No more BlogBlog for Carphone CEO

By Alex Manchester, Editor, The Internal Comms Hub (Australia), Melcrum

The Register has posted an article concerning the public blog of The Carphone Warehouse CEO, Charles Dunstone. As of Friday the blog has been trashed, with a spokesperson saying "he's just stopped doing it" and it was "probably for personal reasons".

You may remember some of the news surrounding Dunstone's blog, unveiled in 2006 shortly before The Carphone Warehouse launched it's initially much maligned (although now ok) "TalkTalk Free Broadband" service in the UK. The blog was seen as a relatively brave move, a wakeup call to corporate blogging naysayers, and Dunstone was praised for his candidness. Unfortunately this positive take was short lived.

Many corporate blogs were launched at the same time or before Dunstone's blog and they're still in existence, with more and more companies looking at implementing them. For example, Neville Hobson wrote earlier today (on Twitter) that Coca Cola has just launched a new "Coca Cola Conversations" blog, and the list of senior exec bloggers grows ever longer at the NewPR Wiki. Broadly speaking, these tools and communication channels – or platforms, call them what you will - are here to stay.

Dunstone's blog seemed doomed to failure quite early on, however, and it's not a huge surprise to discover its deletion. Early and widespread problems with the TalkTalk service meant there was little time for him to find a writing groove before facing a PR nightmare (although still substantially longer than the thick-skinned people at Dell's blog had when they launched). Coupled with an unwillingness to truly engage during this period - at the peak of the TalkTalk problems there was nothing written on the blog at all - it was clear that a few things had been misjudged.

A cynic might suggest it was all a publicity stunt anyway, a corporate blogging bandwaggon keenly jumped on. Others may say it just wasn't the right thing to do in that specific scenario, with that company and in that way.

One thing's for sure: if senior execs want to blog publicly as a means to communicate with customers and other stakeholders (including employees), if they want to have unspun conversations as was Dunstone's intention upon his blog's launch, then they have to be prepared for some stick and they have to be prepared to live out the hard times. They have to be committed.

If not, then in the long term there seems little point in starting at all.

Comments

[Hayden]

Alex
I agree with you entirely on this and have said the same myself.
http://press20.blogspot.com/2008/02/blogs-that-fail.html
What I do wonder is if this will cause more of a PR own-goal than CW expected.
Hayden

[Krishna De]

Alex - you might also be interested to note that there is a Wiki for the Fortune 500 blogs here http://snipurl.com/fortune500wiki and if you have reviewed a blog from the Fortune 500 you can link your post to it.

Unfortunately the Carphone Warehouse example will be cited by businesses as another example of why not to blog. It would be great to unearth some positive stories and success results of corporates in Europe who are achieving great success in engagement with their stakeholders through business blogging.

[Alex Manchester]

Thanks for that list, Sandra. I'm not sure why there's such a dearth of prominent major corporate blogs in Europe (and in Australia, for that matter). The US leads the way in that respect and, as you say, the now-defunct CW blog will only serve as a negative argument.