Brawl Over First Fortune 500 Corporate Blog Resolved!

During Dr. Nora Gamin Barnes’ presentation on her research results at the Society for New Communications Research Symposium in Cambridge, MA on Friday Shel Israel suggested that the first Fortune 500 company to run a corporate blog was General Motor’s Fastlane blog (Jan 2005).

I piped up and suggested there were earlier corporate blogs among the Fortune 500. We also got into a debate about the definition of a corporate blog. If the criterion is the blog is branded by the company and run by company employees not for personal purposes I think I can find at least one blog earlier than GM.

Looking back I conducted my first corporate blogging survey back in 2004, and interviewed Gary Lerhaupt at Dell, the company had started a Linux blog, here’s the interview with Gary.

That blog is no longer around, but it was definitely an official corporate blog.

However, to me Microsoft, and SUN were certainly using blogging for corporate purposes. We had several large technology companies before Jan 2005 encourage employees to write a blog, and gave them a corporate blogging platform to run a blog. The blogs may or may not have been personal though. See this badly written article of mine in 2004, where I mention Microsoft had 700 employee blogs.

Several companies; Microsoft, Oracle, SUN, also had blog aggregation sites. I an article about blog aggregation in 2005, mainly about Macromedia, but I’d found several blog aggregators during 2005 from the large Fortune 500 technology companies. We have to remember that blog search engines were only just appearing, Technorati started in 2005 so many of the big blogging companies build their own blog aggregators to bring the community together.

If you define a corporate blog as the “official” blog then Dell might be the first in the Fortune 500, but if you include employee blogs like John Porcaro’s or Heather Hamilton at Microsoft, I think we have to look back earlier in time.

In addition, Microsoft’s channel9 website goes back to 2004 as this posting from March of 2004 indicates, maybe not the first corporate blog, but certainly the first corporate Fortune 500 video blog.