Audience Q and A
Is it always a good idea to directly address concerns? Yes. The best scenario for a company with detractor blog issues is to directly address concerns that might be coming up in the blogosphere. However, you have to be careful of "loving" the negative article to death. Too much attention and you'll shoot yourself in the foot. It's a fine balance between addressing the issue at hand and knowing when to gracefully ignore it.
How does a business with only one domain name, i.e., "www.widgets.com", create more than one domain name in order to generate more content in order to fight potential detractor bloggers? There's lots of possibilities here. Businesses that are worth their salt should always have something to say, and that can be expressed through advertisers, PRWEb, affiliates, sponsors, RSS feeds, and more. These all fall under what is termed the "architecture for communications."
What about corporate clients and blogs? Is it a good idea? Not always something that's needed. Corporate clients shouldn't start blogging because it's "the thing to do". If a corporation wants to implement a blog on their site, they'll need to think it through very carefully as to what tone they want the blog to take. Comments are another thing that are questionable for corporate blogs, because of the whole need to keep everything moderated. There's got to be a fine balance between the two. One panelist brought up that if comments are not enabled, or if there's not a way for concerns to be voiced, that detractors will create a channel to do it themselves.
Blogs with comments, blogs without comments - opinions? Many people in the audience were extremely vocal on the fact that a blog with comments not enabled is not a blog, but merely a website. You can enable comments and still reserve some measure of control - you can use a disclaimer or reserve the right to edit offensive posts, but comments are seen as a vital part of effective blogs. One audience member stated that if you want to be part of the blogosphere, you have to engage in the conversation. If you want to have influence, you have to play by the rules of social dialogue.
Corporate exposure and blogs; is there a way to make a corporation available yet protected? A good example of making this work is Channel 9, Microsoft's blog that blends accessibility and corporate representation. There's inherent risk when you have a corporate blog; you have to make sure it's not just a bald attempt to shill for the company, but if done right, it can have a huge return on investment.
