A video pitch about corporate blogging

Joël Ronez, a French blog consultant, is preparing a big presentation to the marketing professionals at Steria about corporate blogging and he asked me a weird idea, a few minutes videoblog with a pitch on why they should do it. It was quite fun to do it, here it is in quicktime video (5,1Mo)... I prepared it with videocue and an isight.

And a transcript:
"Hello everybody, and welcome to my home office !
Joël Ronez makes me do weird experiments: make a videoblog to be presented to you, the international marketing professionals at Steria in a conference in Nice and give you a few minutes pitch on 4 reasons why a large corporation such as yours should blog...
I have no idea how far you are on that road so these key points are very general and applicable to any company, you probably know them already, but let me try.
1. if you don't do it, your clients will do it for you by publishing their comments about the quality of your work: check Steria in Google and in blog search engines such as Technorati, you'll see there is already a lot and it keeps growing
2. This is good news it means your customers care about what you do, there is a conversation around you and as the Clue Train Manifesto book says, markets are conversations.
One of the reasons why you should open your own blogs is now to participate in this conversation, to have your own voice and let the transparency enter your company. We want to hear your project managers, the people who do research and your employees, not only the corporate message that your websites send, not only the voice of your management and your press releases. We want you to be just a click away. We want to give you suggestions on what you should do better and give you feedback, no need for panels anymore to get our feedback.

3. We want you to express your voice as you really are, not as your annual report or your PR presents you.
People are interested in the conversations. Take a comparison with the decision to buy a car for example. What do you prefer, an advertising about how great is this car or what ten of your friends have to say about it ?
Just for fun, let me quote here one of your colleagues at SAP, my friend Shai Agassi who is also member of the SAP board: "if you blog, you exist" and I would add, "you exist as you are really". The blog is the best online representation of yourself. People will find you easily in Google and read what you have to share with them, your expertise for example.
4. Are you afraid of getting negative comments ? All businesses do. If there are any on the Web, it means there are also current conversations about them and you should answer them in public. Here is a few tips on how to start easily
-create an expert blog: we all do market research and read press articles, such as interesting entries on our current focus. It could be on anything. On your work or on what happens in New Orleans. Just start a blog linking to everything you believe is interesting and there should not be any controversy or risk. The research you already do is now public and helpful for others.
-consider launching internal blogs, the risk is extremely limited as long as you write a charter on what you let your employees blog or not. Actually if it's only internal, it's probably everything. Many large companies such as Disney, Nokia or the BBC have already hundreds of internal blogs where the employees share what they learnt everyday and most importantly, create conversations on how to help each other solve your customers issues.
Of course I would really advise you to use Microsoft or Macromedia examples: let any employee blog in public following a short blog charter (which states basic rules such as nothing confidential) and present these blogs in a public portal. This would provide not only a great transparency to your customers, but also let them read and discuss directly with your research specialists or why not your top management, like Bob Lutz of General Motors is doing.
There is no market for messages, no market for corporate talks: do you read many press releases these days ? This challenge to all of us, not only the PR people, is very exciting and I believe it is as important as the ubiquity of email. One blog created in the world every second and 50 million of them at the end of 2005 tells the story ! Thanks very much for listening and have fun during your conference."