GM Blogger Bob Lutz Interviewed by Shel Israel

April 12, 2008 By

One of the first names that comes up when anyone talks about corporate blogging is that of General Motors VP Bob Lutz. His use of the GM FastLane blog is a standard reference for how a corporate executive might make effective use of blogging. Lutz gets not one but ten references in Debbie Weil’s The Corporate Blogging Book.

Shel Israel has interviewed Bob Lutz on the subject of social media within General Motors and more generally. Evidently this is the first time Lutz has agreed to an exclusive interview on the subject.

As a social media consultant for business, I found the interview riveting, have watched it again and intend to watch it a couple more times at least. Here is a 72 year old executive (seniors rule OK!) explaining how social media/blogging have helped his company both in terms of external communication with the media, customers and the general public and how it can help internal communications.

Seventeen minutes on how blogging and other social media can work in and for the enterprise. Evidence based, practical, insightful.

Some points I picked up on the first viewing:

  • Lutz was surprised to find that the primary readership of the blog turned out to be the media – “the number one readers of the FastLane blog”
  • he hopes journalists will now pause before writing a “really stupid piece” on GM, in the knowledge that GM has a way of responding and explaining that does not have to be mediated by the mainstream media and they will not want to be embarrassed by being shown up in front of their peers in the FastLane blog
  • he felt that GM were previously treated poorly by the media (always “glass half empty” stories) but he can no longer complain about how new products are treated in the press (“glass half full”)
  • a public-facing corporate blog helps the public to see a corporation less in the old way (a monolith) and more as it is, a collection of diverse individuals, all trying to do the right thing for the shareholders and for the American public
  • in corporate America, official communication had reached a point where it was no longer communication (pre-digested, sanitized, everything positive, no longer taken very seriously because it’s pre-packaged)
  • blogging by various executives where they communicate spontaneously puts a human face on the corporation
  • he thinks if blogging had been around in earlier days, Lee Iaccoca would have been a blogger!
  • internally, blogging is “an incredibly powerful tool for knitting a culture together”
  • in the future, social media will be the preferred means of communication
  • apart from condolences, he almost never writes a letter these days
  • he hopes Ford Motor Company do a lot of internal blogging these days (for their sake)

In my experience, corporate executives are more interested in what other corporate executives have to say about most things, including new technologies, than they are in what consultants and technology salespeople have to say. And rightly so.

Which makes this interview, from my corporate blogging/social media consultant’s viewpoint, pure gold.

Filed Under: Blogging, Enterprise 2.0, Social Media Tagged With: , , , , , , , ,

New Report Says There Are Now 47 Million China Bloggers

January 1, 2008 By

One of the most profound experiences for me in the year past was visiting China. Or, more specifically, visiting Beijing and then Shanghai. And one element of the experience was that I began to learn how pervasive blogging is in China.

My colleague Debbie Weil, who was in China at the same time and on a panel I moderated at ad:tech Beijing, was also amazed at the numbers quoted to us, both of Internet usage overall and of the number of blogs. In an interview in December, Debbie links to the Pew Internet report of July 2007 for a figure of somewhere between 165 and 210 million Internet users. At the time we were in Beijing, Debbie was also given to understand there were some 30 million bloggers.

Up till then I had been relying on Technorati’s regular surveys, the latest of which, in April 2007, indicated a total 70 million blogs worldwide, being tracked by Technorati, of which only 8% were indicated as being in Chinese. Even allowing for the possibility or even likelihood that the China figures Debbie and I were being given were rubbery, there is still a big discrepancy. I can only assume that the systems of measurement are different.

And just last week, on Dec 26, the China Internet Network Information Center (CNNIC) released its Survey Report on Blogs in China 2007. According to the report summary, by the end of Nov 2007 the number of “blog spaces” (which I assume to mean what we in the West call simply “blogs” or “weblogs”) was 78.82 million, with 47 million bloggers (“blog writers”): the report summary helpfully adds that this means that one out of every thirty Chinese or one in every four Internet users (“netizens”) is a blogger. (Thanks to Allesio Jacona for the link to the CNNIC report summary.)

For me, what was more interesting than the aggregate numbers was the growth story. According to the CCNIC report, at the end of 2006 there were 17.5 million bloggers, with 30 million more in the past year to reach the current figure of 47 million (give or take half a million). Incidentally, it’s interesting that there are more women (57%) bloggers than men (43%) – converse of the pattern in the West.

The report indicates that the bloggers cover “almost all of the areas of people’s daily life” but there is not much in the summary of the report to indicate whether, or how much, blog production is related to business.

One of my goals for the New Year is to garner information and case studies on the takeup and practice of business blogging and other business usage of social media in China. I have a number of links already to China blogs with a business focus and once I have them in some semblance of order I will begin to share them on this site, together with other links that come to light.

Filed Under: Blogging, China, General, Social Media Tagged With: , , , , , ,