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Right, this question is about IT vendors, and I've prefaced it with the phrase, "do
IT vendors get corporate blogging?"
So, Matthew, do you make time to follow any vendor blogs from the networking space, and
do you happen to know if any of your prospects or customers rave about certain blogs? Or
is everybody too busy to even think about this?
You know, I read a lot of IT vendor blogs. There tends to be a decent amount of useful
information in them. I don't come across too many customers that mention that they read
this on a corporate blog. I think the problem with corporate blogs is
that they're so focused on protecting that brand, looking professional, and all that
stuff, that they forget how to make the content interesting.
There are some, and I think it's probably more the smaller vendors, that tend to have
a lot more fun on their blogs. And so it's nice to read, it's interesting to read.
Whereas, some of the larger companies, their blogs are very dry. I'm not saying there's
not usable information in them but they're so, it's such a controlled message, that there's
almost no sense of emotion whatsoever. And the only sense of emotion you get is this
fake enthusiasm where they're just excited about their own product, or their own launch.
But I think if you're a multibillion corporation like HP or Cisco or EMC, I don't know that
you can really play fast and loose with your blogs.
You can do other things at your conferences. EMC has this thing they do at EMC World called,
'Chad's World'. He gets to do this Wayne's World-type parody at EMC World, more of an
appropriate venue because it's all engineers.
Companies that do things like that that are pretty funny to the point where I'll actually
sit there and watch this episodes from EMC World, even though I'm not a storage person,
to me it's still interesting.
I like companies that can poke fun at themselves. Most companies, from a PR perspective, aren't
willing to do that, and I think they miss out. So, corporate blogs, I don't ever hear
customers ever mention them at all. Now, if it's a viral video - yeah, if it's something
hilarious that goes viral, people will talk about it. And that's generally something that
has humor around it.
But corporate blogs, as a general rule, I don't think they do a whole lot of good.