Ed Garsten, editorial director of DaimlerChrysler’s media-only blog – TheFirehouse.biz provided an interview to me as part of Diva Marketing’s Biz Blog Profile Series.
Ed explained the strategy and gave his views about blogging and the
impact of the internet. Our interview is one of only two that Ed has
given about Firehouse.biz. The other was with Debbie Weil.

For those who might have missed the the story, recently TheFirehouse.biz blog created some buzz in the blogosphere when word got out that it was open only to the media. Industry analysts have since been invited.

What did this Fortune 100 company do?  They took it in stride and
never proactively participated in the conversation. It seemed odd to me
that they didn’t tell their own story. However, from their research,
they knew the blog was being embraced by their target readers who were "grateful for the opportunity to communicate in a closed environment." As Ed said, "Does Ski Magazine care about what non skiers think about it?"

"Blogging is still an evolving medium that different constituencies
will begin to use in ways that make sense to them. We’re not about
exclusivity or secrecy. We’re about communicating with a certain subset
of people and aiming our content toward them with ‘Firehouse.’ " Ed Garsten

So the what if the some pundits of the blogopshere are tied up in
knots about a closed community blog. Althought barely a month old, it
was launched September 12th, the company views TheFirehouse.biz as a
success. It has become an important media relationship strategy.
According to Ed, DaimlerChrysler considers the blog  "…another means
of
spreading our message
while affording reporters an opportunity to post their feedback on
issues, events, products, etc."

One thing for sure Ed gets it when he says, "We’re involved in the most explosive form of communication to
come along in at least a decade and there’s no reason its growth and
potential should be reined in by artificial limits. It’s called
progress."

Yeah, the Chrysler Media Group made a few blunders in the launch;
however, for the most part, their strategy was well thought out and
researched. They understood what their target audience wanted and
delivered it. Sure there are growing pains, but it’s a new medium and
we’re all still learning. Heck…we can’t even agree on how to define a business blog!

Here’s the back-story about the Chrysler Group Media Blog, The Firehouse.biz, direct from "mysource" at Chrysler who has asked to remain anonymous.

Chrysler’s business strategy was to create a blog to support their on-line "press only" site. As mysource pointed out, "press only" sites are common practice within the automotive industry. I must admit, I had no clue about that one and it seemed odd to me.

However, I did a few Google searches and found some "press only" sites from a few of the big guns in the auto biz. The language says loud and clear KEEP OUT. And we wonder why so many
dealerships stink at customer service. Must be a culture thing.

Toyota: You have entered a section of The Pressroom that requires a user name
and password. Some sections of this site are reserved for use by
members of the print, broadcast or electronic media.

Ford:
(Supporting information is required to obtain media access)

Honda:

If you are not a journalist, your application will not be approved.
Please do not fill out this form unless you are a journalist. All
applications will be verified prior to approval.

When I asked "mysource" why Chrysler didn’t jump in on the
blogosphere conversation and explain their position he assured me that
someone who had access to their blog was sure to do that. I didn’t get
this one either. Why would you want to depend
on the kindness of reporters when you have the opportunity to speak for
yourself?

"Mysource" was right. BlogWorks and Adrants
and picked up the post written by Jason Vines, vp of communications at
Chrysler and added their own spin. Be it good..bad..or indifferent.
That the point is Chrysler missed a chance to participate in the
discussion – to tell their story in their way.

Now I don’t have a real problem, as some might, with closed blogs.
What frustrated me was completing an application, in good faith, to
gain access to the blog and then being told I wasn’t part of the
in-crowd.

From my point, the entrance page doesn’t tell you that the blog is for the media
only. I assumed that the name the  "Chrysler Group Media Blog" referred
to a multi author blog written by the media group. [Cool, thought I.
Some PR folks who are getting it.]

"Mysource" agreed that might
be a valid point and would take it up the food chain. Seems to me all
this could have been avoided if Chrysler had simply put access to the
blog within their "press only" site. But then again…they wouldn’t
have the buzzzz.

Lessons Learned: If you have a closed blog keep don’t make the entrance page public.

Chrysler welcome to the blogosphere!

Chrysler has launched a blog for the working press. Can’t help but wonder what are behind those firewalls that can’t be let out to Chryslers’ customers. If any bonafide ‘working press’ people register would love your take on the new blog.

Thanks for your interest in TheFirehouse.biz, the Chrysler Group’s
media-only blog.  We will issue media registration rights to members of
the working press only.  A member of the working press is one who is
paid as an employee,freelancer who regularly contributes, or
representative of a known and established media organization
(newspaper, magazine, television, radio, etc.) If you would like to
resubmit your registration, we would be happy to reconsider it.

