Over at Worker Bees Blog, Elisa Camahort just published what I think could be a really great idea for business blogging. In “High-risk Corporate Blogging: getting a message out that your customers may not want to hear,” she outlines a concept that I don’t believe I’ve seen any organization try: a group of competitors banding together to sponsor an independent blogger.
She writes…
“So finally, you stop dreaming, and you wonder…what if I and my competitors worked together to sponsor a blogger? Formed our own consortium of truth? Give the blogger editorial control. Give yourself plausible deniability and strength in numbers. Sure, you might still go down, but you’d all go down together. But what if it worked the other way and the powerful, but blinded companies who run the industry woke up and caught the Clue?”
Yeah, I think she might be on to something here.
The catch would, of course, be that even competitors have common interests – especially in “commoditized” industries. How free would the sponsored blogger really be to challenge such cornerstone issues?
For instance, in the US energy industry there are several key, yet often unspoken unspoken assumptions. In particular, that our energy infrastructure should remain:
- Primarily centralized (rather than distributed or localized)
- Firmly under the control of (usually large) for-profit corporations
- Based primarily on fossil fuels
- Focused on massive economies of scale, rather than capitalizing on the “long tail” of diverse local energy resources.
Imagine a consortium of oil/gas extraction, petroleum, energy wholesalers, and electricity/natural gas utilities banding together to sponsor an independent weblog on energy. How long might their collective sponsorship last if the blogger regularly began posting articles on, say, how our centralized, homogenized energy infrastructure poses significant risks to national security and emergency response — let alone the economy, public health, and the environment?
Um, not long, I think. After all, the power of the purse is formidable and effective method of editorial control.
However, I doubt that a truly independent blogger would “go quietly into the night.” She’d probably kick up considerable fuss and draw a lot of criticism toward the energy industry. Perhaps the mainstream media might even start asking more fundamental and uncomfortable questions of energy companies and policymakers.
Like Elisa said, the competitors could all go down together – which might make the risk of pointed and fundamental criticism a bit more palatable from a business perspective.
Still, despite such risks, I think it’s an idea worth trying.
If you’re working for a major company in a competitive field, consider this option. I dare you.
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