I seem to be a couple of steps behind these days. But that’s the way it goes when you’ve got your head buried in writing a book. I was doing a Technorati search on something tonight when I realized that half a dozen bloggers had flamed DaimlerChrysler’s restricted-access media blog as being wrong wrong wrong and un-bloglike… before I came along last week and blithely logged in and was given immediate access. See here and here and here and here for the flames. And a more considered write up by Laurie Mayers here. (Honestly, I was oblivious to all that had been said.)
Well guys, I follow a lot of you and you’re great. But I disagree on this one. It’s just plain myopic to say that DaimlerChrysler blew it by setting up a media-only blog. It makes perfect sense to me that restricted niche-audience blogs will become more and more common as we wade deeper into this corporate blogging thing.
Blogs and blogging are a tool, remember? They’re a communications channel as well as a way of communicating. They’re about conversations. If you choose to have your conversation with a certain, specified audience, who is to say you’re doing it “wrong?” So what if it’s a hybrid of public-facing and internal, password-protected blog?
The more important question is not who has access to the Firehouse media blog. But whether it will prove to be an effective way for the DaimlerChrylser PR folks to have a backstory conversation with automotive media types. And I don’t know the answer to that… Although so far I don’t see anything terribly revealing in the blog.