Last Friday Lenovo launched its first “official” corporate blog (there are countless Lenovo employees who blog, some of whom can be found in my blog roll). This one is called “Design Matters” and its blogged by David Hill, Yao Ying Jia and Tom Takahashi — the three global leaders of Lenovo’s design group. I’m the cheerleader in the background.
We’re taking a slightly different approach to corporate blogs, eschewing the notion of a single monolith because we believe we need to segment the conversation down various niches — leading with design because design is what distinguishes us from the market. In the future we’ll roll out more on everything from promotions and coupons to philanthrophy and evangelism.
This is only phase one. Phase two gets very interesting. Stay tuned.
Good stuff. A very naked conversation, not Dull at all. Eager to see how it evolves with this whole net “neighborhood” thang going on.
David,
I’m a former IBM PC Co employee living here in Raleigh, and I’ve been following your blog for a while now — interesting and entertaining! I find the new “Design Matters” blog particularly intriguing.
Funny that you say that there are countless Lenovo employees who blog — I found yours by googling “lenovo marketing blog” or some such thing and churbuck.com was one of the first things that came up!
If you are ever down in Raleigh with a spare minute for coffee or the like, I’d welcome the opportunity to get together.
Greg Hopper
I ordered a Lenovo back at the end of June. The delivery date kept getting delayed again and again until it became a two month wait with no guarantees. What is going on at Lenovo??? I tried to cancel the order so I could order another computer and Lenovo would not allow me to do since they had received the authorization from my credit card. Then I was directed to order from Zones.com by a Lenovo employee. When I sent her the invoice number proving I had ordered another Lenovo machine, they still won’t cancel the order. I am being held hostage by this company. I have contacted their marketing department and was assured the problem was going to be taken care of, but there is still no resolve. I am in Real Estate and if I told my clients they couldn’t have their homes and kept putting off their closing date, I wouldn’t have any clients. At this rate, Lenovo won’t either. Anyone know what is going on with this company?
Lois, please contact me at 508 360 6147 or dchurbuck@us.lenovo.com
Sorry, this sounds like a rottten experience.
Oh Great God of Lenovo!!! Thank you so very much for coming to my rescue! Within less than 7 hours I was informed that a computer was being shipped to me today. I appreciate your personal attention in this matter and am looking forward to its arrival. Thank you so much!!!
Lois
Personally I think the small groups of employees or single employees blogging about areas of interest to them is considerably more useful from a public engagement point of view. Unless you have John Schwartz-style (or Bob Lutz-style)industry uber-pundit as your blogger, an concentrated viewpoint is arguably a waste of what blogging can accomplish for a company. You’re probably better off of with a range of blogs addressing different areas of interest to different kinds of users. Microsoft –in what I’d consider a fairly rare PR triumph for them– took the correct approach to that with different people blogging about corporate issues, technology issues, Vista, etc. But, in fact, they’ve always had a touch of the community tradition through MSDN etc, although that wasn’t obvious (or relevant) to regular consumers.
Of course, from a flack’s point of view it’s a serious escalation in risk as well, so not every company culture seems to lend itself to this. Certainly some of my MNC clients have blanched at the idea of company blogs that are not filtered through legal department (kiss of death) the IR department (son of the kiss of death) or –gasp– the PR department (return of the son of the kiss of death vs. Frankenstein). It’s a shame though, because that hyper-managed approach strips the humanity out, reduces any external facing blog they do to corporate brochure ware and, from my point view, completely erodes the value using a medium that encourages direct customer engagement.
So I suppose what I am getting around to is, good luck. I’ll be interested to see how it goes. Oh, and have a good vacation.