Must Your Big Brand Be So Corporate In the Online World?

When a big company hears about starting a blog, the employees start to panic.  They don’t want to commit themselves  into this.  They don’t know what they can talk about on a regular basis.  They are just looking forward to work comfortably in the company, and to “retire” for the rest of their lives.

They are also unsure of how this blog is going to affect their brand personality they had built over the years.  They are just afraid of ruining the brand with their hands on the keyboard!

Have anybody seen the official Google blog before?  Do you know what they have been blogging about?  They blog basically everything that their employees can lay their hands on.  As of today, Google is blogging about the huge lens that they have bought and playing under the sun during their lunch.  Why would Google allow them to blog something like this?  Hasn’t the brand been “telling” them what they can do, and cannot do?

What’s wrong with a big company to blog about something which is not so “corporate”?  In my opinion, it is absolutely fine!  What’s wrong with being personal on a corporate blog?

Logically speaking, many of the big companies in Asia will never allow their employees to blog anything out of scope from the brand.  That’s because they have been doing everything to make sure they are expert in everything and anything through the communication in the traditional media.  But the new media has simply changed everything!

The big companies are not so sure of how to position their brand online.  They would rather treat online and offline the same.

As the big brands are afraid, so are the agencies who are helping to bring their brands online.  It takes courage to change their brand personality totally from offline to online.  If anything happens, nobody dares to take the responsibility as it is going to harm the  business greatly.

But who knows if they really take the “bold” step to be more personal to the social media?

Photo credit: muggieramadani