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in its name. But if you take your time to read through the blog postings, you'll
probably notice what I did - it sounds like somewhere between a pure marketing
advertorial and a university lecture on Coca Cola 101! Blogs are dialogues and
when we want to chat with people, we have to say something interesting to
capture their attention and retain their interest and not tell them in advance that
the discussion will “only work if there is a two-way dialogue”, to quote from
Phil Mooney's introduction. It's like meeting someone at a dinner party and the
first thing you tell them is that you intend to have a conversation with them but
the conversation can only take place if they speak back to you. The person is
likely to walk away with the conclusion that you are either crazy or need stress
therapy. Conversations just flow if they're right. It's as simple as that. And what
will make them right is engaging the audience with content that is informative
(not educational) and entertaining (not tasking). Coca Cola Conversations is full
of direct marketing information from the company's archives and initiatives on
competitions, recipes and so on, which I have to admit is rich content. But these
are presented in a teacher-scholar manner that gives the impression that the com-
pany is seeking to inundate the public with the richness of its past. No wonder
people are not responding - sorry Phil but people are not looking to be “edu-
cated” about Coca Cola; they want the “experience” of Coca Cola to be extended
to the blog to enable them to show their passion and love for the brand. This fact
is also applicable to all the corporate blogs that litter the cyberspace.
In the case of My Years With Four Seasons, the blog that is written by
someone who calls himself “Christian” (no last name and no photo), the
offense is even worse. Christian claims to be German and to have been
working at Four Seasons Hotels for the last 10 years in different positions
including Assistant Director of Rooms at the hotel in Shanghai. His reason
for starting the blog is to share his experiences within Four Seasons and his
tales of living and working in China (even if we all know that starting the
blog was decided by the marketing department). He goes on to give a glow-
ing report of the excellence of the Four Seasons culture which he experi-
enced working for the hotel in Berlin, San Francisco and currently in China.
No details are given apart from the message that the Four Seasons is a great
place to work with a great corporate culture. Christian, however, promised
to share more experiences in his next post. The problem is that two months
after Christian's (first) blog post on 11 February 2009, there was not yet a
follow-up post or message and therefore no activity on the blog. Well, I'm
sure you're thinking the same thing as I am - the Marketing Director hasn't
yet found time to update his blog à la Christian. And this is in the age of
supersonic hyper-connectivity and instant online messages in real time,
where the average number of times a blog is updated is at least once a day.
The majority of companies that set up corporate blogs seem to be doomed
from the start, especially since their efforts are far from the dramatic success
they sought to achieve by creating the blogs in the first place. But the key
for companies to benefit from the blogging phenomenon and the social web
