Lights and Wires in a Blog

"This just might do nobody any good. At the end of this discourse a few people may accuse this reporter of fouling his own comfortable nest, and your organization may be accused of having given hospitality to heretical and even dangerous thoughts."

These are Edward R. Murrow's lines from his speech at the RTNDA Convention Chicago, Illinois October 15, 1958. As I read the speech a thought pounced on me: 'If Murrow were around today would CBS have offered him space in the blogosphere?' Would they let him have an RSS feed titled 'Blog It Now'?

So what does a corporate blog do for a company? Is it about capitalizing on the opportunity for employees to speak directly to the customer or is it about appearing higher in search engine rankings, personalizing the company and giving it a human face?

If corporate blogs are about keeping an ear to the ground and hearing what's going on in the blogosphere. Does censorship find place in the corporate blog? Mark Jen nods his head violently on hearing that line. (Mark lost his job at Google for something he wrote on his blog.) Technorati executives have asked their employees to have their weblog posts reviewed by staff members before posting. To suppress blog posts from employees and having grass-root corporate conversations vetted through a marketing mouthpiece is more than likely to discourage bloggers from writing.

Blogs allow for some soul-baring and straight talking. They are fun to read because the writing has a gossipy flavor. You can make blasphemous prophecies and get away with it. When a boardroom blogger tries blogging that's like when your grandmother starts saying "O-Snap!"

Does having corporate guidelines, securities and disclosure rules, and prominently displaying disclaimers on blogs make this new found internal communication strategy more trouble than its worth. Or will more companies jump on this bandwagon since its interactive and cheap to deploy.

How does the public sector and not-for-profit sector deploy this technology in enhancing their operations? Will we ever get to hear what makes the public servant blogger’s blood boil and what upsets them? Will actual voices ever be heard from behind the corporate wind bagging and mechanical PR? How will criticisms and rumors be dealt with? Does our charter of rights and freedoms guarantee blogging as one of the freedoms?

In the words of Edward R. Murrow, “This instrument can teach, it can illuminate; yes, and it can even inspire. But it can do so only to the extent that humans are determined to use it to those ends. Otherwise it is merely wires and lights in a box. There is a great and perhaps decisive battle to be fought against ignorance, intolerance and indifference.”

This weapon of blogs could be useful.