Seven Rules of Corporate Blogging, by Nicholas Carr

Nicholas Carr hits the nail on the head with his Seven Rules of Corporate Blogging ... and he doesn't hold back with regard to some dos and don'ts around corporate blogging. I have quite a bit of first-hand experience with setting up enterprise blogging programs. We have 15 bloggers now at http://talk.bmc.com. Traffic is building and awareness of BMC.com is growing steadily as a result.

But back to Carr's article.

Robert Scoble, the dedicated, persistant and most well-known blogger for Microsoft, runs into some choppy waters while responding to comments on his blog about the delay of Vista - the next OS from Microsoft now planned for early 2007. Nicholas uses this situation as backdrop for some of the points he makes on corporate blogging.

Here is how Nicholas starts out:

Microsoft's Robert Scoble, who cowrote a book on corporate blogging called Naked Conversations, now seems intent on turning himself into a case study for why companies shouldn't blog. The posts on his company-sponsored blog, Scobleizer, have become increasingly shrill and antagonistic of late. He recently implied that bloggers who run AdSense ads are incapable of writing objectively about Google, and last week he launched an ad hominem attack on journalists he disapproves of - using terms like "100% incompetent" and "jerk" - and pedantically lectured the blogosphere on how to tell "credible journalism" from "non-credible journalism."

Microsoft has spent the last couple of years trying hard to rid itself of its image as a corporate bully. Now it has a bully in the blogosphere. That's not good.

With the Scoble case in mind, let me offer seven simple and unfashionable rules for corporate blogging. I don't know how credible they are, since they reflect my own personal opinions, but I'll let you make that judgment.

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Note: Scoble apologizes in the Comments. I can imagine it's not easy being so visible in the blogosphere. I have a lot of admiration for Robert, regardless of what happened.

Tom