Gartner released yesterday its 2005 Hype Cycle for Emerging Technologies. The research firm has pegged Corporate Blogging and RSS as being two years away from mainstream adoption. For now, both are tumbling into Gartner’s Trough of Disillusionment (along with wikis and desktop search) as a result of too much media buzz. If you believe Gartner, Corporate Blogging is already sooo… last year (2004).

They’ve got a point. The media rumble about Corporate Blogging is almost deafening by now. It’s not a “new” story anymore. Which is not to say that blogging isn’t still a “new” thing to many companies.

At any rate, the five stages of hype make a lot of sense. It works something like this: new technologies get overhyped in the beginning; then they go out of favor; eventually they mature and are adopted by the mainstream but by that time they’re no longer news.

The five stages are: Technology Trigger, Peak of Expectations, Trough of Disillusionment, Slope of Enlightenment and Plateau of Productivity. Oh, and podcasting is on the upswing, according to Gartner. It’s sliding up the Peak of Expectations. That sounds about right, doesn’t it?

The way I understand it, the hype cycle is measuring the buzz as well as the adoption rate. It
doesn’t necessarily correspond to the long-term utility – or success –
of a phenomenon like Corporate Blogging. Only time will tell.

Read more about Corporate Blogging’s downward slide into the Trough of Disillusionment…

Great tidbit just now from Boeing Web designer Chris Brownrigg on why Boeing’s much talked about blog is called Randy’s Journal: “Because they (management) were uncomfortable with the term blog.” Chris wisely got around that decision by giving the blog the following page title: “Boeing Blog: Randy’s Journal.” Better for search results when you type in “Boeing blog.” Take a look when you click through.

The (dreaded… or anticipated) blogging phone call

Chris was given 48 hours to design and launch the blog for Boeing VP Randy Baseler after getting “the blogging phone call.” Audience members nodded at this. Seems both managers and techies are getting “the call” from top management to “get into this blog thing.” Uninitiated into the ways of the blogosphere, he dove into the project by looking at the code behind lots of other blogs. He settled on Movable Type as the software platform. Posted a mock-up of the proposed blog here. Comments and other blog features were subsequently added after readers protested.

I love this inside glimpse of how a corporate blog gets launched… shows how it’s very much a joint effort between management and the Web techies.

Decent article about blogvertising. I was interviewed at length but didn’t get quoted. Oh well. Features the usual cast of characters: Denton, Calacanis, Copeland.

Just had a call with Todd S. (are last names important?), and he was aggrieved by the last paragraph of this piece:

For now, many big companies are sitting on the
sidelines. "We’re in a wait-and-see mode," says Stuart Bogaty, senior
partner and managing director of mOne Worldwide, a digital ad agency
that is part of WPP
Group. He thinks that companies will remain skittish until agencies can
better monitor and control what individual bloggers are saying about
them. On the other hand, that might undercut their renegade appeal. "If
we were able to convince a blogger to do that," he notes, "it would
reduce the value of his blog in general."

The link above allows free access to the story for a week, so read it while the reading is good.

WSJ: Many Advertisers Find Blogging Frontier Is Still Too Wild

Communication consultant Debbie Weil dings the executive bloggers at Boeing and GM for neglecting to comment on recent big negative news about their companies (CEO resigning in sex scandal and major drop in earnings forecast respectively).

She’s got a good point. It’s also probably the kind of scenario that freaks out most companies about blogging. But, as she points out, if you’ve got it, you might as well flaunt it (i.e., you’ve earned positive credibility with an audience of readers through these blogs, so you may was well use the channel to advance a positive interpretation of such bad news rather than ignore the elephant in the room).

Debbie Weil: GM & Boeing: Corporate “Tell-It-Not” Blogs

Deb Weil points out that HP has several blogs, including those of executives Rich Marcello, SVP & GM of Business Critical Servers, HP and Dan Socci, VP of HP Services, Technology Services Marketing.

Link

Launched in February, a decent example of a blog (comments, bylined posts, XML feeds, etc.). I just don’t like the use of frames. I also don’t see permalinks.
Powered by Blojsom.

Link

A colleague asked me what percentage of Fortune 500 companies are blogging. Interesting, though I don’t know. (Let’s presume we’re talking about just public blogs, and real blogs, not faux blogs or intranet blogs.) I guessed somewhere in the 3-6% range currently. Unfortunately, the Fortune 500 list is now a premium feature of Fortune.com, so I’m doing a simple gut-check on what firms make the list at this point. But here’s a short list off the top of my head:

• GM
• Sun Microsystems
• Microsoft
• Google
• Yahoo!
• Boeing

That’s 1.2% right there, but I haven’t really thought too hard about it yet. Who am I missing?

