Blog Council Formed to Wintry Reception

The Blog Council has come to order. It has been formed, site launched, and first meeting set to convene in January. Per their official description, the Blog Council is a community for official corporate blogs and bloggers that represent major global corporations acting as a strong advocate in support of responsible, ethics-based corporate blogging. Their mission is to create best practices (global corporate blog directory, standardized blog terminology glossary, moderating and responding to comments), community, ROI, and advocacy. Other initiatives include proactive blogger relations, blog policy, blogs as customer service tools, ROI of blogs, creating "brand love" in the blogosphere, managing blogs in multiple languages, dealing with employee personal blogs, and how to engage bloggers to write about a company. Council member companies include AccuQuote, Cisco, Coca-Cola, Dell, Gemstar-TV Guide, General Motors, Kaiser Permanente, Microsoft, Nokia, SAP, Starwood Hotels, and Wells Fargo. I don't see Google on the list, at least not yet, but the Official Google Blog is more popular than all the others' blogs. Neither is Sun on the list whose CEO, Jonathan Schwartz, has a blog. The council is clear to differentiate itself from and as not representing personal, SMB, and professional bloggers.

Corporate blogging is the corporate adaption of blogging. And, given that corporations have a corporate and legal reponsibility to protect themselves and shareholders, it seems logical that they would have some rules of engagement around this. But this smells of a corporate stranglehold on an inherently open, unregulated, free speech realm. The Council's own site is a blog but already I don't see how you comment other than email the "Blog Council". I don't know about anyone else, but I don't read any of the member council company blogs; okay, maybe I've looked at a Microsoft Blog before. I guess I might check out some of the others in time to see the fruits of this endeavour. Will all this policy-making help or hinder corporate blogging?! I guess that is yet to be seen but people are mostly skeptical.

Robert Scoble writes:
"If your company needs help "getting it" then you shouldn’t be hanging out with other companies.... Demonstrates that the industry has a LONG way to go before it understands the real value that seemingly unimportant conversations have."

What do you think?