IT Week: What is the role of an audience group manager?

Phil Cross: My role is focused on the IT professional audience and, in short, I operate as their conscience within Microsoft. My performance is measured almost entirely on customer satisfaction and how IT professionals feel about the company. I also run our TechNet programme, which provides information about Microsoft’s plans and activities to IT professionals through newsletters, live meetings, etc.

How big a role has blogging played in the TechNet programme?

One of the great things about being measured on customer satisfaction is that you tend to get the freedom to try a lot of different things. We’ve taken a lot of approaches to reaching out to customers, but one that has really, really worked is blogging. We now have a team of technical bloggers in the UK and one of our bloggers, Eileen Brown, gets around 500,000 hits and RSS feed reads a month.

So what is the secret to a successful corporate blog?

The first thing is that it should be as non-corporate as possible. I was looking at a certain politician’s blog recently and it was obvious it wasn’t him who had written it – it was one of his PRs or someone else. The more honest and open the blog, the more likely it is to encourage debate and interaction.

But don’t corporations need some control over what staff are writing? You don’t want them giving away commercial secrets.

A lot of firms do now have lengthy blogging policies – one I know of is about 16 pages long – but ours runs to two words: blog smart. If you trust your employees, then giving them this freedom is OK.

Aren’t corporate blogs just inviting criticism and abuse from disgruntled customers?

They can do, but if a customer highlights something that is not as good as it should be you’re best off just putting your hands up and saying “you’re right, we’ll look into it.” It also gives you the opportunity to point the disgruntled customer to solutions or services that may work.

What other tips would you have for firms interested in blogging?

You do need to blog regularly to give people a reason to come back, but that doesn’t mean you need to blog every day. You also need to accept that, by definition, a blog isn’t that polished. You can’t wait for the complete story around an issue before you get started.

Microsoft is a commercial organisation and wouldn’t be encouraging blogging if there weren’t any commercial benefits. So what have you found them to be?

Have you seen our offices in Reading? They are big and grey and imposing, and don’t look that welcoming. What’s more we have a partner-driven model, so many of our customers don’t actually see much of us. Blogging is a way of personalising the company – of showing customers that we are people. It helps create good perceptions about the company and makes it easier to create a dialogue that will help both parties.

Is blogging particularly well suited to technology companies?

There is some truth in that because technology is inherently complicated, but I’d argue it is useful in any complex industry. One of the big problems we find with our live events is pitching the presentations at the right level. If you’ve got a room of 50 people some will say it was too complex and some will say it didn’t go deep enough. Blogging gets round that. You can start at a certain level and people can easily come back with further inquiries and you can respond or point them to other blogs.

Does this mean that blogging can cut costs by replacing more expensive face-to-face communication events?

I’d love to think that was true. Over 40 percent of my budget goes on events and they reach just a small proportion of our audience, although people do love the events and enjoy meeting face-to-face. I don’t think face-to-face will ever disappear, but I think across industry it will be scaled back a little and more will go online because of the financial cost and, of course, the environmental cost of travelling to events.

But what do you do when a blogger gets something wrong or causes embarrassment to the company? Former Microsoft blogger Robert Scoble seemed to be constantly posting things Microsoft didn’t want released.

It’s a case of taking the rough with the smooth. People will make mistakes and that does create issues in terms of whether you should pull it – which is not the answer because the post will have invariably been saved somewhere and pulling it will just make things worse. The answer, if you’ve made a mistake, is to just admit it and then learn from it. You don’t get fired for making mistakes, though you do get fired for making the same mistake twice.

But what if you’ve leaked confidential corporate information?

Well, that is a different issue. But the thing is, how is posting a blog about a secret different from telling someone directly or sending out an email you shouldn’t? If information has been leaked, then normal disciplinary procedures should apply. There is no need for specific criteria for blogging.

Is there a danger that we already have too many corporate blogs?

It is true that there are only so many people out there wanting to consume blogs, but that just means only the strong will survive. Corporate mouthpieces will not survive; it is the interesting blogs with something personal and engaging to say that will prosper.

You’ve been involved in setting up Microsoft’s UK blogs – any plans to launch one of your own?

I am keen to do it for a number of reasons. I want to talk about what we are doing with TechNet and, perhaps more importantly, get ongoing feedback from IT professionals about what we can do to improve it. We recently mooted an idea in our newsletter for a Vista After Hours event to show IT professionals all the non-work related things they can do with Vista, such as the various media and photo capabilities. That got a great response and it is the kind of customer sounding exercise we want to be able to do far more often and in real time, which is what blogging gives you. I’m also keen to post on green computing because it is an area our audience is interested in where there’s not much information.