Dell and Other Big Company Blogs: Hiding in Plain Sight

BL,

While I somewhat agree with you, I think your statement attaches too much importance to the homepage. As you know, more and more customers/readers reach specific landing pages through Google searches or links. I would put more focus on optimizing search for my blog or getting linked to by other bloggers than appearing on the homepage.

Anyways just my 2 cents...
Eric

So you're saying that people are likely to put "HP Blog" into Google instead of going to the HP home page?

With all respect Eric - that is ridiculous.

Interesting...I wonder if Chrysler's new sale to a private equity firm will encourage bolder moves (and please, not the Ford style) like some analysts are predicting. With so much talk around Cerberus, people's uncertainty about the quality of privately owned manufacturers and like you said, the lack of a constant obsession about a stock price, maybe they'll venture into real social media innitiatives. Imagine if unlike GM, they decide to put social media at the forefront of their online properties, start taking feedback and making serious changes to their brand...now talk about a turn around if that happens!!

For a lot of people, the term "home page" is synonymous with "where one begins a visit to a company's website." Thus, I'm going to side with B.L. and say that a company's blog should be linked from its home page.

In a perfect world the home page would be virtual, as in limitless real estate to accomodate links to all content. Unfortunately, there are spatial limits in the real world that dictate trade-offs. While we respect differing opinions, we don't buy the premise that we're hiding anything. The last time we checked our Technorati ranking, the 28-week-old Direct2Dell.com was 1,701 out of 71 million blogs. That said, we're always open to ideas ... keep 'em coming!

"So you're saying that people are likely to put "HP Blog" into Google instead of going to the HP home page?"

If they are wanting to know if HP is blogging, I would say yes. In the past when I have wanted to see if a company has a blog, I'll do a Google search before I'll go to the company's site looking for it. Because, as we both know, the company doesn't always host its blog on its main website.

I'm also not sure if I buy the theory that companies are 'hiding' their blogs, such as Eric's blog. Ny guess would he that rather, the companies don't realize that people would actually be LOOKING for the blogs. If they wanted to hide the blogs, why let their employees blog at all?

John: A link to "Dell Blog" and "Dell Idea Storm" in the nav bar, top, side and/or bottom is not going to take a lot of space!

In workshops I do for big corporations, and when I speak at conferences, I actually use Dell as an example of a company that is using social media well after learning the hard way what the cost of not listening to customers would be.

Mack: You and I are bloggers. Of course we'd think of putting "HP blog" in Google. We may have a lot of readers, but we're still a small and geeky part of the general business world.

Actually, i realized as i was writing this comment that i shouldn't bury my response in here, so i am going to write another post referencing this one.

thanks for your thoughtful comments.