• by Shankar Gupta , January 10, 2006

Companies from General Motors to Google have corporate blogs these days, but corporations that give bloggers license to completely speak their minds remain rarities.

For that reason, when Microsoft's resident blogger Robert Scoble penned a scathing critique of his boss last week for pulling the plug on a controversial Chinese Web log, the blogosphere took notice.

In a post last Tuesday, Scoble denounced the MSN Spaces team for "being used as a state-run thug" because the company took down the blog of Chinese journalist Zhao Jing, who goes by the pseudonym Michael Anti. Later that day, Scoble posted again, stating that he had received more information from the MSN Spaces team. While Scoble didn't specify that information, his later post took a more conciliatory tone: "Being in the content business is not an easy one, that's for sure."

Microsoft isn't the only company to have been challenged by its company blogger. In September of last year, Yahoo! blogger Jeremy Zawdony railed against the practice of changing users' home pages during the install process of Yahoo! software. "Do I agree with those practices? No. Do I like those practices? Hell no. It's insulting and disrespectful," he wrote.

The incidents highlight the delicate balancing act that faces both corporations that maintain blogs and the bloggers hired to write them. Corporate blogs that condemn a company's management or product present obvious public relations problems. But if a blog contains nothing but feel-good public relations posts, few people will read--or trust--it, say blog evangelists.

"Corporate bloggers need to balance the need to take an objective, hard look at what their companies are doing with their need to maintain good internal working relationships," said CooperKatz public relations expert Steve Rubel. "For many, this can be hard." Many companies retain employee bloggers, including Vespa--a client of Rubel's firm--Sun Microsystems, Flash Macromedia, and Yahoo!

A Yahoo! spokesman said that the company values criticism from any sector, including its employee bloggers. "We are encouraged that our users, including Yahoo! employees, are passionate about our services," the spokesman said. "We value the opinions of all our tens of millions of Yahoo! Messenger users, and we use this input to improve our services."

Scoble declined to comment further on the issue or to speak with OnlineMediaDaily about how much leeway he had to criticize Microsoft and whether the company pressured him to soften his original post. MSN also declined to answer questions for this article.

But Pete Blackshaw chief marketing officer at buzz-monitoring firm Intelliseek, said that Scoble likely has the authority to be quite controversial, given how helpful he's been to the company's PR efforts. "Robert Scoble is a one-man counterpoint to the argument that Microsoft is a close-minded, evil company," he said. "Even if you believe he crossed the line on this, he's still such a net positive for Microsoft."

He added that Scoble's anti-MSN post "probably endears him to many, and reinforces the perception that he's 'objective.'"

Blackshaw also pointed to a white paper it published last fall, "Talking From the Inside Out: The Rise of Employee Bloggers," which concluded that consumers found comments by employees on corporate blogs more credible than TV, print, and radio press reports, as well as advertisements.