You Have to Love How One Beer Company Does Corporate Blogging

04/26/08

Corporate blogging is still a little understood art.  And very little practiced, to be quite honest, outside of the tech field. You think most companies are blogging?  Guess again. According to this ongoing survey, only a measly 11.6 % of the Fortune 500 are doing it—as of about a week ago, to be exact. (Not to speak of the even smaller percentage of those doing it well, I might add, whether in the Fortune 500 or elsewhere.)

But there was an absolutely great front-page piece in the Wall Street Journal on Thursday: For All You Do, Bud, This Blog Is About You.  Here’s an excerpt:

(Jim) Arndorfer, 37 years old, is a full-time employee of Miller Brewing Co., the U.S. arm of SABMiller PLC. A former reporter for Advertising Age, he now runs Brew Blog, a free Web site dedicated to breaking news about beer. Especially news about Anheuser-Busch’s beer.

Brew Blog is the latest and perhaps most unlikely front in Miller’s drive to rattle Anheuser. Mr. Arndorfer tracks the St. Louis company’s every move, from earnings reports to management changes. He relishes revealing details of its products before Anheuser does.

Okay, this is funny!  I think it’s one of the best front-page pieces in the Journal in a long time.  [But then, I would—I’m a blogger!] A great, big shout-out to the reporter, David Kesmodel.  The competitive antics of these two big brewers is no secret; it’s the stuff of ad industry legend.  But, more than this, I think the Brew Blog is a great case study in corporate blogging. Here are some reasons why....

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03/30/08

No, I’m not talking about the relatives of your blogger friends. I’m talking about a term that’s becoming as frequently used in the PR business as “media relations.” How PR professionals interact with bloggers is taking on more and more importance—so much so that it’s now actually being studied. That’s right, all you bloggers out there—now we’re legit: the PR people are officially studying what we do and how they can influence us. In an announcement this week, the two firms behind the study announced a new web site, where you can read about their ongoing findings, as well as best practices in the field: BloggersandPR.com.

It’s a very nice, well organized site, with lots of information, and I would encourage anyone either new to PR, or just interested in getting up to speed with the latest thinking in blogger relations best practices, to bookmark it.  What are the biggest surprises in the findings so far?  Well, to me they are....

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03/26/08

Big happenings yesterday, with Yahoo announcing it will endorse the “OpenSocial” tech spec that was initiated by Google and is also backed by MySpace, Ning, and several others. Yahoo and Google also said, on a conference call they organized for the media, that they, along with MySpace, were forming a non-profit foundation for OpenSocial. The most significant thing I heard from the conference call was that OpenSocial apps will now be able to reach more than potential 200 million users by next week, based on all the social networks signed on to date. That is huge—more users than MySpace and Facebook combined. Which social nets of Yahoo’s will get OpenSocial apps initially?  The firm wouldn’t say, but one wonders about their oldest and best known: Flickr. For the complete lowdown on yesterday’s announcement, see today’s Wall Street Journal coverage.

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03/22/08

I learned a lot at the recent O’Reilly conference, “Graphing Social Patterns.” (You may have seen my coverage of the event at my other blog, and also on my Twitter page.) But the most interesting thing that was confirmed for me personally at this event was that, for social networking to really become successful from a business standpoint, it must somehow start to enable the one big missing element so far: commerce.  Advertising is not going to cut it as a sole business model, a fact that’s becoming increasingly evident.

With clickthrough rates continuing to decline, ad spending hardly going up in the current economic environment, and the lack of ad relevancy getting talked about more and more (especially on social networks!), suddenly advertising is not seen as the panacea it once was. It would appear that commerce—selling real stuff—must be the next big thing.

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03/14/08

Guy Kawasaki launched a new site this week called Alltop, which makes the boastful statement that “We’ve Got All the Top Stories Covered All the Time.” It’s a news and blog aggregator site for those who either can’t or don’t want to bother with setting up their own RSS readers or start pages—which is a large percentage of what I’d call mainstream web users. RSS remains very geeky and has low penetration beyond the tech-literate crowd. Mainstream users, Kawasaki and his partners reason, just want to go know, quickly, what’s going on related to their favorite topic or field of interest.  And I put experienced users like me in the category of people who will like Alltop, too. The site launched with pages covering 40 broad-interest topics.

Guess what, friends?  One of those topics is Social Media!  And I heartily recommend you bookmark that page now—socialmedia.alltop.com—because I think it’s a fantastic collection of sites and blogs in this burgeoning field, which can be a real challenge to keep up with. [Okay, so NewMediaWise is one of the sites listed—what can I say? These people are brilliant… :-) ]

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