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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03/10/08

Some interesting information popped up today about blog influence—actually, I saw two studies cited, within minutes of each other, that seem on first blush to be opposing. But, in reality, I determined they’re complementary, and certainly of interest to anyone involved in blogging or social media. The first was noted in a story called New Media An Important Place To Be Seen. In this piece, The Center for Media Research reports that, according to the most recent BIGresearch Simultaneous Media Survey, “many new media options are showing double digit growth.” In particular, blogging experienced 21.5% year-over-year growth for purchase influence—the second highest of any new media type, and well ahead of any traditional media class (many of which declined). Granted, this study was just for a single category of products (electronics), but other recent studies have show an increasing influence for blogs in general.

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03/05/08

Great piece today by Cathy Taylor on one of the Mediapost blogs, Social Insider. In it, she points out that many agencies aren’t walking the talk about social media, particularly when it comes to blogging. And the first commenter makes the interesting point that social media may go against the whole culture or M.O. of agencies—implying not to look for much improvement anytime soon. 

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03/01/08

Blogging, the wonder child of the Web 2.0 juggernaut, seems to be changing. And the biggest reason for that, as I see it, is the new kid on the block: microblogging. And by that I’m mainly talking about that quick-post, sound-bite, here’s-what-I’m-thinking-or-doing-right-now phenomenon called Twitter.  (There are others of this ilk, too, like Jaiku and Pownce, but Twitter seems to have sucked most of the oxygen away from them since it launched only a year ago.) I blogged about the momentum of Twitter recently on my other blog, here. Then I also did this post about a new site with a lot of buzz that drafts off of Twitter’s popularity to a large extent, called Friendfeed.

The best blog post I’ve read on Twitter is this one from Jeff Jarvis at BuzzMachine. Read the comments, too—the impact of microblogging on PR is something you may be surprised to learn.  And I just caught an interesting post on how a blogger, having only discovered FriendFeed, is now longing to understand how it can help him manage his time—specifically, his blog. (That’s because the fuel of blogs is time. Like oil, there’s a finite amount of it.  Ever think about that?) Here’s his post: Wish I could run my blog with FriendFeed.

So, just what is microblogging doing to blogging? That’s what I’m wondering. What do you think?  Are bloggers now moving away from doing longer posts— where thinking, writing, maybe some research is actually a requirement—as opposed to just blurting something out?  I mean, how much time can a blogger spend, even if he/she tries, in planning a measly 140-character “Tweet,” as Twitter posts are so playfully called. (Yes, “Tweet” is already to “microblog post” what Levi’s is to jeans, Kleenex is to tissues, and Xerox is to copies.) I hardly know a blogger who isn’t Twittering like a maniac these days.

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