Do-it-yourself Corporate Publishing -- the new trend?
Social media has had enormous impact on our society and the tech industry in general. The fact that you are reading this blog post right now signals that we all are now aggregating and analyzing information and events in a different way. We are choosing our filters. We are gathering viewpoints from sources we trust. Those sources are not always the vehicles of trust from the past, the traditional publications.
This week in my Twitter feed, I saw a reference from Tim O'Reilly to Ford's PR Blitz around its CEO's quest for support in Washington for the auto industry bailout. The link he provided was to a section from Ford's corporate webpage which packaged nicely, if slickly, the plan Ford was presenting to the government, along with other data anyone interested could download and several videos from Ford executives, including the CEO, elaborating on the plan. Anyone trying to cover or understand this news story could get additional nuggets and context, including the full text of the plan being presented. Corporations are becoming their own publishers is what came into my head when I saw this. When I went back to look for it for this blog post, I found it fairly buried on the busy home page of Ford's site, however, so I think you'd need to be very motivated to dig this out. And it was a bit too polished to not seem like market-speak, so I would assume journalists would brush on by it or view it as an online press release.
Just this morning, I was meeting with a former colleague who told me about General Electric's recent foray into corporate publishing, GEReports.com. This goes beyond a segment of the home page, although you can quickly get to it from the home page (which is much cleaner and easier to navigate than Ford's.) GEReports looks like a news report and bills itself (on its home page) as "your source for what's happening at GE." A few weeks ago a Reuters report on the new approach to making many announcements cited some concerns about how this satisfied corporate governance and the fact that it required Wall Street types and others to go get the news themselves rather than spoon-feeding it to them via releases on the various business wire services. They were reacting mostly to the fact that the company chose to use GEReports to announce some major corporate news, which was a novel approach. In my humble opinion, it's a great way to communicate with just about anyone, as it includes snippets of information from shows GE is attending, from technical experts in various divisions, from executives, from customers in videos, blog postings and very short articles (Rupert Murdoch would approve.) Interestingly, GEReports has been quoted in coverage of the company by Reuters and others, which seems to give it the stamp of a true information source like a publication.
Now GE is a mammoth company which has enough news content on a daily basis to pull this off. They certainly have a smart vision for creating this alternative channel to their various audiences. Smaller corporations cannot pull this off exactly, but they certainly could create a variation on it and some of the ones we work with already have used their CEO's blogs to release or at least position even corporate news to their constituencies.
It's an interesting development and I've chosen to follow GEReports both on Twitter and through my Bloglines RSS Reader to see how it evolves (which they have smartly made very easy to do, by the way). If I were a journalist assigned to cover GE, I'd be doing the same -- both to make sure I didn't miss anything and also to make sure this type of corporate publishing isn't going to put me out of a job.