UPDATE:
I’m not sure Google and Yahoo! are technically 2004 Fortune 500 (I’m working on finding a friend with a login so I can check), but if not they miss it by a hair’s breadth, given each of their $3+ billion in revenue last year.

Reader John Ridings points out that Cisco also has a blog.

Jeremy Wright adds a post on his blog of all the F500 companies he knows of with internal blogs, which is naturally a lot longer than this one of public blogs.

Steve Rubel suggests taking those and making a stock index out of them, which he bets would track better than the S&P 500.

Debbie Weil points out that HP also has several blogs.

http://devresource.hp.com/blogs/index.jsp

Big geek, little geek:
Gizmodo editor Joel Johnson with
Bill ‘G-money’ Gates

Another sign of the times and validation for how seriously some businesses take blogs. Major score for Gawker Media’s Gizmodo: Microsoft approached them about an interview with G-Money himself, Bill Gates.  Much of the conversation in this first-installment of the serialized interview is about blogs and RSS. Big congrats to my man Joel Johnson, Gizmodo’s editor. (I bet Pete Rojas is just sick over this!)

Gizmodo: Bill Gates Interview

Ka-boom! This is a biggie in the world of business blogs. Bob Lutz, Vice Chairman of General Motors, is the blogger. Whoa. Props to Steve Hall of Adrants, where I first saw the link. He wrote something more thoughtful: read that.

This on the heels of GM’s Smallblock Engine blog.

Link

Continuing to show its fascination with blogs, Microsoft has just released a new blog publishing system of its own.

Any reviews out there yet?

UPDATE:
As one commenter notes, bOingbOing has a funny/disturbing post on about how MSN is censoring authors’ ability to use dirty words in the titles of their blogs. Other reviews also noted in comments below.

ANOTHER UPDATE:
Further details from PaidContent, AP and a press release.

CALL TO ACTION:
Anyone want to review this platform for me for $25? (If so, see review terms here first.)

Link

Continuing to demonstrate that it understands and values blogs, Microsoft has launched a blog to complement its new search service.

Link

This is big: the biggest car company in the world now has a blog. Coming on the heals of Mazda’s boneheaded faux-blog embarrassment, GM shows the way for companies to blog right: transparent, honest blog about cars clearly coming from GM. I would appreciate a mission statement or About This Blog kind of page somewhere (I admit, as someone who hasn’t owned a car in 20 years, I don’t know what a "smallblock engine" is exactly, and I don’t know who Ed Koerner, the site’s main blogger, is either), but it’s a pretty good start for such a huge firm. Stay tuned.

Link

Not to be outdone by Google’s blog, Yahoo just launched its own blog. The first post, a bit of self-congratulations about how great Yahoo’s search is, was written by Jeff Weiner, SVP of Yahoo! Search & Marketplace. From the sound of it, however, others will also join in the blogging:

Be sure to check back here for news about new product introductions, updates and exclusive betas.

In addition, this blog is designed to provide a window into what our team is thinking and doing, in their own words (and maybe some guest bloggers as well).

Above all else we hope this blog enables you to share our excitement for the search industry and what the future holds. 

Powered by Movable Type. Funny that they wouldn’t use Blogger, as it’s free

😉 

Comments are turned on and filling up fast.

ClickZ offers additional perspective.

Link

Jonathan Schwartz

Jonathan Schwartz was appointed president and CEO [make that COO; d’ho!] of Sun Microsystems just this past April, and by June the 38-year-old, ponytailed executive started a blog.

Bill Gates, take note.

Link

If you’re still on the fence about the power of blogs in business, our cause has a new advocate: Bill Gates. At the recent Microsoft CEO Summit 2004, a conference for CEOs, Gates raved about blogs and product-oriented communities, two related trends I’ll be talking about later today at AdTech. Thank you, Bill, you just made my presentation! Read the complete speech in the link above or read the BBC’s assessment of the key points on blogs, or just read the pertinent section of the speech excerpted without permission here:

Another new phenomenon that connects into this is one that started outside of the business space, more in the corporate or technical enthusiast space, a thing called blogging. And a standard around that that notifies you that something has changed called RSS.

This is a very interesting thing, because whenever you want to send e-mail you always have to sit there and think who do I copy on this. There might be people who might be interested in it or might feel like if it gets forwarded to them they’ll wonder why I didn’t put their name on it. But, then again, I don’t want to interrupt them or make them think this is some deeply profound thing that I’m saying, but they might want to know. And so, you have a tough time deciding how broadly to send it out.

Then again, if you just put information on a Web site, then people don’t know to come visit that Web site, and it’s very painful to keep visiting somebody’s Web site and it never changes. It’s very typical that a lot of the Web sites you go to that are personal in nature just eventually go completely stale and you waste time looking at it.

