Hewlett Packard Blogs

Some months ago I was at a going away party for a friend and bumped into David Gee, Hewlett Packard's Vice President of Marketing for their worldwide software division. David and I got to talking about blogging as a marketing tool and about the various corporate bloggers out there spreading the gospel for their respective companies. As David knew, I am a big advocate of blogging as a tool for communicating directly with your customers and he certainly appreciated the power of that direct communications channel. Within a few weeks of our conversation, David had a number of his key managers and technologists up and blogging.

A short time after the HP Blogs got up and running, David invited me to the HP campus to talk with a number of other marketing folks about the blogsphere. The conversation was an interesting one in which, among other things, I showed them all of the ways in which I track who is reading, linking to and commenting upon VentureBlog (e.g. Movable Type, FeedBurner, Bloglines, Technorati, etc.). We also spent some time talking about the things that I thought made company blogs either successful or not.

As I shared with the folks at HP, if there is one thing that I think is the hallmark of a successful corporate blog, it is the willingness of the corporate blogger to speaking candidly about the good and bad of his or her company and that corporation's commitment to allowing such a conversation without fear of repercussion. Needless to say, such candor is a scary thing for many corporations; but, without it, corporate blogging becomes nothing more than company slideware. I urged the folks at HP to take some risks and encourage their bloggers to speak their minds.

HP's bloggers are starting to do just that. In a recent post by Rich Marcello, HP's SVP of Business Critical Servers, Rich comments on the departure of Carly Fiorina. Rich praises Carly for her incredible leadership and communication skills. But he concludes, "What's true is that we made a great deal of progress toward realizing our strategy over the last several years; we also have more work to do that couldn't be executed without a leadership change." Interesting stuff to be reading from one of HP's Senior Vice Presidents. I hope that Rich and others over at Hewlett Packard will continue to speak openly about their business -- it is the only thing that will make the HP Blogs a must read for their customers and partners alike.

Comments

[ateet]

Hey David,

I agree with your comments about Corporate blogging but do you think that corporate bloggers can speak freely about the company in a blog, specially after cases like firing of Mark Jen from google. Google is perceived as a company with very open culture, if they could not handle it, how do you think really big bureaucratic organizations will.

-Ateet

[phipsi]

You speak about encouraging corporate bloggers to speak their minds? Is that what companies really want, if corporate blogging is intended as a marketing tool? Surely what management wants is for bloggers to write about good stuff happening in the company, with occasional remarks about what's bad - the latter being tolerated purely because they give an impression of candor. Truth is seldom valued by companies, other than the "truth" that they would have customers believe. - Phipsi

[jonathanruff]

The reality is, by the time employees are blogging about bad things going on within the company, customers already know about it in one way or another. Silencing negative blog posts that are pointing out problems is the equivalent of sweeping problems under the rug. If you have to really fear what employees write (such that they're not going to primarily write positively), it implies there's something broken with the company and culture.

Having an open blogging policy creates a line in the sand, where companies can't hide from problems for long; it forces them to deal with reality, sooner than later. Good companies will use it to become better.

Plus, they're going to blog anyway. It's either going to be anonymous & shady, which casts a really bad light on the company, or it can be out in the open and used in a positive fashion.

[Ivan]

I like the notion of a company having an open policy for employee blogging. While I agree that corporate blogs will always contain content intended to benefit the company, that does not necessarily mean every bit of information will be positive. The more effective blogs will establish credibility via candor -- thereby differentiating themselves from standard marketing spin. This will achieve the type of customer relationship building that companies are trying to achieve via blogs in the first place. One other observation -- the HP blogs do not appear to allow for public comments. If this is the case, the customer relationship building and communication is a bit one-sided.

[bill]

Blog business.has huge potential market in China. What you think of China market.

I am looking for venture capital and partner for China blog business.

bill

http://foresight.blogbus.com

[tlurquin]

Interesting development at HP but hardly a novelty among major tech players - Microsoft has been on the ball for a while (see: http://scoble.weblogs.com/) and SunW as well (see: http://blogs.sun.com/jonathan). Also, the debate about corporate blogs was laid out elegantly in The Economist Magazine (Feb 10th, 2005) - "Chief humanising officer" (see: http://www.economist.com - need subscription to view article).

[IanHarkins]

www.b2bmarketingpodcast.com have an interview 003 I believe, with Ingrid Van Den Hoogen of Sun Microsystems. She talks extensively about employee blogging and Sun's very open (and what seems like a very sensible) policy on it, where they trust their employees and that trust has not been betrayed.

[IanHarkins]

www.b2bmarketingpodcast.com have an interview 003 I believe, with Ingrid Van Den Hoogen of Sun Microsystems. She talks extensively about employee blogging and Sun's very open (and what seems like a very sensible) policy on it, where they trust their employees and that trust has not been betrayed.

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This will be great for brand advertisers, as they will be able to reap the rewards of all the equity they have built up. Many policies (including the new Google trademark policy) work in favor of affiliates and resellers, while this goes back to Google roots and is benefiting the user experience and connecting them directly with the brand they are looking for.

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