As of this writing (Monday "morning" just after Sunday midnight), Google reports about 65,800 hits for "corporate blogging." And 72 of those hits mention this site, Chief Blogging Officer. Not bad (if I say so myself) for a blog whose first post is dated November 10, 2004 -- exactly two months ago. "But hold on... maybe it is bad," I hear you say (I've got your newsreader bugged). "Don't those other  65,728 hits sorta hint that you're late to the party?"

I'd like to address that question here, and put the whole notion of corporate blogging in a bit broader perspective, starting with this clip from an article by ex-San Jose Mercury News journalist Dan Gillmor in Computerworld last August...

The average corporate Web site has much in common with the average annual report. ...such sites seem designed to thwart the casual visitor who wants to look deeply into a corporation and its doings.

The least interesting feature of a corporate Web site, with few exceptions, is the typical "Letter From the Chief Executive," a content-free missive, most likely written by a committee of lawyers and marketing people, that does nothing to reveal the character either of the company or its leader. Creating an impression of openness isn't the same as actually being open. Establishing a corporate weblog can change that.

What the best blogs tend to have in common is voice: They clearly have been written by human beings with genuine ideas and a passion for what they're saying...

I don't think corporate blogging is a fad. The blog brings a human voice to the enterprise. It's not just good marketing. It's good business.

from: Executive Blogging for Fun and Profit by Dan Gillmor
source: Computerworld, 2 August 2004 [emphasis mine]
via: HighBeam Research

As many of you know, Gillmor recently left the San Jose Merc to blog and speak full time in support of the ideas in his new book...

Click on the cover grafik to go to the Amazon listing. The full text is also online at the O'Reilly site. Click here for Dan's new blog.

I was pleased to find myself listed in the book's "epilogue and acknowledgments" section -- among 165 others (guy talks to lots of people). But what was I doing there? I've met Dan only once or twice, and I liked him immediately. However, I can't say (unfortunately) that I imparted any words of wisdom -- or even marginal utility -- in those brief encounters. I found the answer in chapter one, "From Tom Paine to Blogs and Beyond," where Gillmor writes:

Perhaps no document of its time was more prescient about the Web's potential than the Cluetrain Manifesto, which first appeared on the Web in April 1999. It was alternately pretentious and profound, with considerably more of the latter quality. Extending the ideas of McLuhan and many others, the four authors -- Rick Levine, Christopher Locke, Doc Searls, and David Weinberger -- struck home with me and a host of other readers who knew innately that the Net was powerful but weren't sure how to define precisely why.

"A powerful global conversation has begun," they wrote. "Through the Internet, people are discovering and inventing new ways to share relevant knowledge with blinding speed. As a direct result, markets are getting smarter -- and getting smarter faster than most companies."

They explained why the Net is changing the very nature of business. "Markets are conversations," proclaimed their first of 95 theses with elegant simplicity. Journalism is also a conversation, I realized. Cluetrain and its antecedents have become a foundation for my evolving view of the trade.

It's no coincidence, since I wrote a good deal of the thing, that Cluetrain has also been a foundation for my own evolving view of journalism, both online and off. Four years ago tonight, I was hard at work on my next book, Gonzo Marketing: Winning Though Worst Practices. I was writing about things like "micromedia"...

Because entry costs require high returns on investment, broadcast media rarely offer emergent voices a hearing. The internet reverses this trend, providing many low-cost vectors for low-scale publishing -- micromedia, as opposed to mass media. Low-budget bottom-feeder webzines don't worry much about the size of readership. With little investment at risk, the primary motive is personal gratification, seldom profit, and the style of such publishing in therefore often quirky and experimental. If there is an audience that clicks with the material, that's the market -- and it shows up via word of mouth. The process works bottom-up, by attraction, not top-down by intrusive demographic targeting...

One of the latest and most interesting additions to the suite of micromedia tools are weblogs -- simply "blogs" to the faithful. There are a lot of faithful. Blogging exploded across the non-commercial regions of the internet like a global pandemic -- the real thing, not a drummed-up marketers dream of manifesto destiny...

In 2001, when Gonzo Marketing hit the stands -- about a month after 9/11; my excuse (and a good one, I think) for why so few actually read it -- I had to explain what a weblog was. We can skip that part today. But maybe it's good to recall how blogs differed from what came before, and the liberating (dare I say empowering?) effect they've had.

At first glance, weblogs don't seem like anything new. Given a little effort, anyone with a text editor, an FTP client and a web page could put one together. But how much effort is too much? The requirement to write HTML would probably exclude most people right off the bat. Remember when URLs that came in email had to be cut and pasted into a web browser? Once it was possible to to click directly on emailed links, the web took a huge leap forward. As Malcolm Gladwell demonstrates in The Tipping Point, little things can have disproportionately large consequences. Weblogging appears to be one such wrinkle in the web today. And one thing you can count on: there will be more. Such tools will keep getting better, connecting more people entirely outside the big-media sphere of influence...

The best voices emerging via weblogs and other micromedia are forming the kernels around which new networked communities of interest will coalesce -- micromarkets in potentia. The internet has always demanded that business read between the lines. Weblogs raise the bar. Now the challenge is to read between the sites.

I also wrote quite a bit in the book about "corporate underwriting" of blogs and other micromedia. After giving an example we can safely skip over, I said:

Welcome to gonzo marketing. As with the gonzo journalism from which it takes its name, this kind of engaged participation is the exact opposite of "objectivity" that pretends to have no perspective, no point of view. Every website worth its salt is an act of journalism, news of some passionate interest and engaged advocacy. By underwriting and participating in the life and growth of such sites, corporations can forge powerful relationships with emerging micromarkets. This is a win-win, not a zero-sum model. Everyone benefits: the corporation, its workers, external site producers, and their audiences.

If you look at the top left corner of this page -- or just below, for that matter -- you'll see some very fine print that relates intimately to everything else in this post.

In the paragraph quoted just above, the "external site producer" (in this case) is me. And the audience? Well, sportsfans, that's you.

The point is that "corporate blogs" need not be corporate (i.e., suitified) in their look and feel, their point of view, or their focus of interest. Chief Blogging Officer is underwritten by HighBeam Research, but not so I can flog the service and its many advantages, and how cheap it is, and what a great value, and how many Ginsu steak knives you'll get if you Subscribe Now! No. It's so I can use the service to find out all kinds of cool stuff about the things I'm interested in right now -- research for my next  book (gods willing) -- and in the process, demonstrate the range of topics the HighBeam Research databases include. Would HighBeam like it if you got out your wallet and subscribed to the service somewhere along the way?

Of course! Seeing the value of these document sources to my own work, that's what I  did. And that -- with a few intervening proprietary fast-talking tricks -- is how I ended up writing this blog.

When HighBeam CEO Patrick Spain (far from the context-free Chief Executive Dan Gillmor broad-brushed in his Computerworld piece) first signed me up for this mission, he had no idea what I would write about. He probably wouldn't have guessed that my blogging would cover hot dogs in drag, Ted Nugent's kitchen skills, slams on Ralph Waldo Emerson, tips on where to buy Celtic Heart Knot Soap, the shocking truth about wetlands, speculation as to whether UFOs really landed in Roswell, whether conspiracy theories are theories at all, and the most important question of all: Who says blogging has to be about  something?

Forget "corporate blogging" as whatever those words have brought to mind to date. Think instead...