Set organisational bloggers free....

Fantastic post from Jeff Jarvis demonstrating that while more and more organisations are understanding the intrinsic benefits of blogging they aren’t understanding the instrumental benefits. 

Jarvis applies his argument to newspapers – an ideal industry to generate significant numbers of corporate bloggers – and suggests that while newspapers are rapidly adopting blogging as a communication channel they are burying their bloggers deep inside the website hidden under layers of ’proper’ content and unmemorable URLs.

The solution, says Jarvis, is to serve up newspaper bloggers as individual units of blog content and connect them to the newspaper’s main site as part of it network. So, to use Jarvis’s idea floated earlier this year: have the newspaper homepage as a hub for loads of really useful, interesting and timely networked content. 

As Jarvis puts it:

“Architecturally, this returns to the idea that news sites shouldn’t be sites at all but larger, looser networks and not just of stuff they make but also — who can afford to make it all — stuff others make. It also points to the problem of presuming that sites can and should still consider themselves destinations; this, I argued, is one of the lessons of the death of Timesselect.”

By doing this the newspapers can reap the rewards:

• lots of blogs at lots of addresses means lots of people creating lots of brands – all for the newspaper
• An element of separation between blogger and newspaper makes it easier to write content with a human voice, not “the cold voice of the institution”
• The only way for these bloggers to spread and grow is to join in and link to other conversations 

In Jarvis’s own words:

“We are seeing the links and the voice. But the architecture remains a problem … The blogs may be getting more plentiful and they are getting better. But now they’re ready to move out of the house and find homes of their own.”

Now apply this thinking to corporate or organizational blogs. All too often the in-house marketing manager or PR agency wants a blog to tell the firm’s story to the world. They will hopefully understand the intrinsic principles, but what about the instrumental – or ‘architectural’ – principles?

Technorati tags: Jeff Jarvis, Newspapers, corporate+blogging, networks