Every once in a blue moon I like to go for online visits to companies with which I am familiar. In some cases, such as this one, it's a company I know because they fired me once. That's OK, by the way. I figure if I'm not getting fired every so often, I'm not pushing the envelope. Plus, I'm not perfect. This is a good company and they make a good product. I like the CEO. The team there works hard and they do a lot of things right… but their blog isn't a good example of that. Take a look.

Six or so posts since November of 2006, with the last one being on December 26, 2006. Have they not had any news since then? Of course they have. Instead what this illustrates is that corporate blog provisioning is almost impossible for corporate executives to sustain when they have other things to do. Two, finding less senior corporate bloggers with time and who know enough and can write is very, very difficult. Blogs need champions, too, because in the end, blogging can be profoundly tedious and time-consuming. It can be discouraging as well, especially in the early period. Blogging in obscurity can be discouraging. And in today's online world, I think we're losing our patience for things that take time to evolve. We want instant on.

The result of this, of course, is that the company makes itself look not so hot by leaving this link up on its website and letting it go to seed. Better to take it down. Better still not to have started it in the first place until a plan was in hand to sustain its presence and velocity. It reminds me of the old days when corporate newsletters would be launched to great fanfare only to lapse after one or two issues.

The unfortunate part about all this for people like me who advocate for blogs among a skeptical corporate audience is that examples like this sustain the position that blogs are not useful… that they don't work. That's true if the blog isn't worked, of course. It's not true when the blog is sustained with a routine diet of coversationally-rich, community-driven news, views and information. Over time audiences build, subscribers sign up, comments happen, and the media may from time to time take a look inside, too.

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Nice short headline, don't you think?

But here from Jason Burby is a nice, neat and compact overview on ClickZ of what he's learned recently about corporate attitudes toward social media initiatives in a series of meetings with marketing/agency types in five cities across America. I think he makes some very valid, very reasoned points that help put this whole thing into reasonable perspective. Jason Burby, by the way, is the Chief Analytics and Optimization Officer for ZAAZ, a Web business consultancy implementing data-driven business initiatives for long-term clients across the U.S.

His concluding point struck me as very appropriate:

Marketing executives see the value of understanding visitor behaviors and are beginning to embrace the opportunities. But they're also realizing online success involves much more than just buying tools and trying to work them into the regular Web update cycle. They're beginning to understand they need to change their organizations, how they make decisions, how they share data, and more.

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