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GM: a big company blogging

GM’s vice chairman now has a blog. According to Neville Hobson, this is the first Fortune 100 company to do this. The interesting thing is not how revolutionary this blog is, but how ordinary it feels.

It’s just a website where a guy who makes cars talks to people who buy ’em. They talk about the things car buyers might be interested in – interior trim, cup holders, SUV, insurance costs, the Saturn range, and so on.

There’s lots of talk about corporate blogging (for example, Hugh McLeod, or Dave Winer or Scoble) It’s all interesting comment and worth considering. But for a long time, mainstream companies weren’t paying much attention.

Now that we see it in practice, in a company with tens of millions of customers, it no longer seems all that fantastic. Tallking directly to your customers and listening to their feedback about your product range is an obvious thing to do, and the Internet is an obvious channel to use for it.

It isn’t so much a question of corporate blogging is an obvious idea rather than a great idea. The question for a company executive shouldn’t really be ‘Should we blog?’. Rather, the question should be ‘Why aren’t we using the Internet to communicate with our customers and potential customers?’

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  1. My question is: should the blogger be one of the company executives? Or the blogger may be a hired PR professional?