Review: The Corporate Blogging Book by Debbie Weil

Debbie Weil is a corporate blogging expert, online marketing consultant and speaker. She consults with large companies, CEOs and senior executives on how to create blogs that connect with customers and attract media attention.

And I know this because the above text is the entire title displayed in your browser when you navigate to her site, debbieweil.com.

As to how true this is, I couldn't tell you. She's one of the advertised speakers at the upcoming Blog World Expo, and while a Google search for "corporate blogging" doesn't list her site on the first page of results, it does list her book: The Corporate Blogging Book. It's subtitled "Absolutely Everything You Need to Know to Get It Right".

Unfortunately, it's not. It is, however, a good introduction to the subject.

Like just about every other corporate blogging source in existence, this book about corporate blogging is aimed at the manager or CEO of a company. Either the company is considering starting a corporate blog and needs to know more information, or they know next to nothing about corporate blogging and want to know what it's all about. Or they are misinformed about blogging altogether and don't think blogging is relevant for their company.

The book covers, roughly in chapter order, basics about what blogging is, what corporate blogging is, some corporate blog examples, some fears about blogging (time and legal issues, mostly), CEO bloggers, the ROI of blogging, some blogging basics, some blog technology basics, and making the case for blogging to your boss.

Perhaps it wasn't a good idea for someone as immersed in the blogging world as me to have read the book. There wasn't anything new in it that I hadn't read a dozen times over on popular blogs already. It's merely a convenient collection of introductory ideas suitable for an airplane ride. Which was a bit of a disappointment. I was hoping that "absolutely everything you need to know" would include a lot more than that.

Regarding the ROI of blogging, one of my pet peeves is that most people speak about blogs in terms of number of hits to the blog, which is not really a useful metric for a corporate blog. Ms Weil kind of manages to convey this in the ROI chapter, but not forcefully enough. Too many of her examples still laud those blogs that become sensations in their own right. Funny how no one ever talks about the metric of a site's FAQ as being a destination site in its own right; only that it contain useful information and cut down on support calls.

Judged entirely on its own aims, which is to sell corporate blogging to companies by means of a simple offline introduction to the topic, it's good enough. But no more.

You can find more about her book on the book's site.

Yehuda