Many of you are familiar with Cannondale's The Brad Blog and the Cannondale Race Blog, but we may be on the verge of a Cannondale blog explosion if things go as planned. According to this article in Business Week, Cannondale has shifted a portion of its website from a traditional content management system over to a blogging platform and provided fifteen additional sales and marketing staffers with the ability to update the company site.
Janet Maurice is Cannondale's Webmaster. She explains that the staffers will not necessarily be blogging in the traditional sense, but they will have unfiltered access to update the site with news, photos, press releases, etc. A special section of the site has been added (Cannondale Community) to aggregate the news and information from across Cannondale and also includes the posts made to the two established corporate blogs. There is even a single RSS feed to help you keep track of all of the happenings at Cannondale.
So with all of this unfettered access to the corporate website will the corporate brass at Cannondale lose control of the brand? This is a common feeling expressed by executives and traditional corporate communications types. Most marketing thought leaders would argue that all companies have already lost control of their brands with the rise of social networking on the web and self-publishing or blogging. Cannondale deserves credit for recognizing this and participating in the conversation instead of trying to control it.
For a glimpse into how this initiative developed at Cannondale check out this post and comments from Jonathan Maus's old blog, Just Riding Along. You'll notice I called Brad out on the corporate blogging practices and he responded with some nice insight on the progress that was being made with the corporate leadership at Cannondale.
Now that the platform is in place and staffers have greater access to publishing, I will look forward to new Cannondale blogs that spawn from the enthusiasm of these employees.
I wonder how long it will take the other big guys to join in the conversation?
