Paula Berg, Southwest Airlines' original Blogger Girl, is leaving her position to move to the mountains of Boulder, CO. She kindly agreed to a quick Q & A via email to update us on what she learned at Southwest. Full disclosure: I've met Paula F2F several times and each time was impressed with her enthusiasm and dedication. Corporate blogs are hungry beasts that demand constant feeding. Paula never seemed to waver. (See useful links at bottom

No surprise: corporate bloggers are the smallest piece of the blogging pie, according to Technorati's just released State of the Blogosphere 2008. Only 12 percent of bloggers self-identify as "corporate," meaning they blog in an official capacity for their company.

But to complicate the numbers, a number of corporate bloggers also identify themselves as personal or professional. Click Continue to see the chart. Frustratingly, this leads to more

Updated February 2010

Corporate blogs are a subset of how social media is being used by companies and organizations. Think of a blog as the hub of the wheel, the home base of your social media strategy.

From your blog, you link to your Twitter stream, your Facebook  fan page, your YouTube channel, a Flickr photo page, a SlideShare page and more.

Don't make it too complicated: a blog is a next-generation Web site. Call it a social site. The

I prepared this case study on Southwest Airlines corporate blog for a lecture I'm giving tomorrow to a group of MBA students at Fairleigh Dickinson University. This group has a special interest in Corporate & Organizational  Communications. What other questions should I put to the students?

P.S. I will report back after the class. [Update: See mini interviews with two students.]

Update: see additional questions about the SW blog below.

Case

I prepared this case study on Southwest Airlines corporate blog for a lecture I'm giving tomorrow to a group of MBA students at Fairleigh Dickinson University. This group has a special interest in Corporate & Organizational  Communications. What other questions should I put to the students?

P.S. I will report back after the class. [Update: See mini interviews with two students.]

Update: see additional questions about the SW blog below.

Case Study for Student Discussion

Southwest Airlines' Nuts About You Blog and its role in crisis communications:

Situation

March 14, 2008: Southwest Airlines, a discount airline that serves almost 100 million customers annually, many of them fanatically devoted, has maintained a spotless safety record since the…

A best practice adage about corporate blogging is that there’s gotta be an inside evangelist in order for the blog to work. Well GlaxoSmithKline Consumer Healthcare has one in the form of VP of Weight Control Steve Burton. Steve is the lead author on GSK’s official corporate blog for alli at alliConnect.com. alli, if you haven’t seen the TV commercials, is the first OTC (over the counter), FDA-approved weight loss product. 

The alli blog

Take a look at Kryptonite's newly-launched corporate blog, Unbreakable Bonds. It looks pretty good and it's written by the company's renowned PR chief, Donna Tocci.

Remember way back to 2004 when Kryptonite was the poster child of the blogosphere as the victim of a blogstorm? Everyone said Kryptonite was clueless about the buzz in the blogosphere over its faulty bike locks. Turns out the story was more complicated than that.

Read about what

Take a look at Kryptonite's newly-launched corporate blog, Unbreakable Bonds. It looks pretty good and it's written by the company's renowned PR chief, Donna Tocci.

Remember way back to 2004 when Kryptonite was the poster child of the blogosphere as the victim of a blogstorm? Everyone said Kryptonite was clueless about the buzz in the blogosphere over its faulty bike locks. Turns out the story was more complicated than that.

Read about what really happened.

Remember this graph?

Other useful links

The infamous posting on Engadget (from Sept. 12, 2004)

Why There's No Escaping the Blog (Fortune - Jan. 10, 2005)

Shel Israel on…