host their own blogs. Google bought the company in 2003. "It would be nice if you could find a way to do it so it's not sanitized. Just sticking press releases on the front of the blog just doesn't cut it."

I’ve proposed a fine solution to this – more product labeling in news coverage.

In "The Web Log Handbook," Blood defines blogs this way: "Weblogs are the mavericks of the online world. Two of their greatest strengths are their ability to filter and disseminate information to a widely dispersed audience, and their position outside the mainstream of mass media. Beholden to no one, web logs point to, comment on, and spread information according to their own, quirky criteria."

Executive blogs: Beholden to no one? Quirky? Not so much. But Schwartz, for one, says he is trying.

In his first blog entry, on June 28, 2004, Schwartz explained his plans: "I promise to listen -- from all the constituencies we serve (customers, stockholders, developers, consumers, suppliers . . . all)," he wrote. "Hello, world."

Three of the new biggest lies:

“My door is always open.”
“I read all my mail.”
“This is a community.”

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