In the October 4 issue of Fortune magazine David Kirkpatrick takes a balanced look at Sun Microsystems' corporate bloggers, including CEO Jonathan Schwartz. Buried deep in the story, however, David Farrell, Sun's chief compliance officer, tells Fortune that the company will soon require employees to agree to specific guidelines before starting a weblog.
The article has several other good nuggets of information...
* Schwartz' blog has about 35,000 readers in a typical month, including customers, employees, and competitors
* The company's most popular blogger is a marketer known as MaryMaryQuiteContrary
* About 100 of Sun's 32,000 employees blog. By my calculations, this represents less than 1% of the company's workforce. Microsoft, in contrast, has approximately 1.75% of its 57,000 employees who blog (or 1000 corporate bloggers)
* Scoble is quoted, representing Microsoft's corporate bloggers (hmm, did Wagged facilitate this?)
Key sound bite from CEO Jonathan Schwartz:
"I don't have the advertising budget to get our message to, for instance, Java developers working on handset applications for the medical industry. But one of our developers, just by taking time to write a blog, can do a great job getting our message out to a fanatic readership. Blogs are no more mandated at Sun than e-mail. But I have a hard time seeing how a manager can be effective without both."
