How Boeing is using blogs
About 18 months ago, Boeing decided to test the use of blogs with Randy’s Journal, written by Randy Baseler, vice-president for marketing at Boeing Commercial Airplanes. And because no comments were allowed, this was considered as a “fake” blog by lots of readers. Now, Boeing is extensively using blogs, both for its internal and external communication needs, as reports BusinessWeek Magazine in Into The Wild Blog Yonder. All these blogs are published with tools from Six Apart. So, in Behind the Scenes of Boeing’s Blogs, Anil Dash has interviewed D.L. Byron of Textura Design, who helped Boeing launch their blogs. Read more…
So why Boeing has changed its mind since the launch of its first blog? Here is the answer from BusinessWeek.
Boeing has learned to cede some control and expose itself to stinging criticism in exchange for a potentially more constructive dialogue with the public, customers, and employees. “Companies are nervous about creating external blogs because they fear the negative comments,” says Charlene Li, an analyst at Forrester Research Inc. “But negative comments do exist. A company is better off knowing about them.”
So after the initial negative wave of criticism, Boeing decided to continue to use blogs, but in a different way.
Boeing’s early results suggest that the rewards outweigh the risks. The company’s two public blogs give Boeing a direct link to the public, something the 91-year-old company has never had before. And executives are starting to use internal blogs to get conversations going and allow employees to raise issues anonymously. “I’ve always been a big believer in open and honest dialogue that gets the issues on the table,” says James F. Albaugh, the chief executive of Boeing Integrated Defense Systems (IDS).
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But let’s turn to the interview of D.L. Byron by Anil Dash to learn how Boeing recovered from its first attempt at blogging and how it gradually expanded its use of blogs.
The first blog was a “pseudo”-blog, which is where the criticism [mentioned in the BusinessWeek story] came from. So [Boeing] hired Textura Design to help them turn Randy’s Journal into a real blog. Later, we helped them with launching Flight Test Journal [Inactive since December 2005], and then we also worked with them on the IDS blog, an internal project which is discussed in the article.
And here is why Anil Dash was happy to discuss with D.L. Byron.
Q: So you’re using Movable Type for all of the blogs, inside and outside the company?
Byron: Yes. We’ve also used TypePad for Connexion by Boeing. They’ve also embraced blogging via events like the Blog Business Summit, and sponsored blogs, and we rapidly prototyped blogs for them to review, test, and kick around, and then turned them into Movable Type blogs when it was show time.
Now, let’s wait from some blogs from Airbus to fuel the competition.
Sources: Stanley Holmes, BusinessWeek Magazine, May, 22, 2006 Issue; Anil Dash, Six Apart, May 11, 2006
