Debbie Weil: An executive communicator’s guide to corporate blogging

Following my quick experiment in ‘Live Blogging’ during Debbie’s afternoon seminar this post is a summary of the rest of her material.

If there’s one thing more up in the air than the future of corporate blogging, it’s the role of the communicator in supporting corporate blogs. Debbie Weil has forged a sophisticated vision for how organizational leaders can and should participate in the blogosphere—and how their speechwriters can (and can’t) help.

The session promised to share information on:

Along the way, you’ll see examples of leadership blogs, and learn from the best (and the worst) in the business. You’ll leave this session not only knowing how to create a leadership blog but how to create a whole blog strategy for your organization.

Debbie pays the mortgage by consulting with organizations on blogging. She works with CEOs as an executive blogging coach and writes a blog of her own, Blog Write for CEOs.com

A quick survey of the 250 attendees at the Conference showed that 88% of the companies represented are not publishing blogs and 69% not considering publishing blogs. Indifference? Opportunity!

Debbie first explained some of the basics to the dozen or so attendees. Not surprisingly, many of them were in the dark about much of this. Back in 1990 many people did not have email addresses. What a difference a decade made. Look for a similar sea change in blogging, says I.

Making Sense of Social Media

These defeat the silos found in federal government and other big corporations, allowing speechwriters to float like a butterfly over vast reservoirs of speech fodder (he wrote, in a late night mix of confused metaphor).

They allow employees access the creativity outside corporate America. They allow us to be part of the Naked Conversations (which is not to be confused with the Naked Lunch).

Social Media is good for Sharing; Collaboration; Creativity; Participation; Engagement; Authenticity and Transparency.

Example: Writing a book used to be solitary, a blog can encourage comments on text. Wikis also. The blog takes all the comments and centralizes them.

A business blog is:

Debbie led the group in a debate on pros and cons of blogging. By the end of the afternoon at least one former skeptic was convinced. Look for a blog by an employee of a Defense Contractor (of course, if you read it, he may have to shoot you!) She took us through a show and tell on setting up feeds in Bloglines. We discussed the best use of RSS feeds and such to help monitor the blogosphere. I refrained from mentioning my Handy Dandy Guide to setting up an RSS Newsreader, so I’ll do that here.

The question arose as to why more speechwriters don’t blog. One thing might be the load. David Murray, Editor of the Speechwriters Newsletter claimed to be the ‘world’s first retired blogger’ – he was actually paid to blog by Ragan Communications and gave it up due to the time factor. However, speechwriters who don’t get their own by-lines might get great joy out of blogging.

Debbie advised your topic has to be your passion. Her workbook on content development for blogging has worksheets on:

Debbie showed us how easy it is to start a blog in Typepad and post to it, change the URL to map to a web site you may have and more. She used her China Blogging Tour blog set up in anticipation of a book tour she’s undertaking over there, as an example, inserting pictures and video from YouTube and Bebo links.

And that, after an intense three days in Washington DC, was that.