This quote from Kris Hoet, an friend of mine from when we used to work on Windows Live community projects at Microsoft, reminded me of the old notion of the accidental spokesperson in the form of the employee blogger, and how this highlights the “other” side of corporate blogging, the organic growth and support of employee blogs:

Thomas [Crampton] called it “difficulty of blogging for Microsoft”, I see it more as “challenges in corporate social media” or something but that doesn’t sound half as good… and the chat would have been the same anyway so why bother ;)

The reason for this was the notion that corporate blogging that get listed this days only seem to relate to initiatives that are set up centrally and less about the ‘accidental spokesperson’. LionelatDell or ComcastCares (aka Frank) or … are real people, real but corporate identities, transparent and honest (I presume) but set up for the company they work for.

[From Personal/corporate identity « ‘Cross The Breeze]

About a year and a half ago, Rohit Bhargava did a post on the topic which made the rounds of the blogosphere at the time. The basic concept doesn’t have to apply to blogging – think back to any story you may have heard of an otherwise anonymous employee, government worker, volunteer, etc saying something inappropriate into a mic or camera, leaving the “official” spokespeople to scramble to clean up, disavowing the accidental spokesperson’s comments as being unrepresentative of the organization.

As Rohit notes, the danger with blogs (and now, a whole range of new media tools) is exactly what makes them otherwise so powerful: their potential for vast reach.

It’s no wonder many corporate PR teams view blogs with a mixture of distrust and fear. Particularly when it comes to dealing with employee bloggers.

The real difficulty, however, comes when one or more of these employee bloggers starts developing a following. As their audience rises, so does the importance of their unofficial role as a spokesperson. In effect, they become an accidental spokesperson.

He cites Scoble and Steve Rubel as good examples of this. It nicely highlights what I think of as the two types of corporate blogging – one gets written up as part of social media strategies, the other too often gets relegated to HR or PR driven “policies” as a means to do some preemptive damage control.

Corporate blogging, the official kind that consultants get paid for, is at this point a well known beast. It may still (frequently) trip up companies attempting to roll a formal company, team, CEO, or topical blog as a PR or community building tool, but the basic concepts and best practices have been documented ad nauseam.

Organic employee blogging, which is what really took off at Microsoft over the years and what Kris refers to at the top of this post, is where the accidental spokesperson really comes into play. Microsoft has been mentioned from the “early days” of blogging for its fairly open policy and supportive culture towards employee blogging, and as a result has seen more than its fair share of high traffic tech bloggers develop from within. Before any formal team blogs popped up, hundreds or even thousands of employee blogs – both on company-owned sites and off – were really acting as day to day accidental spokespeople for the company.

It may have given the PR teams nightmares (I witnessed more than a few, even among some fantastic PR people who clearly “got it” – to be frank, it was mostly certain executives who got most annoyed at the proliferation of publicly opinionated employees), but that kind of mass distribution of company culture leaking out every minute, hour, and day is rightly and often credited with helping turn tech industry opinion of Microsoft around.

Which is more powerful? The official company or team blog, planned out to engage the community and put a human face on the company or perhaps serve as a story pipeline into the wider world of “new media”, or the seething mass of accidental spokespeople, employee bloggers telling the world what they think even when, as is often the case, those thoughts aren’t exactly “on message”?

My vote is for the latter. I appreciate a high quality and smartly done company blog, and it’s one of the first things I look for when checking out a company. But the employee blogs, especially if done without any obvious corporate messaging filter, are what I *love*. Their text may share interesting tidbits and opinions, but their mere presence and activity speak volumes about the culture of the company.