My fellow bloggers and I sat down the other day to talk at very high level about what we were actually going to write about on this blog. We’re all coming from different experiences with blogs and wikis and other “Web 2.0″ social media forums. Ron works in IT and has been implementing and pushing Open Source Software (OSS) for a number of years, gaining traction on Wikis as a tool for collaborative documentation. I’m a tinkerer, so I implement (and I obviously blog enough) but my interests coming from the education and training space have always been more “meta,” meaning I’m usually more interested in the “how” and “why” than the “what” of social media. That’s why I’m glad we have a partner on this venture in Michael, who is a veritable consumer of social media. This blog is Michael’s first foray as a contributor to social media, even though he facilitated and introduced our first corporate blog.

When we sat down the other day, Ron and I both got quite an education on the role of a Communications department when corporate leadership starts blogging. In our organization, the communications team does some clean up on the posts by one of our corporate leaders/bloggers. Ron and I, both having our own blogs, couldn’t understand why our senior leaders couldn’t just blog on their own. Michael then started talking to us about a post one of our leaders wrote about overcoming struggles to get things done. My recollection on the exact details isn’t all that important here, but he was tying his message to a story from his actual life, which is what all good bloggers should do (right?). His story involved his daughter learning how to waterski at the family lodge and the hard time she had learning how to stay up, but that she kept practicing and kept trying and eventually figured out how to waterski, eventually growing quite adept at the skill.

Now, on a blog like this, written for an audience that’s in the whole outside world, that’s a perfectly harmless post and writing style. But inside the enterprise, it can be a different matter — many people may well voice their thoughts about that “struggle” to learn how to waterski… on your boat.

As a corporate leader, when you’re blogging, you are speaking directly to the people who work for you — people who face struggles like figuring out how to pay their bills, or struggles like making time for that class after work so you can move up in the company while you’re raising your kids by yourself. When you’re blogging to an audience structured by power and authority, what would be an innocuous anecdote on your blog to the world can cause a tremendous amount of negative resonance in an enterprise that reads your blog a) because it adds meaning to their work; and b) because you’re their boss.

Michael told Ron and I about this example, and how their communications team helped our corporate leader think about other examples that would deliver the same message with a different resonance to our larger audience, and we were completely floored having never thought about the reverb of a blog post within a power structure.

This story helped me see a couple of things very clearly on the subject of becoming legitimate:

1. Corporate communications has an important role to play even when blogs are introduced internally, because corporate communications goes beyond the tactical writing of memos to the strategic shaping of corporate zeitgeist as they help leaders become stronger bloggers and communicators
2. Writing to a blog that’s for the world to see is much different than writing to a blog that’s nested inside an organization, because the audience is nested within a power structure, which affects the response to and acceptance of the actual message in any given post.

I’m looking forward to other “A-Ha” moments to come.