Understandably enough, IT companies are represented heavily in the short list of 40 Fortune 500 companies that blog. Joining them, Intel launched its own official blog last week, IT@Intel.
Like Dell and EDS, it has gone for a group blog with a number of authors. Other companies like Sun and Boeing have a senior executive in charge of the official blog, while the third approach, taken by companies like Microsoft and HP, is to have larger numbers of blogs from many product teams. My understanding is that Intel plans to introduce or make public other blogs over time.
As a reader, which is my only expertise in this matter, I tend to prefer single-author blogs. You get a sense of the personality behind the posts, their interests, enthusiasms and tics. There’s a sense in which you feel that you’ve got a relationship with the blogger. Team blogs can give the impression that you’re dealing with an institution rather than with people. From what I understand of blog writing, that’s true from the other side too. If it’s a solo affair, you start to develop a unique voice; you get to know your regulars; you start to work out what people are interested in that you can write about; and you start to really care about catering for your readership.
But Intel is doing a very good job so far, and know what they’re doing. Marty Menard, director for high performance computing, explains that their thinking was to create a convocation, “a group of people formally assembled for a special purpose”. If a single-author blog is analogous to going to dinner at their house, then the Intel blog is more like a seminar.
That’s not to say it’s delivered like a series of lectures. While they’re (rightly) trying to share what they do know, there’s an encouraging degree of humility, fragility and an avowed desire to learn. Marty Menard writes:
The intent of this blog and our writers is to create discussion; we intend to share what we know; and finally learn from others.
Jeff Moriarty, a Program Manager in the Enterprise Collaboration & Engineer group, says:
I’ll be honest, I’m worried about these blogs being able to succeed. I’ve worked on many official IT@Intel briefs and white papers, and the process of authoring these things and taking them through legal, and political review is not for the faint of heart. Everything must be squeaky clean and very precisely aligned. These blogs are a much more open avenue of communication, and do not quite agree with some of the more conservative aspects of Intel’s nature. Some people inside Intel flat out don’t “get blogsâ€, and like the idea at all. That’s where I smelled a challenge, and I was hooked.
In spite of this, or perhaps in defiance of it, the Intel blog welcomes comments and responds to them, also publishing excerpts from them in the sidebar. They also have a blogroll, and though I’m not on it yet, there are controversialists who are, not just corporate sites.
The big advantage of a group blog is that the quality level of contributions can be higher, as can their volume. Instead of one person racking their brains to come up with something worth saying, you’ve (hopefully) got a queue of people lined up to give their best thoughts. Intel certainly seem to be delivering this with posts on Measuring the Business Value of Information Technology and a series of posts about information overload, together with free downloads.
There are other advantages to a group blog, to do with costs and risks. People can do it as well as their normal work. So far as I can tell, all the contributors to the Intel blog also have day jobs. It also changes the way the company is represented. CEO blogs can be absolutely fascinating and develop a great following, but what happens when the CEO moves on or gets canned? A cult of personality around a charismatic leader is very powerful, but also a tad risky. You can see, for example, the wisdom of HP not using its board members as its blogging face.
Compared to the multiple blogs idea, too, there’s also less risk on legal and political levels. Everything published can be quite carefully monitored. That’s something that will be pretty high on Intel’s agenda, unless it has changed a great deal over the last couple of years – perhaps Jeff Moriarty was testing the limits of that with his words.
Good article on blogging. I agree with you in your statement, “You get a sense of the personality behind the posts…”
One problem with the “gang” approach is that you, as a reader/commentor, have this feeling of interacting with a black hole.
It’s impersonal but also frustrating because you don’t know if you are wasting your time.
More like a magazine than a log. As I say, though, I don’t think Intel have done a bad job at all, and for larger businesses the approach makes a lot of sense.
[...] Along with maverick, Jeff Moriarty, you’ll find Martin Curley, Marty Menard, Nathan Zeldes and Davis Sward. Of the 5, 2 have been with Intel since the 80s and 2 are published authors. Their bios are actually fascinating. The fact that they are writing a team blog seems to be a negative factor to some, but for the most part I’m happy to see a team blog. Any of these Intel geeks would have been a fine blog author, but together they’ll present a balanced look at Intel. [...]