I received the following intro to the Corporate Blogging session from Dave Coustan:

Corporate blogs take many forms and aim at achieving any number of objectives. Although it’s hard to draw generalizations across all of the different forms and use cases, the idea of a company speaking through a blog usually brings with it some questions in common. What does it mean for a company to have a blog? In what department should a company’s blog live? How are official, company-sponsored blogs different from other kinds of blogs? How is a blogger (or commenter) different from a company spokesperson? What complications do corporate blogs introduce into the way traditional companies are accustomed to doing business and engaging with the public? And what other practices are there to think about outside of running a corporate blog itself?

I’ve been at EarthLink for about a year, and created Earthling (http://blogs.earthlink.net ) back in January as “an official EarthLink blog”. I’d like to start the discussion with a quick summary of what Earthling is and how it evolved at EarthLink. Depending on the interest in the room, we could focus the discussion on my experiences blogging within and for a company, or more generally about corporate blogging as a whole. I think any grab bag of the following topics would be interesting. Drop a comment if there’s any one of these you know you’d like to see covered or have any other suggestions:

- The practicals of day-to-day corporate blogging – how does it work at EarthLink?
- Lessons learned at Earthling – what’s worked, what hasn’t, what direction is it headed
- Do some models work better than others?
- What should an employee blogging policy look like?
- Who should blog at your company?
- What common issues does a company usually grapple with when it decides to blog?
- What’s the role of the readers of a corporate blog, and is it any different from other types of blogs?