I belong to a group of marketing and corporate communication professionals from IT companies located in Bangalore. We meet often, sometimes to discuss deep professional stuff, sometimes just to drink beer and get plastered.
Some of our recent meetings have been interesting. Mike Green heads Intel's internal communications, and he was with us last month talking about how Intel is making a real effort to find out what its employees are saying about the company. A lot of this intra-company feedback involves blogging.
More recently, we had Kevin Ruane who is with Oracle's PR department. He said Oracle was using social media to reach out to journalists. In August we will meet Shashi Bellamkonda, Network Solutions' Social Media Swami who will talk to us about "How to sell blogs to your boss."
The problem we face here is that most Indian companies, and I include MNCs based in India, distrust blogs mainly because they feel they have no control over it. It's true, blogs could be misused by, say, the competition, but people like Shashi believe that the advantages far outweigh the fears.
Kevin told us that just about 12 percent of Fortune 500 companies use blogs to reach out to the public. Which means that the rest are not quite aware of social media's advantages, or they share the same apprehensions as their Indian counterparts.
It would be interesting to figure out which is the more accurate answer!