And so, what blogging and these notifications are about is that you make it very easy to write something that you can think of, like an e-mail, but it goes up onto a Web site. And then people who care about that get a little notification. And so, for example, if you care about dozens of people whenever they write about a certain topic, you can have that notification come into your Inbox and it will be in a different folder and so only when you’re interested in browsing about that topic do you go in and follow those, and it doesn’t interfere with your normal Inbox.

And so if I do a trip report, say, and put that in a blog format, then all the employees at Microsoft who really want to look at that and who have keywords that connect to it or even people outside, they can find the information.

And so, getting away from the drawbacks of e-mail — that it’s too imposing — and yet the drawbacks of the Web site — that you don’t know if there’s something new and interesting there — this is about solving that.

The ultimate idea is that you should get the information you want when you want it, and we’re progressively getting better and better at that by watching your behavior, ranking things in different ways.

Another big phenomenon is building communities around Web sites, around products. And virtually every company ought to have on their Web site the ability for their customers, their suppliers, various people, to interact and their employees to see the dialogue taking place there and jump in and talk to them and help them.

The idea of these communities making these things fun, how you make sure nobody dominates the community or invades the community, a lot of progress there that make those things important. Built into every one of our products now are connections back to the community, a thing called Office Online, or Visual Studio, our development tools have the developers online, that’s called MSDN. And we learn so much about what people are doing or what they want from that and we literally require our employees to engage in those communities so they’re up there and visible and getting that direct exposure not through statistics but through particular customer dialogue.

Information visibility. This is one that we often talk about, because our view is what’s being done in terms of insight in information is so small compared to what can be done and what should be done — seeing trends in customers, seeing quality type issues, tracking those, even the most basic things around budgeting, forecasting, sales analysis — getting it so somebody can take form the back-end systems that have the information in a very complex form necessarily and navigate that and bring that into their ad hoc tools, typically Microsoft Excel, and play around with it and yet still be connected to the updates and not run any issues about is it secure enough that they’ll let you get at that information, that’s been a big challenge. Steve will talk about a few cases where I think we’ve really got some best practices here in terms of insight into the information.

My only question is, where’s Bill’s blog?

Microsoft.com: Remarks by Bill Gates…Microsoft CEO Summit 2004

Well, ever since we spotted the trial blog at Google a few weeks ago, we knew this was inevitable. The Google Blog was born on May 10th. Disappointing there hasn’t been a new post yet today — seems like they’d have a lot to talk about, but I wonder whether it will end up being a more occasional blog, like Blogger’s own blog. Another peculiarity of the blog seems to be that there is no obvious author. The first post (see below) is from Evan Williams, appropriately enough, creator of blog software tool Blogger.com, which Google acquired last year. But we know this only because he signed the post within the body of the post. The footer information about each post does not contain an author identification, so the second post is anonymous.

Here’s Evan’s first post to the new Google blog:

Ever since I came to Google, they’ve been talking about putting up an official Google blog. And now, less than 15 months later, voil√†.

Oh well, it’s not like we own a recently relaunched service where you can create a blog in two minutes or something. Okay, we do. (Sorry for the plug.) But I guess other Googlers have been a little busy what with all the searching. And the advertising. And filling out purchase orders for all those hard drives.

Anyway, I’m excited the blog’s up. We’re going to post stuff here – regular bloggy things: What Larry had for breakfast. What Sergey thinks of that Hellboy movie. Which Dawson’s Creek character reminds us most of Eric.

And perhaps, news about Google, and our thoughts on whatever random events cross our horizon.

Oh, and we have email feedback too. So we hope to hear from you, as well.

– Evan Williams

(Blogger Program Manager, Google)

ClickZ makes this pertinent observation:

Interestingly, the launch comes as Google is preparing for an initial public offering of stock, during the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) "quiet period" in which companies usually refrain from making public statements that could be interpreted as an offer to sell stock.

CNET’s New.com is already nit-picking at Google’s blog for having discretely edited a post to tone down potentially controversial comments about outsourcing. It’s clear that this blog will remain under a magnifying glass for some time to come, at least through Google’s IPO.

Link

Tim Bray

Along with Microsoft’s Robert Scoble as well as the team from Macromedia, Tim Bray is one of the highest profile bloggers in the tech community, both for the quality of his commentary and the size of the organization he works for: Sun Microsystems, where his title is technology director. Bray, who has been blogging for a few years, just joined Sun two months ago (as of this post). He is a long-time Internet technology pioneer, having co-created XML and previously ran Antarctica, a maker of business intelligence visualization software.

Like many prominent bloggers with prominent jobs, Bray disclaims on his blog, "The opinions expressed here are my own, and neither Sun nor any other party necessarily agrees with them." At the same time, however, he recently helped craft the Sun Policy on Public Discourse, which, in fact, lives on Bray’s blog.

Link