I’m intrigued by a blog that James Governer wrote on Blogger Relations which he described as active tracking of blogs to identify and foster relations with influencers, traditional or not.

When I consider it for IBM (disclaimer, I am not the person who gets to decide this), the first question after what it is, is where does it sit (ok, the usuals like mission, action, direction are assumed decided….defer to James here).  We have dedicated disciplines at IBM for Public Relations, Analyst Relations, Internal, Investor, Community and so on.

Unless you are at my blog for the first time, you know I sit in analyst relations.  AR has done more with the blogs than any of the other external communications functions.  This is due to the audience we deal with, desire to move this forward by the recently departed Catherine Helzerman and John Mihalec, VP of IBM analyst relations to name a few.

So one would think that it belongs in AR, but the Internal and Corporate folks (remember when IBM introduced it’s blogging strategy - Corp. Communications did it and has an extensive function here).  So who’s to say?  I’d seek advice here.  If it is to attain equality to the other communications disciplines, it should be it’s own function.  If we are to stay where the focus is right now, it falls under A/R.

James points out that any good developer relations function has to have a good blogging capability.  Interestingly enough, I was in IBM developerWorks when we started the first IBM external blogsite. So maybe it sits in development, it would depend on the mission once again.  I’d say this one is doubtful as there are too many issues covered by IBM bloggers at this point.
IBM is a different animal as we are sometimes viewed as an octopus…8 arms in every direction, so anything we do usually has consequences in area’s that other companies do not even have products.  SAP and Oracle have no hardware or Server divisions.  Others  don’t have dedicated Finance divisions, and still others have no services.

Typically, on issues such as this, we start slow and get our feet wet, then get into the pool….our entries have been some where between Greg Louganis and a cannonball so no telling.

I’ll end by quoting James as he writes it well…”How should corporate communications respond? In a word- flexibly.”

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