I know that the impulse behind it is a valuable one, but I just can’t seem to get excited about the launch of the Business Blog Council, or what should probably be called the Big Business Blog Council. In fact, my thoughts on it run pretty close to Dave Taylor’s — it sounds like a gigantic waste of time to me. Don’t get me wrong, I’m all for businesses getting with the social-media program. But I don’t think getting a whole bunch of gigantic corporations into a room together is really going to help.
I really want to like this idea. Lionel Menchaca of Dell is a super guy — we had him on a panel at the last mesh and I really enjoyed meeting him — and he really gets what social media is all about, as his post on the Blog Council shows. But even if businesses need a secret clubhouse where they can share ideas about blogging, which I’m not sure they do, I still don’t see why it has to just be for big businesses. Why not all businesses?
I know, I know — people keep saying that businesses like Coke and Dell and Cisco have different needs because they are bigger. But I’m not sure I buy that. What difference does it make whether you have 100 employees or 10,000? Both companies will still have to think about disclosure and legalities and all those kinds of things. Much as it pains me to admit it, I think Scoble is right — just get out there and start doing it.
The biggest risk with something like the Big Business Blog Council — apart from it just reinforcing how big businesses don’t really get it, as Mark Hopkins points out at Mashable — is that it turns into something that starts with the word “cluster” and rhymes with the word “duck.”