Blogs. "Do they really work?" "Does anyone care?" "We already have a website." "The management team isn't sold on it." These and many other statements like them are the routine reasons I hear why corporations remain myopic about social media options. They think blogs serve a fringe element or that their potential online audience would be too small. That, at least, is what they say.What they actually think may be an entirely different matter.

So if I asked you how many people in the world would want to go online to read a blog written by an executive at a manufacturer of commercial airplanes, what would you say? Would you advise an organization like Boeing Commercial Airplanes to blog?

First, check it out. Boeing does have a blog. It is a tremendous blog. It is now in it's second generation, having just transitioned from an executive named Randy Baseler who used to write it, to an executive named Randy Tinseth who has replaced the former blogger. Wander around it, read some, and if you can come away thinking this blog isn't important to Boeing or to its readers, well… I'll stop hounding you because you're not likely to ever convert.

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I'm wondering if any corporation has the courage to try an approach to blogging I am about to describe below? Given that many corporate blogs are now, or in the future will be, only marginally successful, I've been contemplating a way to keep the whole corporate social media experiment from failing. I've tentatively called this the Ombudsblog. Here's the basic idea:

In return for a one-year non-renewable employee contract, an individual with exceptional writing ability and blog experience, is hired to own and operate the corporate blog, posting in his or her own name on behalf of the company, and saying anything he or she wishes and, as a key part of the deal, may attend any meeting, visit any facility, converse with any employee.

Some more specific terms and implications of this fantasy business blog vision: The blogger can be fired but will be paid in full for the term of the contract. The blogger has no expectation that being biased in any way will gain him or her long-term employment stability because it is a one-year-only deal and so there's no incentive to be anything but fair and balanced. The blogger must adhere to corporate policies relating to confidentiality and all the usual standards. For three years after the one-year deal, the bloger may not work for a competitive entity.Readers of a blog of this variety would likely see it as a credible site versus the many corporate blogs being written today by folks who worry about their job security and, to be honest, can't in the main hardly write a lick.

I fear that without some remedy or approach such as this, traditional corporate communicators of the old school will continue to contort and corrupt the blog concept to create little more than daily website-like updates of the party line du jour again and again, over and over. No edge, no conversation, little or no credibility… zero value. That outcome, of course, ultimately taints and weakens the blogosphere in the aggregate.

Bad idea? Let me hear from you if you have a strong opinion either way.

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