MarketingSherpa has a interesting peek inside how a publicly-traded corporation goes about blogging at the senior officer level.
The company is Network Appliance; founder and EVP David Hitz blogs here.
It’s not exactly a fast-track process, as the idea surfaced in September 2004, and was launched a year later. Approvals from the corporate legal department and the IR group were apparently preconditions to moving forward.
The goal is to post twice a week, but sometimes work gets in the way. This could be a sign of a welcome trend in blogging: quality over quantity. This is possible when your focus is personalizing a company and a senior officer, and not monetizing eyeballs with mega-pageviews.
Dave’s Blog contains some very interesting posts, an eclectic reading list, and this morsel from the bio (click on the picture):
Before his career in the computer industry, Hitz worked as a cowboy, where he got valuable management experience by herding, branding, and castrating cattle.
That may cause competitors of Network Appliance to sit up and take notice.
Update (17 Feb 06): The New York Times takes a peek inside a Wal-Mart internal blog. Straight talk always goes with low prices. BusinessWeek also examines company blogs. Corporate blogging even pries Steve Rubel of Micro Persuasion loose and finds him landing at the Edelman PR firm.