Telstra Shuts Down Corporate Blogging Experiment

Telstra, Australia’s still-dominant telco, yesterday shut down its corporate blogging site nowwearetalking.com.au

CEO David Thodey’s letter announcing the shutdown promised “Telstra will launch a new corporate blogging website later this year”.

In keeping with the expressions of opinion from the opinionati when nowwearetalking launched back in 2005, from congratulatory/welcoming through curious/cautious to dismissive, blogosphere commentary on the shutdown, for example the comment stream on the mUmBRELLA post on the story, covers a spectrum of views from the “maybe it was a good thing” school to the unapologetically “good riddancers”. My impression is that there are significantly fewer voices saying it was or might have been a good thing than there are those of people glad, indeed very glad, to see the site gone.

Long time commentator on telecoms, the always well-informed and, in my observation over a number of years, always straight-talking Stuart Corner is in the good riddance camp.

Liam Tung at ZDNet provides a fairly non-judgemental synopsis of the nowwearetalking story and quotes mUmBRELLA’s Tim Burrows as being disappointed that the site is gone.

I believe it was a good thing that the experiment was tried. If nothing else, it showed up what can happen with a corporate blogging site when a corporation is battling not only its competitors but the nation’s government.

The general impression I have from zipping through the headlines on this topic in my online searching is that Tim Burrows was probably on the money when he opined yesterday to ZDNet that the site was just too much associated with former Telstra mouthpiece, the larger than life Phil Burgess and the Trujillo headed regime, and had to go.

No doubt the bones of this experiment in corporate blogging will be picked over, with lessons drawn and theories propounded, for some time to come. 

Media students, start your keyboards! I’m betting your lecturer will be setting nowwearetalking as an assignment before the week is out.

Image info: screenshot of nowwearetalking.com from Dec 2005, from The Wayback Machine at Archive.org

Des Walsh

Business coach and digital entrepreneur. With coach training from Coachville.com and its Graduate School of Coaching, and a founding member of the International Association of Coaching, Des has been coaching business owners and entrepreneurs for the past 20 years. Over the same period he has also been actively engaged in promoting the business opportunities of the digital economy. He is a certified Neurolinguistic Programming (NLP) coach, and a certified specialist in social media strategy and affiliate marketing.