Corporate blogs serve many purposes and one of the most important can be the "unfiltered voice," provided by having a full page to work with to tell your story as opposed to having to craft a "statement," that you hope will be used by the media when referring to your particular situation.
In 2008, I wrote about how eBay used their corporate blog very well to squelch rumors of changes to their PayPal service. In my social media classes I've also used GM as an example of using a blog to respond to media coverage as they did to the NY Times on several occasions.
Yesterday, there was a kerfuffle around tweet that came through the official Chrysler account:
Shortly thereafter, Chrysler posted the following to their blog:
This wasn't perfect, but it was fast, it acknowledged the issue and said they have put processes in place so it doesn't happen again. That probably could have been enough. However, Chrysler today made a longer post with more detail and why this was more serious to them than a misplaced curse word. This post was attributed to Ed Garsten, the head of electronic communications at Chrysler.
There is a lot that is right here, for example, Chrysler:
- Acknowledged the comments made on their previous post and on other sites;
- Tied their actions in this matter in to their larger marketing and corporate goals; and
- Included the name of the person at Chrysler making the post so it wasn't a faceless corporate voice.
I meant to write this post last night but I'm glad I didn't then as the whole story hadn't yet been told, and it may not yet all be told, but there's more to learn today about how a company can respond using social media than we saw yesterday. Thanks to David Armano for pointing me to Chrysler's follow-up post with his Tweet. Also, last night when I tweeted about this, I received a response from someone I greatly respect questioning whether this should have been a fireable offense. At the time, I would have been inclined to say no, and I'm still not sure they should have been fired, but with after reading Chrysler's thoughts I can understand the thinking a whole lot better.